Capitalism's violence, masses' revolt show need for total view

This special issue carries our Draft Perspectives Thesis, part of our preparation for the national gathering of News and Letters Committees. We publish 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.

• I. Capitalism's many crises

• II. The politics of degenerate capitalism

• III. Climate change and development

• IV. Arab Spring and the missing link of philosophy

The world today is riven between the creativity of masses in revolt and the violent degeneracy of counter-revolution, whose destructiveness even extends to the revived specter of nuclear war two decades after the collapse of the USSR. Such is the degeneracy of the globalized capitalist system, laden with destructive forces and sunk into structural crisis. The deep crisis is seen in the U.S. and abroad, economically, in unemployment and poverty, homelessness and hunger. It is seen politically, in new laws attacking workers and women, and new outbursts of racism. It is seen environmentally, with the advance of climate disruption and fake capitalistic solutions. It is seen in thought, as the lack of philosophy, of a total view, hampers the development of struggles from the U.S. to the revolutions of the Arab Spring facing counter-revolutions.

A. Toward the nuclear brink

The bellicose acts of both the U.S. and North Korea confirm how ready both are to risk nuclear war. It may be true that neither side desires to plunge into such a nightmarish disaster. Yet each has repeatedly pushed closer to the brink. North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un held missile and nuclear bomb tests, repudiated the Korean War's 60-year-old armistice, and restarted a shuttered reactor to produce nuclear weapons fuel. He threatened to bomb South Korea, Japan, the U.S. and Guam. Secretary of State John Kerry declared, "North Korea will not be accepted as a nuclear power"; the U.S. expanded its annual joint military drills with South Korea, adding bombing runs by nuclear-capable B-2 and B-52 warplanes.

The Korean Peninsula has been militarized since World War II ended. Europe and Asia were divided into spheres of influence of the two superpowers, Russia and the U.S. After the Korean War and the collapse of the USSR, the division of Korea persisted, with rising power China as North Korea's remaining ally.

North and South Korea have two of the world's largest standing armies. The North deploys approximately 700,000 troops, 8,000 artillery systems and 2,000 tanks close to the South, ready to strike. Its regime maintains not only its large military but its hold on power through its "military first" policy.

The superpower U.S. has 28,500 troops in South Korea, with another 53,000 based in nearby Japan and 55,000 more in Hawaii and Guam. And this is before the U.S. has executed its "pivot to Asia" to confront China's regional strength. At the same time, China is using nationalism to try to divert widespread internal discontent, revolt and strikes, and has its own imperialist designs to control supplies of strategic resources like oil and rare earths. China has acted ever more aggressively in territorial disputes with several other Asian nations over resource-rich uninhabited islands in the Pacific. Its naval vessels recently confronted ships from both The Philippines and Japan.

Long before North Korea built its first nuclear weapons, the U.S., Russia and China had intercontinental missiles aimed at each other. The recent events are a harsh reminder that the end of the Cold War did not end the nuclear threat to humanity. The fact is that nine countries are now nuclear-armed, with about 16,000 warheads in U.S. and Russian stockpiles.

Only the U.S. has intentionally used atomic weapons against civilian targets. Such weapons are one part of the world's overwhelmingly largest armed forces. Despite recent budget cuts, the U.S. still spends more on its military than the ten next biggest militaries combined.

The fact that some in South Korea now call for construction of their own nuclear weapons illustrates the lie inherent in the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It calls for nuclear-armed nations to pursue disarmament, but in reality acts as a framework for proliferation. The show of weapons reduction really amounts to arsenal modernization. This is in keeping with an international order in which not only do nations compete with one another, but a group of industrialized countries continuously appropriates natural resources and unpaid labor from the majority of the world's population.

The civilian nuclear energy industry was created to provide a "peaceful" cover for the nuclear-industrial complex. The civilian industry enables proliferation to continue. In the wake of Fukushima's meltdowns, the people of Japan are the latest victims of the "peaceful" side of the complex.

