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Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2010-2011Capital devours lives, labor, land; masses seek paths to freedomThis special issue carries our Draft Perspectives Thesis, part of our preparation for the national gathering of News and Letters Committees. 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." Join us in discussing these Perspectives. Contents:I. Alienated labor in today's struggles"The capitalists may not be ready to 'agree' with Marx that the supreme commodity, labor-power, is the only source of all value and surplus value, but they do see that there is such a decline in the rate of profit compared to what they consider necessary to keep investing for expanded production, that they are holding off--so much so that now their ideologists are saying low investment is by no means a temporary factor that the capitalists would 'overcome' with the next boom. There is to be no next boom. It is this which makes them look both at the actual structural changes--overwhelming preponderance of constant capital (machinery) over variable capital (living labor employed)--as well as the world production and its interrelations."[1] -- Raya Dunayevskaya So deep is global capitalism's decay that it raises the specters of war and revolution. From the deepening long-term unemployment and homelessness and new outpourings of U.S. racism to never-ending imperialist wars abroad, a myriad of crises grip the globe--and are being met by revolt, including an international upsurge of labor. Economists keep announcing that the recession is over, despite the persistence of deep unemployment as a "lagging indicator," but they occasionally remember that the foundation of the whole economy is production. What they avoid facing is that the only source of value is alienated labor--that is to say, the capitalist economy is based on extracting surplus value (unpaid hours of labor) from sweated, alienated labor. a. Labor battles from mine to schoolroom The April 5 explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in Montcoal, W.Va., killing 29 miners, starkly demonstrated the human toll taken by capital's relentless drive to extract surplus value. Despite being cited for hundreds of violations every year, including three evacuations of miners this year due to buildup of explosive methane gas, the mine kept operating with one imperative: production and more production. That inspectors could not keep the mine shut shows how weak the regulators are and how powerful a stranglehold the mining companies have. Mine owner Massey Energy--a notoriously union-busting, mountain-destroying, production-over-safety company, whose CEO Don Blankenship spent $1 million on a "Tea Party" event where he spoke--only had to pay a pittance in fines for its roughly 3,000 violations at this mine alone since 1995. (See "For mine bosses, 29 dead just the cost of digging coal" this issue.) The bosses' reign of terror is such that many miners and their family members interviewed on television about the disaster would not show their faces. That does not mean that their anger can be contained forever--a century and a half of militant miners' battles argues otherwise. Struggles are heating up among many dimensions of labor, from teachers and nurses--professions not always recognized as labor but increasingly disciplined by mechanisms of control from above and pressure to step up "productivity"--to autoworkers in Fremont, Calif., who had to battle their own union as well as Toyota's shutting down their NUMMI plant. (See "Limits of Workers' Patience," March-April N&L.) They found both the local and the national United Auto Workers looking out for the interests of the auto companies rather than the workers--and the union had even accepted "good behavior" conditions on receiving severance pay that discourage workers from attempting a plant occupation or other action before the plant closed. On March 1 President Obama himself fired a shot across labor's bow with his speech supporting the firing of all 74 teachers and 19 staff members at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. The signal sent to workers is that the state stands beside the capitalists in cracking the whip to make workers accept cuts and still work harder. The Central Falls teachers were fired for refusing the superintendent's order to work an extra half hour a day with no compensation. Obama warned that teachers must be held "accountable," and that tough medicine is required for school districts to receive special federal funding. His signal that mass teacher firings are acceptable--and that workers in general should not expect help from the government in their labor struggles--was shortly followed by another mass firing, at Beach High School in Savannah, Ga.
Some estimates put federal, state and local spending for 2010 at nearly half of the year's total output of goods and services. Under this Democratic administration the state remains a weapon in capital's arsenal against the working class, shelving the pro-union Employee Free Choice Act, using GM's bankruptcy as a weapon against the autoworkers, and coming out strongly for teacher firings. The mounting fights against cutbacks in public services have brought youth alongside labor. States are cutting school budgets so severely that a national day of action initiated at the University of California was held on March 4 (see "No to Education Cuts!," March-April N&L). At over 100 campuses, thousands of students--from college to grade school--took part along with teachers and workers, opposing layoffs and tuition hikes. High school and college students occupied buildings at UC Santa Cruz, UCLA and the Baltimore Juvenile Justice Center. Student walkouts at high schools and middle schools indicate the depths of the movement. One Detroit teacher told N&L that this goes beyond a struggle for jobs: "Education as labor can't be separated from a concept of a human society. The healthcare workers in the Maryland Freedom Union in 1966 who said, 'We are on strike for our patients, too,' and have been saying that ever since, captured how sharply the alienation of labor stands out when people are on the receiving end--even more clearly than when labor produces things. It includes the human pain caused by education under capitalism, and, against that, efforts both by educators 'as labor' and by parents, community, students and educators and their organizations as demanding that education create 'fully developed human beings' (Karl Marx's words in Capital)." All these struggles face the perils created by the Great Recession, with 6.5 million people unemployed for over six months in March, far higher than anytime since the 1930s Depression. African Americans are as always hardest hit, with an understated official unemployment rate of 16.5%, and 41.1% for Black teenagers. Homelessness has risen so much that the number of people living on the streets of New York shot up 34% in a year. These are no mere cyclical conditions, but the outgrowth of permanent structural changes in the economy since the crisis of the mid-1970s. b. Crisis rooted in production The roots of the persistant economic crisis go far beyond the housing bubble and the dirty dealings of finance capital. Crisis is in the very innards of capitalist production. Far from being defined by things--money, commodities--capital is a social relation involving the domination of dead labor (chiefly machinery) over living labor. Profit is an expression of surplus value, the unpaid hours of labor extracted from workers. Since accumulation of capital spells out more and more dead labor in proportion to living labor, the rate of profit--the ratio of surplus value to total capital--tends to fall.[2] Labor is the only source of value and surplus-value, but capital can't employ labor on the same relative scale when ever greater amounts of capital confront the worker. Automation puts this process into overdrive. A new stage of automated production took root after World War II destroyed vast amounts of capital, enough to keep general crisis at bay for three decades. But by the mid-1970s crisis broke out. The rate of profit had declined to the point where the resulting lack of investment meant a stagnation that could not be cured by ordinary medicines like recession. The series of massive financial bubbles that have blown up since the double recession that opened the 1980s reflects the flight of capital from productive investment to speculation. Because the crisis is inherent in capitalist production's dependence on alienated labor as the only source of value, neither financial bubbles nor immense Keynesian state expenditures have achieved more than a temporary amelioration from today's Great Recession. Even in the richest land, the U.S., millions are facing years without jobs. Tens of millions have had to turn to soup kitchens or food banks--skyrocketing to one out of four people in the Memphis, Tenn., area. Massive deficit spending to stave off collapse is seen as unsustainable, and restoring the rate of profit would require destruction of capital on an immense scale--which at the end of the 1930s took the form of World War II. In spite of this horrendous cost of total war as what it took to restart capital accumulation in the U.S.-led post-WWII economy, some Marxists, who identify socialism with the state, still situate today's general crisis of stalled accumulation not, as Marx insisted, in production, but rather in the market, in what John Maynard Keynes called "lack of demand." In the February 2010 Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster reasserts the position of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy in Monopoly Capital (1966), writing that "the main economic constraint was no longer the generation of surplus [value], but rather its absorption, i.e., a chronic lack of effective demand." This assertion is repeated in spite of the fact that the collapse in the rate of generation of surplus value in the world economy was so obvious and deep by the mid-1970s that, as Dunayevskaya pointed out at the time, it had bourgeois economists citing Marx on the falling rate of profit. Marx directly answered those who claimed the crisis is one of "lack of effective demand" by pointing out that crises are always preceded by periods when workers are actually consuming a greater share of the annual product. Market demand was never greater than at the moment the speculative real estate bubble burst, bringing on the present protracted crisis. The shift from production to finance may have temporarily boosted "effective demand" but it also deepened the impact of the day of reckoning. Foster sees financialization of the economy as a reflection of a new stage of "stagnation within production" in general, but for Marx the decline in the rate of profit is specifically created by the decrease in living labor relative to dead labor or machines. That is not just an arithmetic ratio but a social relationship of domination of dead labor, technology, over living labor--in other words, the inversion of subject and object in production. There is no way out except through workers overcoming that inversion. Marxist-Humanism's anti-capitalism is not narrowly "economic" but points to how labor as self-developing subject is the absolute opposite of capitalism's alienated labor. Revolution by masses in motion is needed to establish a new society based on freely associated labor. It is high time to raise the Marxist-Humanist banner of totally new human foundations for the world economy, based on a qualitatively different kind of labor. Marxist-Humanism is a body of ideas born out of the specificity of our age. It is in the post-World War II era that automation took root, bringing not only permanent unemployment and continuous speed-up, de-skilling and elimination of jobs but new questions from below. Marxist-Humanism's birth is intertwined with the coal miners' general strike of 1949-50, when the miners moved from questions of the fruits of labor to what kind of labor human beings should do, including challenging the separation of mental and manual labor.[3] To meet this challenge, publishing a new book of selected writings by Raya Dunayevskaya on Marx is a central perspective for News and Letters Committees, provided it is understood as an intervention into the freedom movements and the battle of ideas. c. Healthcare battles reveal the menace from the Right An important aspect of the restructuring is the shifting of spiraling healthcare costs more and more to workers, resulting in bankruptcies and foreclosures. Amid a vicious class war of capital against workers, it seemed impossible for the U.S. to achieve what every other industrialized country has: universal healthcare. Yet workers kept insisting that if trillions could be found to fund wars and bank bailouts, then the state could afford to fund adequate social services. The healthcare bill just passed is being hailed as the most important social legislation since the 1960s. Much was achieved that would never have been won without long struggle--including advances in the ability of people with disabilities to receive home care rather than being forced into institutions. It took a century to get this Republican-style bill, with its concessions to insurance corporations and its retrogressive provisions. In a compromise with reactionary anti-abortion Democrats, President Obama issued an executive order "to establish an adequate enforcement mechanism" for the Hyde Amendment, which denies abortion funding to poor women. What couldn't get a hearing in bourgeois politics and media was "single-payer," and, more importantly, labor's perspective in the healthcare workplace, fighting over the right to deliver quality care, which is implicitly a challenge to alienated labor. Somehow the prostect of extending health insurance to millions of people who can't afford it or are rejected due to pre-existing conditions has for a year been the excuse for hysterical racist outbursts from the Right. Last year's racist picket signs and gun-toting visits to town hall meetings have sprouted into death threats aimed at politicians who voted for the bill, a severed home propane line, bricks