Not only in Korea but in South Asia the specter of "limited nuclear war" has been raised, as if it is a realistic or sane prospect. In January the Indian government warned Kashmir residents to prepare for nuclear attack at a time of sporadic fighting between the Indian and Pakistani armies in Kashmir.

Brinkmanship cannot be dismissed as mere show. Going over the brink can happen easily where so many weapons, both conventional and nuclear, are in position, whether in Korea, Kashmir, or the Middle East. Even more so where conflict has an objective basis in competition over resources like oil, trade routes, and territory, in the context of the global competition between the U.S., Europe and China, exacerbated by the global structural economic crisis. At the same time, one of the rulers' main weapons against revolt by the masses is militarism, which ratchets up the risk of war.

B. Europe's economic crisis and revolt

Capitalism's utter moribund degeneracy is seen not only in threats to humanity's future from nuclear weapons and climate change, but also in the continuing economic crisis. High unemployment and homelessness persist in the U.S. and Europe, and the world food crisis continues. The UN estimates that 10.3 million people could suffer food shortages in the Sahel region of Africa this year. One in six people in the U.S.--46 million, including one in four children--do not get enough food.

Europe is again in recession. Unemployment there has soared since the financial crisis, reaching 48.7 million in February. In Greece the unemployment rate hit a new high of 27.2% in January, triple that of four years ago. Youth unemployment was 59.3%. It is nearly as bad in Spain, where youths held mass protests across Spain against high unemployment and poor working conditions. They even protested near its embassies in other countries, calling attention to the large number of youth forced to go abroad to find work.

A whole series of European countries has taken bailout loans in return for imposing harsh austerity measures: slashing social spending, pensions and labor rights, firing government workers and cutting minimum wages. From Ireland to Greece, Spain to Portugal, each of these countries has experienced sustained revolt against austerity. In Italy a government cannot be formed, with no party ready to take responsibility for the austerity program after the people overwhelmingly rejected it. In Bulgaria protests and blockades toppled the government in February. In Portugal mass demonstrations on March 2 declared that the government does not represent the people and raised the slogans of the 1974 Portuguese Revolution.

Cyprus is the latest example, where last year the "Communist" then-president worked out a bank bailout deal. Leaked documents from the European Commission forecast that, under austerity, the Cyprus economy will shrink 8.9% this year and 3.9% more next year. The country is likely to plunge into depression with no foreseeable end. Large, angry protests forced the government to back down on its plan to seize 10% from everyone's bank accounts. Bank employees held a brief strike to protest likely pension and job cuts.

Slovenia may be the next country forced into a bailout. After the government started imposing austerity--at about the same time that evidence of official corruption began to surface last year--protests have spread across the country.

While discontent and revolt continue to be widespread in Europe, leaders of parties and unions have held back their full development by working to channel the opposition into narrow electoral politics and one-day strikes and protests.

C. Automation, joblessness in U.S.

Although the U.S. has not slipped back into recession, unemployment remains high. Poverty has skyrocketed, with 19 million at less than half of the official poverty line. Also, 70% of the 3.5 million jobs that have been created since June 2009 are low-paying, while half of the 7.6 million jobs lost during the year and a half before that were mid-range, paying $38,000 to $68,000.

It isn't just a matter of jobs being moved to China and India. Automation is taking its toll, and it isn't finished. Capitalist figures from former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers to Silicon Valley businessman Martin Ford warn that advancing automation is likely to result in 50% to 75% unemployment. Ford adds:

"It must be acknowledged that this idea is quite similar to the predictions that were made by Karl Marx in the mid to late 1800s. Marx predicted that capitalism would suffer from a relentless 'accumulation of capital,' resulting in massive unemployment....If the arguments in [my] book prove correct, then we may be in the somewhat uncomfortable position of conceding that Marx was, at least in some ways, perceptive about the challenges the capitalist system would eventually encounter." [1]

Foxconn in China--manufacturer of choice for companies like Apple and Amazon--deployed more than 10,000 robots last year, with a simultaneous hiring freeze, and has announced plans to deploy one million robots by 2014. Foxconn chairman Terry Gou famously declared about the company's 1.5 million-strong workforce, "As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache." [2]

At the same time, ideologues are presenting automation as a solution to unemployment. "Robots have the potential to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.," according to a March 2013 report to the Congressional Robotics Caucus. Some manufacturing has indeed been brought back to the U.S. However, the high level of automation implemented to compete with China and other low-wage countries reduces the number of jobs involved to a handful.