through windows. The increasingly bloodthirsty tone of the Right has been encouraged by politicians like Karl Rove, who described the perpetrators as people "motivated by deep concern about our country to get involved in politics," and Sarah Palin, who called on her followers to "reload," coupled with a map showing rifle crosshairs drawn over Congressional districts represented by selected healthcare reform supporters. While politicians and pundits are downplaying "isolated incidents," the far Right's ferocity, if left unchecked, opens the door to terrorism like the Feb. 18 airplane attack by Joseph Stack III on the IRS building in Texas, which killed employee Vernon Hunter but elicited sympathy from Republicans Sen. Scott Brown and Rep. Steve King. Democratic anti-abortion leader Rep. Bart Stupak, who held the healthcare bill hostage, was called a "baby killer" on the floor of the House by another Representative and received a death threat to himself and his children. That is only a taste of what Dr. George Tiller received at the hands of murderous "pro-lifers" who included him on an online hit list of abortion providers with names, addresses and pictures; had him put on trial on trumped-up charges; firebombed his clinic; tried to murder him in 1993, and succeeded in 2009. Since 1976 this war on women killed four doctors, two receptionists, a clinic escort and a guard. Yet both Republicans and Democrats have avoided calling these acts "terrorism." White supremacist militias and others held "Second Amendment" rallies on the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing by homegrown right-wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh, who had links to such militias. On the eve of the anniversary, some Oklahoma state legislators announced that they are working with Tea Partiers to pass a law recognizing a "volunteer militia" to defend against federal "infringements" on state's rights. d. Labor internationally: revolt from Greece to China Restructuring taken out of the hide of labor is exacting a toll worldwide. Serious tensions have come to the surface among the 16 countries that use the Euro as their currency. Especially troubled is Greece, where Wall Street firms helped the previous government cover up deficit spending exceeding Eurozone rules. Germany is demanding an austerity program to protect the Euro's value. At the cost of possibly renewing recession in Europe, Germany's Prime Minister Angela Merkel sees this crisis as an opportunity to extract concessions from workers in Europe's weaker economies, robbing from paychecks, pensions and social services to give to capital. Workers in Greece are fighting for the workers of Europe--if the rulers succeed in imposing austerity in Greece, other countries are sure to follow. Greece's Socialist Party government is complying, sparking a series of strikes, occupations and protests. Three general strikes were held in February and March, with slogans such as, "Workers shouldn't pay for the bankers' crisis," and, "We must become their crisis." Workers fired from the privatized Olympic Airlines occupied the State Accounting Office for 10 days. This was joined by municipal workers during their four-day strike, in which workers occupied garbage collection centers throughout the country. Temporary public workers, textile workers and electrical workers have engaged in occupations and strikes. Students have supported labor with occupations on college campuses. China, less hurt by the Great Recession, shows a different side, as the new station for manufacturing capital shifted from deindustrializing countries--yet labor revolt there is widespread and frequent. Since the 1974-75 recession, we have experienced two generations of worldwide capitalist restructuring. Workers still employed have paid through their own impoverishment for corporate "prosperity." The uprooting of production far exceeds last century's movement of the textile industry to Southern mill towns. U.S. capitalism has been shored up by the sweat of workers in China and elsewhere, profiting from substandard wages as well as from the costs of workers' safety and environmental devastation. The January strike at Wintek in Suzhou was not only over the threat of losing bonus pay, but against the killer chemical n-hexane used to clean the screens destined for Apple. Recapitulating what Marx labeled "so-called primitive accumulation" of capital, displaced workers from rural provinces, "undocumented" without legal rights, have erected the infrastructure of modern China. Even as the army of the unemployed has ballooned to 200 million, young workers, especially teenage girls, have had a lifetime of labor squeezed out of them in just a decade to fuel 20 years of China's hothouse economic expansion. As yet another expression of capitalism's laws of development, state-capitalist China hosting multinational capital is no model for humanity to follow if we are to have a future. II. Development: capitalist accumulation or revolution?"So long as the motive force of production continues to be the accumulation of surplus value (or unpaid hours of labor)--whether for private plants or for state spaceships--the straining of the ruling class to appropriate the full 24 hours of man's labor still fails to create sufficient capital to industrialize the 'backward' lands....The world economy must have totally new foundations operated by motive forces other than mere machine building and private or state profit. Only a qualitatively different kind of labor, one that comes from the release of the creative energies of the common people, can reconstruct the world on new human foundations." -- Raya Dunayevskaya[4] a. Haiti after the quake Marxist-Humanist analyses showed that the same laws of value and surplus-value, and of concentration and centralization of capital, that shape the industrialized countries' economic crisis, are the determinants for the trajectories of "developing" economies too--when the masses are not allowed their self-activity. Thus, our Lead on "Haiti's Earthquake Reveals Living Roots of Revolution" (March-April N&L), grasped the country's history of revolution and counter-revolution, revealing the meaning of neoliberal "development": "The flood of cheap U.S. 'Miami rice' and other subsidized products wiped out Haiti's traditional peasant agriculture, flooding Port-au-Prince with unemployed, cheap laborers. These policies contributed to making vast areas of Port-au-Prince the poorly built death traps they became... "The U.S., and the Haitian elite it supported, did nothing to prepare for this devastating earthquake which was long predicted. The neoliberal vision for Haiti has worked to enrich a small, elite sector which based its profits on sweatshops and imports of rice, beans and corn, rather than domestic production. It helped create a huge gap between Haiti's wealthiest people and the rest of the population.... "The response to the earthquake hints at an entirely different logic of development. The kind of self-organization and cooperation happening in Haiti today has deep roots in the historic struggles of the people for freedom. It is resolutely opposed to the dehumanizing logic of the sweatshop, that iron fist of globalized capital." The poorest, most oppressed country in the Western Hemisphere reveals the future for large sections of even the most "advanced" countries unless the capitalist form of development is cast aside, making it imperative not only to resist but to be armed with a philosophy of revolution in permanence. b. The great land grab The question of different paths of development is being raised in the midst of a global struggle over control of land and food production. Land in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the former USSR is being taken by foreign investors for industrial agriculture for export. Often billed as "unused" or "waste" land, it is generally used by communities, and the takeovers drive out small farmers, peasants--in many regions the majority are women--who grow crops for food. This land grab is sold as a tool for development because small farmers, particularly in Africa, tend to produce less grain per acre than the corporate-controlled industrial agriculture that is trying to crowd them out. For capital, this is development. Not so for the human beings driven off the land, often into urban slums. Dunayevskaya captured this dynamic, showing that capital sufficient to industrialize the "backward" lands will not be available so long as the determinant is the accumulation of surplus value--that is, unpaid hours of labor. In other words, capital's own laws of development preclude it from developing these countries. From the start of the African revolutions in the 1950s, this analysis was projected in our pamphlet on Nationalism, Communism, Marxist-Humanism and the Afro-Asian Revolutions, which is to be excerpted in the new book. With the world food crisis of 2008, wealthier food-importing countries sought new food sources and investors saw an alternative source of profits. Finance capital and agribusiness spearheaded the new land grab with state support--with a large role played by Brazil, China and Arab Gulf states.[5] This means that land and water that could have been used to sustain local communities--or left alone to protect the ecology that communities' lifeways depend on--is devoted to water-intensive, chemical-intensive, energy-intensive farming of food and biofuels for export, depleting the soil until the investors move on. The Observer reported that up to 125 million acres of African land--bigger than California--have been acquired in the last few years or are under negotiation. One Ethiopian from the Gambella region is quoted: "It is a myth propagated by the government and investors to say that there is waste land or land that is not utilised in Gambella. Foreign companies are arriving in large numbers, depriving people of land they have used for centuries. There is no consultation with the indigenous population. Deals are done secretly. The only thing the local people see is people coming with lots of tractors to invade their lands. All the land round my family village of Illia has been taken over..." What was once communal land was statified by Ethiopia's Stalinist regime in the 1970s, meaning the current regime can "hand over huge tracts to investors at nominal rents, in secrecy."[6] In Latin America millions of acres are being taken. Among the big players are Brazilian sugar and rice companies, some of them targeting large tracts in Guyana that are home to several Indigenous peoples and a fragile ecosystem. Takeovers are also underway or proposed in countries from Ukraine to the Philippines. Resistance is extensive, as shown dramatically in Madagascar. After a deal was made in 2008 to turn over nearly half the country's arable land to Daewoo Logistics for export crops, widespread protests helped set the stage for the ousting of President Ravolomanana. GRAIN reports that more and more Indigenous communities in Latin America are defending "their territories and their systems for managing communal land," and making decisions in assemblies. At work in the great land grab are the laws of capitalist development--laws unbreakable except by freely associated labor in revolutions that usher in new stages of development. Because Marxist-Humanism is not only about what we are against but what we are for, we have seen what other Marxists did not in Marx's last decade, when he investigated the relationship between capitalistic countries and the "underdeveloped" lands, as well as the questions of organization and the Man/Woman relationship. Writings in the new book examine these "new moments" in Marx, grasping in them the question of new paths of development, new paths to revolution. These categories provide ground not only for opposing the land takeovers but for projecting a revolutionary vision connecting existing communal and non-market forms with the need and prospects for revolutionary transformation in "developed" and "developing" countries. III. War and revolution"Long before the atom was split and out of it came, not the greatest productive force, but the most destructive A-bomb, H-bomb and N-bomb, Marx wrote in these [1844 Humanist] Essays: 'To have one basis for life and another for science is a priori a lie.' With Hiroshima, we saw what a holocaust the lie of separating the reason for being from the reason for scientific development can become." -- Raya Dunayevskaya[7] a. Afghan war and Kyrgyz revolt Capitalism has reached such a crisis as to have declared a state of permanent war since 2001. Nowhere is this more pressing than Afghanistan, where in the wake of the U.S. military victory in the battle of Marjah, Helmand, in February, the question is: What has been won? The Taliban are still powerful in the province and even in Marjah itself are able to threaten and kill those who cooperate with the U.S. The promised "government in a box" is still "pretty thin," according to Marine Gen. Nicholson, who led the assault.[8] The tentative progress at a snail's pace in Marjah--a relatively small test case--raises the question of how lasting any battlefield victory can be after the promised June 2011 "beginning" of troop withdrawal.That is supposed to leave the country in the hands of the corrupt, despised, and ineffectual government of President Hamid Karzai--a government antithetical to democracy, women's rights, and human rights in general. The Taliban would be no improvement--contrary to the International Action Center and other signers of a "Peace for Afghanistan" declaration. It maintains that the armed "resistance"--that is, the Taliban's fight against the U.S.--"is a legitimate form of liberation struggle." Some so-called revolutionaries do not flinch at labeling as "liberation" even a Religious Right army whose methods include burning down girls' schools and throwing acid in unveiled women's faces, human trafficking and sex slavery, killing hundreds of civilians each year. The point remains what News and Letters Committees has affirmed since our founding: "The necessity for a new society is clear from the working people's opposition to war. That opposition is based upon a vision of a new society in which they, to a man, woman and child, control their own lives. Any opposition to war which is based on less than this, must end in capitulation to the warmongers."