The broad and continuing impact of automation portends long-term high unemployment, decimation of better-paying jobs, downward pressure on wages, and impoverishment of the masses.

The latest trend in fragmenting and alienating workers is microtasking. Companies break down tasks that are not yet fully automated, posting small subtasks on web marketplaces where piece-workers anywhere in the world sign up to perform one for a few cents. The main marketplace is amazon.com's Mechanical Turk. [3] Working from home and sometimes not knowing who has hired them, quick workers may make $1.50 an hour with no benefits or protections. Mechanical Turk handles over 500,000 workers in 100 countries, about 70% of them women, isolated from each other and from their employers, performing little bits of tasks on invisible assembly lines.

Under capitalist relations, technological advances have the perverse effects of alienating and fragmenting work and throwing people out of jobs. This results from the dialectical inversion Marx pointed out: in capitalist production, it is not the worker who employs the instruments of labor, but the instruments of labor that employ the worker; dead labor dominates living labor.

Since the financial crisis hit in 2008, the capitalist press has had to keep admitting the cogency of Marx's analysis of capitalism, from Business Week to Forbes to Time. [4] Still repeating their ritual denunciations of Marx and still trying to save capitalism from itself, though, they cannot allow themselves to grasp what Marx designated the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation--the accumulation of capital at one pole, with wealth for a minority, and of misery, unemployment and revolt at the opposite pole. Its operation is seen in the army of the unemployed and in the fall in the rate of profit. The fact that there is no prospect of any more than a weak recovery on the horizon is precisely because of capitalism's degeneracy brought on by its absolute general law. But the inevitable revolt does not automatically develop into social revolution that topples capitalism and creates the foundation for a new social order.

The rulers are not about to sit back and let revolt freely develop. All sorts of reactionary ideas and attitudes have been ushered into the mainstream of politics and the media.

State governments like Wisconsin's and Michigan's have taken the lead in ramming through reactionary laws (see "Undoing Michigan election," Jan.-Feb. N&L). Recently passed anti-labor laws have already led to a sharp drop in unionization in states like Wisconsin and Indiana. Nationally, only about one in 15 private sector workers are in unions now. The state-appointed emergency manager of Detroit joins others in Michigan not only to deny democracy for majority-Black cities but to attack labor, African Americans and Latinos by dismantling union contracts, pensions, environmental protection and public education--as inadequate as all of those already were. (See "Detroiters organize," p. 11.)

On a federal level, the sequester's drastic cuts gave the Obama administration political cover to join the Republicans in imposing austerity on the U.S. President Obama followed up by writing cuts to Social Security and Medicare right into his budget proposal--before compromising with Congress.

Smarting from their losses in the 2012 elections, Republicans did appear to be in retreat on homophobia and the demonization of Latin American immigrants. A number of politicians changed their stance due to the historic shift in attitudes. Polls show that a majority favors legalizing Gay marriage, up more than 20 percentage points since 2004. However, the Catholic Church and the Christian Right are still crusading against LGBTQ people, and politicians still equate Gays with murderers and pedophiles. The mythical "traditional family" serves as a rallying point for patriarchal reaction that opposes any kind of liberatory movement.

Attempting to co-opt the Latino vote, many Republicans have muted their anti-immigrant rhetoric, though far Right groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform remain influential enough to be featured on Fox News. Yet the record number of deportations--1.5 million in Obama's first term--reveals that, if anything, the treatment of undocumented immigrants has become more vicious under Obama than under Bush. Detention of immigrants also hit record levels, with 429,000 held in 2011. Human rights groups have lodged protests over the widespread use of prolonged solitary confinement on immigrants who were not even convicted of crimes. It is a form of torture.