[9] Near Kandahar, where the next big battle looms, a U.S. convoy fired on a passenger bus on April 12, killing at least four civilians. Protesters took to the streets in Kandahar, burning tires and blocking a road. Military officials had to admit that, despite the new policy aimed at limiting civilian deaths, convoy and checkpoint shootings have killed more than 30 people and wounded 80 since last summer, but none of those killed were ever found to have been a threat. The sudden revolt in the nearby Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan was not directly linked to the Afghan war, but the war defined its significance to the U.S. and Russia, both of which have military bases there. The U.S. depends heavily on its base for Afghan operations. Sparked by another type of austerity measure, a big rise in utility prices, the revolt by the masses was quickly hijacked by Russia-backed politicians who ousted the president but have no intention of doing anything to end the system of exploitation beyond possibly reducing the corruption. The new leaders, who said they wanted to get rid of the U.S. base when they were in opposition, have now assured the U.S. it can remain. However, it does underscore both the instability of what the U.S. is relying on to conduct its war in Afghanistan, and how utterly the U.S. disregards the masses' well-being, materially as well as in terms of democracy and human rights, in its maneuvers around that war. Karzai's warm reception of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at the very time that parties in Iraq were jockeying for Iran's favor after their election, highlights how the two U.S. wars have amplified Iran's influence in the region. Even Republican members of Congress quietly told the right-wing Cato Institute that most Republicans on Capitol Hill now believe the Iraq war was a mistake.[10] More importantly from a human perspective, the war led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, displacement of two million and untold suffering. It has unleashed sectarian violence in Iraq and increased the militarization and violence in U.S. society while leaving 4,400 troops dead and many thousands more disabled physically or mentally. Even assuming Obama succeeds in shifting troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, there is no end in sight for either the fighting in Afghanistan or the war's extension to Pakistan and Yemen, with sabers rattling over other countries such as Somalia and Iran. b. Nuclear threat remains Looming over all international relations is the question of nuclear weapons. The U.S. has stoked the arms race in South Asia by supplying India with fuel and technology for nuclear power and allowing India to build two new reprocessing plants. That frees up other plants and resources to make weapons fuel. In response, neighboring Pakistan is in the process of greatly expanding its nuclear arsenal.[11] The South Asian arms race was not on the agenda of the international Nuclear Security Summit convened by President Obama in Washington, D.C. in April. The focus instead was on preventing non-state organizations from acquiring nuclear weapons, which Obama called "the single biggest threat to U.S. security," though it has never happened. The truth is that two countries, the U.S. and Russia, each possess thousands of nuclear warheads--9,400 and 12,000 respectively, according to Federation of American Scientists estimates. The arms reduction agreement signed in April hardly requires any disarmament at all, since it can be fulfilled by mostly shifting weapons from deployed to reserve status. The true direction is shown by the 2011 federal budget, which is likely to include $7 billion for nuclear weapons research and development--an amount the Obama administration wants to increase in coming years. The Disarn Now: for Peace and Human Needs march in New York on May 2 will draw the connection between this existential threat to civilization and the daily impact of the whole nuclear complex, from uranium mines to radioactive waste dumps. Especially harmed are Indigenous peoples such as the Dine (Navajo), whose territory is the site of many of the uranium mines being opened or reopened for the new push for nuclear plant fuel production.[12] In addition, three countries--France, China and the UK--have warheads numbering in the hundreds, while three more--Israel, Pakistan and India--have arsenals numbering at least in the dozens, and North Korea is estimated to have fewer than 10, none of them deployed. Obama's specific warnings at the summit, however, were aimed at North Korea and especially Iran, and he used it to garner support for sanctions on Iran--not due to human rights violations or stolen elections but solely due to its nuclear program. The same is true of the new policies Obama announced the previous week regarding use of nuclear weapons. While it specified that the U.S. would not be the first to use nuclear arms in a conflict with most countries, it explicitly excluded Iran and North Korea. Thus the threat to these two countries was the most prominent aspect of the nuclear politicking in April. That was not good enough for war hawks like John McCain, who responded to Obama's nuclear policy by stating at a Senate hearing that it is time to "pull the trigger" on Iran. c. Iran's freedom movement in crosshairs of counter-revolution Iran's nuclear weapons program and the associated veiled threats of military attack on that country by Israel or the U.S. drive home the fact that humanity still lives in the shadow of nuclear war. Iran will not anytime soon have the world-destroying power of the arsenals of the U.S. and Russia. Nevertheless, Iran's program to join Israel in the atomic bomb club is likely to heat up the arms race in the Middle East, if not globally, and push it in a nuclear direction. Despite leftists like Noam Chomsky who are so eager to oppose U.S. imperialism that they provide excuses for Iran's nuclear arming,[13] many in the Iranian freedom movement see the nuclear program as a weapon against the movement. Militarization in general and the nuclear security state in particular have always been used by the rulers not only to fight the enemy abroad but to weaken the resistance of the masses at home. In Iran, the counter-revolutionary regime of Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad is using brutal repression in its effort to extinguish the freedom movement. And that freedom movement is explicitly linking itself to the 1978-79 Revolution that was hijacked in a counter-revolution by this regime's Islamic Republican predecessors. What the rulers of Iran and the U.S. can agree on is the need to avoid a social revolution by the masses. A military attack on the country could swing support to Ahmadinejad and divert revolutionary impulses. The regime has long exploited the threat from the U.S. and Israel to advance militarization of society and hopes to brainwash the masses by glorifying its "right" to nuclear arms. That seems to have worked better on leftists like Chomsky. U.S. imperialism as enemy number one substitutes for a concept of a society on totally new human foundations as the determinant for action. Rather than being diverted by the reactionary anti-imperialism of rulers who declare they are standing up against the U.S., we must pay heed to the way the workers in Iran are trying to deepen the revolt there. They have already given the lie to commentaries seeking to limit the movement to "democracy," or even "radical democracy." What we as Marxist-Humanists see is a revolution that was hijacked by counter-revolution but refuses to die, and instead is looking for what Marx articulated as revolution in permanence. (See "Iranian Workers Enter the Fray," March-April N&L.) As always, the crucial question for those who oppose war is: Do you stand with the people fighting for a whole new world on human foundations? IV. Philosophy as a force of revolution"The two-fold problematic of our age is: 1) What happens after the conquest of power? 2) Are there ways for new beginnings when there is so much reaction, so many aborted revolutions, such turning of the clock backward in the most technologically advanced lands?" -- Raya Dunayevskaya[14] The nuclear threat, together with automation's role in permanent unemployment, marks 2010's basic continuity with the stage of production that took hold in the 1940s. What needs to be grasped as equally objective is the new subjective stage that emerged in our age. To disregard this stage--characterized by the movement from practice that is itself a form of theory--or to consign it to the past, would rob us of the ability to grasp and make real the future in the present. World War II was not even over when the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, revealed a new threat to humanity's very existence. Within a few years coal miners were battling the continuous miner in their 1949-50 general strike. Dunayevskaya would later make a category of automation as a new stage of production, and of the new stage of cognition arising: "What was new in this proletarian revolt was that, instead of just fighting unemployment and demanding better wages, the miners were posing totally new questions about what kind of labor man should do, and why there was an ever-widening gulf between thinking and doing."[15] This workers' revolt posing totally new questions signaled a new era of movements from practice that are themselves forms of theory, soon to expand into East European revolts against state-capitalist Communism, the Black freedom movement in the U.S., the revolutions ushering in a new Third World, the Women's Liberation Movement, the anti-Vietnam War youth movement. The new stage in the world called for a new stage of philosophic development. The philosophic moment of Marxist-Humanism, Dunayevskaya's 1953 letters on Hegel's Absolutes, launched that new stage. Hegel is our "contemporary" because his philosophy was born of the compulsion from the new stage in the world initiated by the French Revolution and continued by the Haitian Revolution.[16] Marx had worked out his philosophy of revolution as the philosophy for the age of proletarian revolution--and it is still the philosophy of our age. From the vantage point of our age and its freedom movements, Dunayevskaya dove into Hegel's Absolutes and made them a new beginning. In them she found the new society characterized by the end of the division between mental and manual labor, and a dual movement of practice and theory: from practice to theory and to the new society; and from theory to practice, reaching for philosophy. As she would put it later, "the new for our age was the fact that practice, as 'implicitly the idea,' meant to me that mass practice is itself a form of theory."[17] That is why the form worked out for the new book of writings on Marx, based on moments of development of Marxist-Humanism, is so crucial--and why it is key for one Part of the book to center on the philosophic moment of 1953 itself. The point is that the book speaks to the needs of the present moment of humanity's striving for freedom in a new human society. It is imperative to listen to and address the new questions coming from the movement from below. Marxist-Humanism's development has depended from its beginnings on hearing those new questions. Decades before the collapse of the "Soviet Union," the transformation into opposite of the Russian Revolution had become clear to some revolutionaries. Having helped to strangle the Spanish Revolution in its civil war against Franco's fascism, Stalin sent shock waves with his 1939 non-aggression pact with Hitler's Germany. In the search for an alternative to Stalinism, Dunayevskaya developed the theory of state-capitalism as the nature of Stalin's Russia and a new world stage, including the New Deal. In today's battle of ideas, liberals like Robert Reich hold up Roosevelt's 1930s New Deal as a supposed model for combating capitalist crisis, while much of the Left calls instead for nationalization of the banks and other types of state intervention as the solution--showing how necessary it is to be grounded in a philosophy that does not allow State planning to substitute for the self-activity of freely associated labor. The first moment of state-capitalist theory's development draws on Marx's Humanism--with its critique of alienated labor and of vulgar communism--on the dialectic, and on the revolt of workers and Black masses. The second moment of development is the philosophic moment of Marxist-Humanism, which comprehends the movements from practice to theory and the concept of a new society uniting mental/manual as a new beginning. It followed the miners' general strike, with the new questions the miners posed, and anticipated the 1953 East German workers' uprising, the very first rebellion under totalitarianism. Crucial to the course of Marxist-Humanism was singling out at this moment the negation of the negation--second or absolute negation--as "the turning point," the "subjectivity" upon which rests "the transcendence of the opposition between Notion and Reality."