Now a bipartisan immigration reform bill has a chance of passing. The bill, a compromise hammered out by power players in Washington without consulting with the millions of people actually affected by it, lays out an absurdly long path to citizenship, which would take 13 or more years. Or maybe never, since that would only be implemented if tightened "border security targets" are met. It would not dismantle the repressive deportation and detention machinery. A number of rallies took place in March and April from San Francisco to Miami, with thousands in Washington, D.C. The demands were to legalize immigrants, reunite families, and end deportations and detention.

Immigrant workers' revolt has a new visibility and force in the last several years, not because the Republicans are worried about their votes but because immigrants showed their resolve in strikes and protests from the May Day 2006 strike/boycott to the 2010-13 eruption of "undocumented and unafraid" youth speaking out publicly at the risk of deportation. Immigrant workers from Latin America have been key to much recent labor militancy.

One example is the Coalition of Immokalee Workers' campaign to pressure Publix and Wendy's to sign Fair Food Agreements to help stop exploitation and slave labor of farmworkers. Their 200-mile March for Rights, Respect, and Fair Food ended March 17 with a rally of 1,500 farmworkers and supporters at Publix headquarters in Lakeland, Fla.

Despite lip service to Latinos and Gays, Republicans' hostility to women's freedom continues to deepen. Women not only are the first to suffer from the cutbacks in social programs, but are the specific targets of a whole raft of mean-spirited legislation aimed at controlling their lives. The blatantly unconstitutional anti-abortion laws passed by Arkansas, Kansas and North Dakota are just the tip of the iceberg. New laws have been cutting women's access to abortions in many states. Mississippi, Alabama and Virginia have passed TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws that threaten to shut down all abortion providers in those states by imposing incredibly expensive regulations, hypocritically justified as "protecting women's health" by politicians who would rather see women die than be able to get abortions. Most often, clinics that perform abortion also provide other vital health services for women, such as checks for cancer, birth control and AIDS testing. Anti-abortion ideologues do not care that closing down abortion providers means poor women are left without access to lifesaving healthcare.

Women are fighting the normalization of violence against women, as seen from their reactions to the Steubenville, Ohio, rape trial and the suicide of 15-year-old Audrie Pott in Saratoga, Calif., after being raped while unconscious. (See "Violence 'normalized,'" p. 2.) Whether in the U.S. or in the Arab countries, women are pointing out the need for fundamental social transformation and challenging actual revolutions to deepen. They are driven by frustration over continuing oppression and retrogression--and by the way women in the Middle East and North Africa have taken the historic stage in the uprisings and strikes of the last several years and then suffered a brutal backlash against their gains. (See "From India to Egypt to U.S., women fighting for freedom," March-April N&L.)

A. American civilization on trial

"In a word, the new human dimension attained through an oppressed people's genius in the struggle for freedom, nationally and internationally, rather than either scientific achievement, or an individual hero, became the measure of Man in action and thought."
-- Raya Dunayevskaya, American Civilization on Trial

The re-election of the first Black President could not hide the hollowness of U.S. democracy. Black masses have exposed that hollowness from the beginning, and indeed have put American Civilization on Trial (ACOT), which is the title of one of Marxist-Humanism's foundational works, first published 50 years ago.

On the U.S. scene, the reality under Obama, as under Bush, is that, in everything from poverty to unemployment, to imprisonment, to police brutality, to health, to attacks on women's autonomy, to the rapid restructuring of the educational system, African Americans are worse off than whites. While we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, one cannot help but notice that slave labor still exists in this country, both inside and outside of prisons; that the structure of our economy still depends on a superexploited layer of immigrant workers of this country not given the rights of citizens, as well as superexploitation of workers from China to Honduras to Bangladesh; that families are still being torn apart by armed agents of the state; that resisting this system of exploitation can land you behind bars, deported, or even dead.

From the police force to courts to prisons, the criminal injustice system remains a machinery of oppression and a focus of revolt. Youth of color, often targets of "stop and frisk" actions as well as killings by police (see "New Yorkers protest police murders," p. 11), are in the forefront of opposing them.