[18] The concept of the movement from practice that is itself a form of theory set the structure for the book Marxism and Freedom, from 1776 until Today, the heart of the third moment of development. New stirrings of freedom appeared in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott, while new attacks on Marx's Humanism and Hegelian dialectic were coming from Stalinist Russia. The reality of counter-revolution coming from within revolution is analyzed in Marxism and Freedom as an "age of absolutes" preoccupied with the question of what happens after a revolution, compelling a turn to Hegel's Absolutes because the question calls for a total answer. The attraction for today's Left of Venezuela's statist "Bolivarian Revolution" and the call by President Hugo Chávez for a new "Fifth International"--one that counts as a "brother" Iran's President Ahmadinejad at the very moment of his bloody suppression of labor and freedom struggles at home--is just one example of how the collapse of the USSR did not consign these questions to the past. This moment of Marxist-Humanism's development includes American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard and Nationalism, Communism, Marxist-Humanism and the Afro-Asian Revolutions, comprehending the new roads opened by the Black freedom movement in the U.S. and the African revolutions. The fourth moment of development confronts the failure of the 1960s movements to achieve fundamental social transformation, and the new questions in its aftermath that showed a "passion for philosophy" among forces of revolution. The failure of New Left activity all too separated from theory made it necessary to make a category of our original contribution. The central category of Philosophy and Revolution, needed for this age to reach freedom, is Absolute Negativity as New Beginning. That explicit recognition is taken up in "Our Original Contribution to the Dialectic of the Absolute Idea as New Beginning" (see "Marxist-Humanism's original contribution" this issue), one of the pieces slated for the new book. That contribution further deepened the analysis of the self-developing Subject in relationship to the African revolutions, the world economy and how capitalism's law of value can be transcended. It continued to develop as the mid-1970s global economic crisis broke out. A new, fifth moment arose in the context of the world crises, the rise of the Third World--with gravely contradictory revolutions such as Iran's--and the emergence of the Women's Liberation Movement, raising new questions about forms of organization and about the totality and depth of the uprooting needed. That was developed in the book Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution, with its central category of post-Marx Marxism as against continuation of Marx's full philosophy of revolution in permanence. Marx's Ethnological Notebooks made it possible to see new moments of his thought in his last decade on the relationship between capitalistic countries and the "underdeveloped" lands, as well as on the questions of organization and the Man/Woman relationship. New questions raised there on paths of development and revolution illuminate today's struggles, such as the great land grab. Finally, the question of Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy was a new moment of development that was underway at the time of Dunayevskaya's unexpected death. Marxist-Humanism had from the beginning rejected the elitist vanguard party. By the 1980s a number of others had done so too. That did not mean that the question of organization was settled by hailing forms of organization that emerged spontaneously from the revolt from below, even when they were as great as the decentralized workers' councils of the Hungarian Revolution. A key question is the meaning of the fact that what springs from below does not simply get taken over by the vanguard-type organizations (which do not always describe themselves as such anymore), but that they themselves look to be taken over, in their search for a unity of theory and practice. That this problem is no less urgent today is seen in the way many who reject vanguardism and oppose state powers still get sucked into tailending statist leaders like Hugo Chávez. It is also seen in the search for forms of organization that won't get co-opted or transformed from organs of social movements to organs of the state--as is under debate in Bolivia today--and in the dialogues on whether it is possible to change the world without taking power.[19] An alternative to the vaguard party had to be worked out. News and Letters Committees made a unique beginning, still unmatched by other organizations--including adopting a Constitution incorporating its philosophy while establishing decentralized committees for both organization and newspaper; naming youth, women and Black as forces of revolution alongside workers; publishing Dunayevskaya's 1953 Letters on Hegel's Absolutes; establishing Charles Denby as Black worker-editor. The newspaper was understood as an indispensable element of Marxist-Humanist organization from the beginning, functioning in a way that began to break down the division between mental and manual labor without waiting for the needed revolution. What became clear to Dunayevskaya as she dug into dialectics of organization and philosophy was that this thorough break with the elitist party politically and in form of organization did not in itself establish a full break in philosophy. This did not mean that what had been established should be thrown out, and certainly nothing so vacuous as abstractly declaring the need for a new form of organization, leaving the concrete details to emerge from an intellectual's head. These developments culminated in Dunayevskaya's June 1, 1987, presentation, which made a category of the philosophic moment as determinant and gave a new vantage point for grasping the body of ideas of Marxist-Humanism. What flows from this concept of organization and philosophy is that our celebration of the centenary year of Dunayevskaya's birth is not simply about an anniversary but about projecting the ideas that represent the freedom philosophy of our age so that they can be concretized as what gives direction for freedom movements. The need for this direction is illuminated by what happens to post-Marx Marxist theoreticians who fail to grasp the deeply revolutionary nature of the dialectic in Hegel and its re-creation in Marx. For instance, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri--authors of Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth--reject the dialectic, and end up disregarding the transformation into opposite of 20th century revolutions, which they call victorious; and their aversion to dialectical mediation means that the question of what happens after revolution is more or less left up to practical experimentation by the "multitude." The conclusion is: "The problem of transition [to a new society] must be given a positive, nondialectical solution, leading toward democracy through democracy." Michael Lebowitz, author of Following Marx: Method, Critique and Crisis, sees Marx as a theoretician applying dialectic to a study of capitalism, so he absurdly concludes that Capital has no place "for living, changing, striving, enjoying, struggling and developing human beings. People who produce themselves through their own activities, who change their nature as they produce, beings of praxis, are not the subjects of Capital." Dunayevskaya showed how workers fighting to remake the world determined the structure of Capital, so that the chapter on "The Working Day" became the center of the whole book. After the workers' revolution known as the Paris Commune, the French edition singled out the commodity-form as the fetish that needs to be stripped away to create a new society based on the cooperative plan of "freely associated labor." Perhaps his non-comprehension of Marx's re-creation of the dialectic explains why Lebowitz separates practice from theory so fully that he touts Hugo Chávez as a model for revolutionary practice. What is