One of the 2012 election's features was the voter suppression effort aimed primarily at Blacks and Latinos, and the resistance it sparked. Coupled with that, Republicans used a phony narrative of victimization of whites plus gerrymandering to maintain partial control of the government. Now the Supreme Court appears to be on the verge of helping suppress votes by gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, with a decision anticipated in June. Many of last year's voter suppression efforts were only temporarily blocked by courts, and the expected Supreme Court ruling would restore other measures while sending a signal to racist local and state authorities to open the floodgates of disenfranchisement.

What ACOT shows throughout this country's history is that the real moves to establish true democracy and a fully new society have come from below.

Across the U.S. there are determined struggles over school closings, housing and healthcare cutbacks. In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel proposed to close 54 public schools, on top of years of school closings, mainly affecting Blacks and Latinos. Angry parents, students and teachers have rallied, sat-in in the streets and demanded answers in hearings. In many cities schools are being closed or privatized.

Obamacare has not ended struggles over healthcare. In Chicago communities are still fighting the Mayor's closure of several mental health clinics. Sit-ins have also protested the closure of emergency rooms on the South Side. Four activists were violently arrested by University of Chicago police in January at a sit-in by Fearless Leading by the Youth, demanding the University's hospital reopen its trauma center to adults. They have been fighting for a trauma center on the South Side for three years since FLY founder Damian Turner was shot four blocks from the University of Chicago Hospital but taken ten miles away to die at another hospital.

As evictions and foreclosures continue at a fast clip, so do the struggles against them. Detroit, where the foreclosure rate is about one in every 500 homes, is one of several cities where anti-eviction groups, aided by Occupy, have successfully kept people in their homes when threatened with eviction.

All these struggles reflect the onslaught of austerity and privatization that hurts people of color the most.

As ACOT put it: "The elements of the new society, submerged the world over by the might of capital, are emerging in all sorts of unexpected and unrelated places. What is missing is the unity of these movements from practice with the movement from theory into an overall philosophy that can form the foundation of a totally new social order."

The question arises: Where is the total view? Again and again, struggles arise from the grassroots but are carried out without raising a banner of a totally new society, with new human relations in production, between the sexes, and more. Those who would limit the movement's reach have taken advantage of this to mislead.

Union bureaucrats succeeded in diverting the struggles in Wisconsin and Michigan into electoral channels. The "lesser evil" ideology shared by so-called Marxists and anarchists destroyed Occupy's solidarity with the Syrian masses. And at the very time that large numbers of U.S. Blacks and Latinos came out to resist the Right's attacks on voting rights, these same Left tendencies undermined Occupy's solidarity at home by substituting abstract revolutionism (claiming that "voting makes you complicit with the imperialist system") for the needed historic link to actual struggles--past, present, future--by Black masses to transform society.

B. Wars of the U.S.

Militarism has ever been one of the rulers' favorite tools to sap revolt by the masses. There is no end to war in sight so long as capital drives society.

President Obama has set 2014 for the end of the war in Afghanistan. The Afghan people have every right to fear a recapitulation of what happened after Russia's withdrawal in the early 1990s: no end to war, but a deadly struggle for power among multiple warlords, including the Taliban; and more exploitation and violence directed at women, youth, workers, and national minorities. Yet many look forward to the departure of an occupying force that has committed all too many atrocities, including bombings that killed children with their families, and the yet-to-be-punished massacre by Staff Sgt. Robert Bales of nine children and seven adult civilians in Panjwai one year ago.

There is no shortage of new vistas for war as the U.S., with bases in 130 countries already, undertakes its military "pivot to Asia" and at the same time expands its reach in Africa. With special forces and drones already based in East, West, and Central Africa, the new war in Mali accelerated the long-planned entry of the U.S. military into a number of African countries. (See "State of the U.S. wars," March-April N&L.)

Iran's approach to nuclear weapons capability remains a serious flashpoint. Saber-rattling over Iran by elements of the ruling classes of the U.S. and Israel is ratcheted up and down as politics demands, yet, as with North Korea, the danger of brinkmanship remains, as underscored by Obama's trip to Israel, preceded by his adoption of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's "red line" rhetoric.

The trip itself highlighted the administration's unwillingness to take substantive action on the biggest spur to Middle East conflict: Israel's imperialist occupation of Palestine. Words about a "peace process" were drowned out by the U.S. demand for Palestinians to drop their modest demand for a freeze of settlements as a precondition of talks.

Iraq, more than a year after Obama declared the war over, remains the poster child for the ruinous effects of U.S. war and occupation. Iraq still suffers from the sectarian and ethnic violence stimulated by the U.S. invasion ten years ago, giving an example of the kind of "peace and stability" that imperialism can live with in Afghanistan and Syria. The occupiers pushed Iraq toward an ethnic/sectarian-based politics. Prime Minister Maliki has exploited those divisions and shut out Sunnis to centralize power around himself.

The country is torn by violence, with frequent attacks on religious processions, political gatherings, and independent media. On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the invasion, 56 people were killed in 19 bombings in Baghdad. Fifty people were killed in one day leading up to the April 20 elections. Al Qaeda, which had little or no presence in Iraq before 2003, regularly murders rivals now. Power outages are frequent. Access to safe drinking water and sanitation has plummeted since the invasion. In cities like Fallujah and Basra, the incidence of cancer and birth defects has spiked.

Another devastating sign of capitalism's degeneracy is its failure even to slow down climate change, which the UN's 2013 Human Development Report warns could plunge 3.1 billion people into extreme poverty by 2050. Youth have spearheaded a new movement to control it. Blocking the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Canada is only their most prominent demand.

Burning all the oil in the tar sands would release 240 gigatons of carbon. [5] That's close to half of the 565 gigatons that top climate scientist James Hansen says is the most the world can add to the atmosphere and still have an 80% chance of staying below the two-degree Celsius temperature rise that international agreements specify as a limit. Even that level is fraught with tremendous peril.

All of the proven fossil fuel reserves owned by private and public companies and governments are equivalent to 2,795 Gt of carbon. The International Energy Agency announced last year: "No more than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior to 2050 if the world is to achieve the 2°C goal." [6]

The rate of emissions of greenhouse gases has climbed every decade, hitting a new record last year. The only thing that temporarily slowed the growth of energy use is the global economic crisis. And yet while the standard of living of working people has declined, the wealth of the 1% is still rising, as is energy use.

What should be clear is that, as Marx wrote, "Capital...allows its actual movement to be determined as much and as little by the sight of the coming degradation and final depopulation of the human race, as by the probable fall of the earth into the sun." What is needed is a new way of life, a new kind of development.

The UN framework for addressing climate change, however, only reinforces the capitalist type of development. Take one example of hundreds: the Barro Blanco dam in Panama, which is accredited for the UN's so-called Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The Movimiento 10 de Abril has been resisting hydroelectric development on the Tabasará River for more than 13 years. Peasants and Indigenous Panamanians have held protests and blockades for years and have gone to the UN, despite lethal police repression. Just this March, another protester was murdered by the police, 20-year-old migrant laborer Onésimo Rodríguez.

Biofuels are sold to us as a clean, sustainable alternative to gasoline. Yet consider campesino communities in the Aguán river valley region of Honduras, who are resisting being driven off the land for the benefit of the Dinant Corporation and the Jaremar Corporation, which produce African palm oil from plantations. The corporations have employed death squads that have murdered 80 campesinos. A campaign has begun to demand cancellation of a $30 million World Bank loan to Dinant. And yet CDM credits were approved.