needed is no truncated dialectic but the fullness of absolute negativity as new beginning. Including "Our Original Contribution to the Dialectic of the Absolute Idea as New Beginning" in the book calls for being prepared for criticisms from those who do not recognize the indispensability of the philosophic moment of the age--who either reject philosophy as giving direction, as if to discipline oneself by the idea of freedom is another form of vanguardism; or who raise the would-be originality issued from their own heads to the level of an epochal philosophic moment, and would thereby cut Dunayevskaya and Marx down to their size. It means stating that even Marx did not indicate that Absolute Idea has to be dealt with as new beginning, that it is necessary to begin with the totality; and making that recognition a point of further development. It means as well returning to the actual 1953 Letters and the many universals inherent in them, as well as to the full elaboration of her original contribution in Chapter 1 of Philosophy and Revolution, "Absolute Negativity as New Beginning: The Ceaseless Movement of Ideas and of History." V. Marxist-Humanist Tasks for 2010-11This year we will focus on three crucial tasks. 1. We begin with the task of bringing to completion the publication of a collection of Selected Writings by Raya Dunayevskaya on Marx. The form we have worked out for this collection follows Marxist-Humanism's development from the analysis of state-capitalism, through its "philosophic moment" and the completion of each work of the "trilogy of revolution," to its assignment for us to work out the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy. In bringing out this book for the world to share in the concepts created as Marxist-Humanism, we present it as our intervention into the freedom movements and the battle of ideas contending today. 2. Our second primary task this year will be to continue, deepen and expand News & Letters as the only Marxist-Humanist journal in the world, both as a print publication and as a website. From its beginning in 1955, its goal has remained the working out of a unity of theory and practice, in which the voices from below of workers, women, youth, people of color and LGBTQ people are heard unseparated from the articulation of a philosophy of liberation. In those voices we find the new passions and forces for reconstruction of society, which can enrich our ideas if we practice the breakdown of that most monstrous division, the division between mental and manual labor. As part of this we will endeavor to greatly increase access to the body of writings of Raya Dunayevskaya on the internet. 3. The most urgent of all our tasks remains membership growth to make possible the carrying out of our perspectives on the way to revolution and the creation of a new world on truly human foundations. Friends and correspondents continue to be important to our functioning. What is indispensable is acceptance of organizational responsibility for Marxist-Humanism. Once again, we hold foremost in our minds the principle that: "Only live human beings can recreate 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.'"[20] ____________ Notes: 1.From "Today's Epigones Who Try to Truncate Marx's Capital." All these epigraph quotations are taken from the new book we are working on of selected writings by Raya Dunayevskaya on Marx. 2. This analysis is elaborated in "Today's Epigones Who Try to Truncate Marx's Capital." See footnote 1. 3. See "On the 60th Anniversary of the Coal Miners' General Strike: Automation and Marxist-Humanism's Birth," Jan.-Feb N&L, and A l980's 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 & Letters: 1984). 4. Nationalism, Communism, Marxist-Humanism and the Afro-Asian Revolutions (News and Letters, 1984), pp. 13, 24. 5. GRAIN, an organization supporting small farmers and social movements, has issued a series of reports on the land grab, including "Corporate Investors Lead Rush for Control of Poor Countries' Farmland," Oct. 2009, and "Land Grabbing in Latin America," March 2010, at www.grain.org. See also "How Food and Water Are Driving a 21st-Century African Land Grab," 3/7/10 Observer. 6. "Agro-Imperialism" by Andrew Rice, 11/22/09 New York Times Magazine. 7. From Special Introduction to the Iranian edition of Marx's 1844 Essays, or Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts. 8. "Key Afghan Town Still at Risk, U.S. General Says," by Tony Perry, 4/12/10 Los Angeles Times. 9. News and Letters Committees Constitution, adopted 1956. 10. "The Iraq War: Still a Massive Mistake," by Malou Innocent, 4/5/10 Christian Science Monitor. 11. "Agenda of Nuclear Talks Leaves Out a New Threat," by David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, 4/12/10 The New York Times. 12. See "The New Anti-Nuclear Movement," by Frida Berrigan, Foreign Policy in Focus, 4/16/10. 13. See "Noam Chomsky: Iran Pursuing Nuclear Weapons Out of Fear," 3/11/10 Harvard Law Record. 14. "A Post-World War II View of Marx's Humanism, 1843-83; Marxist-Humanism in the 1950s and 1980s," Bosnia-Herzegovina: Achilles Heel of Western 'Civilization' (News and Letters, 1996), p. 93. 15. "A Post-World War II View..." p. 94. 16. See "Haiti and Hegel," by John Alan, March-April N&L, and Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). 17. A l980's View, The Coal Miners' General Strike of 1949-50 and the Birth of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S., p. 40. 18. G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic (Humanities Press, 1969), p. 835. 19. John Holloway's Change the World Without Taking Power skillfully uses the concept of negation to critique the state and "scientific Marxism." Holloway discusses how capitalism expresses power-over, or domination, robbing humanity of the creativity of power-to. However, through the lens of Adorno's negative dialectics, power-to becomes equated to anti-power. Though a necessary moment in the confrontation with power-over, anti-power remains as first negation, cutting power-to off from the second negation, the emergence of the new, which Marx's expression--"Human power which is its own end"--captures. Cut off from new beginnings made on absolute negativity, negative dialectics cannot grasp the full revolutionary dimension of human subjectivity, and the possibility of constructing the new. 20. Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution, p. 195. |
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The broader reality is that, since the decline in the rate of profit brought about the mid-1970s global economic crisis, capital has taken from workers both directly through wage cuts, and indirectly by cutting social spending like welfare, public transportation and education. Far from spelling out an end to the era of state-capitalism, this shift of resources away from the social safety net and regulation of capital is only one side--the other being militarization, the vast growth of the national security state, and massive subsidies for everything from oil giants and agribusiness to financial corporations, for example, in the $700 billion bailout.