A separate program called REDD ("Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation") is not in place yet, but it too is designed around carbon credits. A broad coalition called the Global Alliance of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities on Climate Change against REDD and for Life released a statement titled, "NO REDD+! in RIO+20 -- A Declaration to Decolonize the Earth and the Sky." It begins:

"After more than 500 years of resistance, we, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, peasant farmers, fisherfolk and civil society are not fooled by the so-called Green Economy and REDD+ because we know colonialism when we see it. Regardless of its cynical disguises and shameful lies, colonialism always results in the rape and pillaging of Mother Earth, and the slavery, death, destruction and genocide of her peoples. Rio+20's Green Economy and REDD+ constitute a thinly-veiled, wicked, colonialist planet grab that we oppose, denounce and resist." [7]

This is not just a plot by the 1%. It is capitalism's inherent law of development. Today, the fall of the rate of profit to new lows--resulting from capitalism's law of development--has only increased capital's desperation to expropriate and commodify new spheres that it had not previously incorporated into capital. When people are driven off the land and into the urban slums, it is not only the land that is being incorporated into capital. Human beings are transformed into labor power as part of the variable capital. It is the development of the domination of dead labor over living labor.

It is these actual social relations, relations of production, forms of labor, relationship to the land and other means of production, by which we can judge what must be uprooted, and to what extent any society has or has not moved to a path of development that breaks from capitalism's never-ending growth of capital, or, as Marx put it, production for production's sake.

Social movements from below have put to the test not only the openly market-centered mechanisms of CDM, REDD, the World Bank, etc., but also the statist national governments that claim to be building socialism. The South American countries of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador have stood up against U.S. imperialism's domination of Latin America and have reduced poverty through social programs. Yet they are pursuing development through mining and oil and gas drilling. In so doing they have come into conflict with Indigenous peoples. At the Rio+20 People's Summit, the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of the Bolivian East went so far as to say,

"We have unmasked the double standard that [Bolivian President Evo Morales, himself an Indigenous Aymara] has in his discourse on the international level, making believe that he is a defender of Indigenous peoples, of the rights of the Indigenous peoples of Mother Earth, of the natural resources and the forest." [8]

One of their struggles is against the government's construction of a highway connecting Brazil with the Pacific Ocean, going through the TIPNIS Indigenous reserve. They say the government held sham consultations with selected people from the Indigenous communities, using deception, manipulation, and cooptation to gain the appearance of agreement.

If humanity is going to create an alternative, non-capitalist path of sustainable human development, we cannot afford to mistake yet another form of state-capitalism for socialism. Struggles from below show that many forces of revolution are reaching for those new paths of development and are not going to be satisfied with state-capitalism. What is needed is a full commitment to develop the philosophy of revolution that encompasses revolution and liberation as real human development that begins with the masses of people taking control of their own lives and in so doing breaking the domination of capital.

A. Syria

Tunisia, Syria and Egypt show the determination of the masses to continue their revolutions in the face of vicious counter-revolution. In Syria, the doomed Assad regime has intensified its air attacks on the country's liberated areas. The death toll continues to rise, with over 70,000 estimated killed and millions left homeless. In a civilized world, not one of the victims of these attacks would have had to die, not one person would have been tortured, not one child traumatized, not one woman raped by shabiha thugs, nor one woman or man driven to the hard choice of armed self-defense.

A civilized world would have solidarized with the long months of peaceful, heroic demonstrations against the Baathist regime. That moment tested the world. The revolution in Syria is entirely a creation of its peoples' passion for freedom, but the counter-revolution is a collective creation of this alienated, inhuman world.

Shabiha murdered over 100 villagers in Haswiya, near Homs in central Syria. In Aleppo 65 were murdered, their hands bound behind them. Sixty civilians, including women and children, were massacred in Sanamayn in the south. Civilians were killed in the neighborhoods of Jobar, Al-Qadam, Tadamon and Yarmouk in Damascus. Scud missile attacks wiped out whole families. The death toll is averaging over 3,000 per month. That is a higher monthly toll than during the Bosnian genocide.

This poorly provisioned, orphaned revolution fights on. The Syrian revolutionaries receive lip service and crumbs from the West, paid many times over in blood. Meanwhile the lie is propagated that a "civil war" is taking place, rather than the truth: that a revolutionary people is being targeted for genocide.

The presence of well-armed religious fundamentalists has helped to confuse the issues. Al-Qaeda opposed the Arab Spring from the start, and the revolutions marginalized its reactionary ideology more effectively than U.S. imperialism or Russian genocide could ever hope to do. The masses' humanism shamed all these powers. Now the fundamentalists are hoping to capitalize on the hypocrisy and inhumanity of the world--of which they are merely a concentrated expression--to create a new power base in Syria. They are trying to grab power away from the self-organization of the people. 

Radical Islamists such as Jabhat Al-Nusra in Syria--powered in part by Iraq's decade of sectarian strife--are playing a role increasingly reminiscent of the way the Stalinists helped to destroy the Spanish Revolution from within in the 1930s, paving the way for the victory of Franco's fascism. The Stalinists in Spain systematically undermined the more radical aspects of the revolution, including the forms of organization by which workers and peasants exerted self-activity. Islamists in Syria are undermining the masses' self-activity in their zeal to impose their own counter-revolutionary vision.

As always, the counter-revolution that appears within the revolution serves to discredit the very idea of a different, better world, as it confirms the corrupt existing world's good opinion of itself. This situation, in fact, creates the starkest of dilemmas. To turn aside from facing the problem is to admit that one has ceased to be a revolutionary at all. Those who continue to fight for, as one revolutionary put it, a Syria "where every human being--regardless of their ethnicity, their religion, or their gender--can live in freedom, without fear," must be supported. The continuing, daily demonstrations within Syria include protests against Al-Nusra by those fighting against the Assad regime.

To fight this counter-revolution from within requires not only the independent revolutionary organization of the masses but a revolutionary organizing principle, a banner of full liberation.

The need for that banner cries out in each country where the revolutions of Arab Spring are being fought out or struggling to get underway. It is therefore crucial to project concretely within all these struggles the indispensable selection of Raya Dunayevskaya's writings on the Middle East in our new publication, Crossroads of History, whose Foreword singles out how those writings relate to the question of revolution in permanence.

This question has become the most significant issue of the Arab Spring. Efforts to deepen and continue the revolutions include the targeting of Muslim Brotherhood offices for destruction in Egypt during mass protests. They include the national general strike carried out in Tunisia after the assassination of Marxist opposition leader Chokri Belaid, accompanied by running street battles and occupations or attacks on offices of Ennahda, the ruling Islamist party. As one protester declared, "The revolution continues! Chokri's death is a lesson for everyone!"

These actions reflect the determination of the masses not to allow a replay of the betrayal from within of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Indeed, Iran's role in supporting Assad in Syria is a direct continuation of this betrayal, disguised by reactionary religious rhetoric. However, as in Mali, the movements' ambivalent relationship to the Islamists--as well as to other elements that would like to limit the revolution, including the liberals and parts of the old state, even the Egyptian military--shows yet again the missing link of philosophy that could give the movement a direction toward revolution in permanence.

What is involved is much more than simply stopping the Islamists and others from halting the revolution. Revolution in permanence is not just a first negation but a negation of the negation, and one that encompasses all the forces of revolution as reason, and philosophy as a force of revolution. Second negation, the negation of the negation which allows the positive in the negative to emerge, is the heart of the Hegelian dialectic. It is that which Marx recreated as the philosophy of revolution in permanence. Marxist-Humanism makes a category of the dual rhythm of revolution, the destruction of the old and the creation of the new society. That is the unique understanding of revolution in permanence developed by Dunayevskaya on the basis of the new moments of Marx's last decade. To bring all of this into today's battle of ideas remains the main point not only of Crossroads of History but of the forthcoming collection of Dunayevskaya's writings on Karl Marx.

B. Egypt

Two years after Egypt's revolution overthrew Hosni Mubarak, fierce battles continue. Jan. 25, the second anniversary of the Day of Revolt when Cairo's Tahrir Square was first occupied, was the occasion for protests across Egypt, and renewed calls for a "second revolution." The following day, Port Said rose up after a court sentenced 21 defendants to death for a 2012 soccer riot. In addition to doubting some defendants' guilt in an event thought to have been orchestrated by the military, citizens compared the death sentences to the impunity of police, soldiers and officials responsible for lethal repression aimed at the revolutionaries of 2011 and protesters and strikers over the past two years. By Jan. 27, 40 people had been killed in clashes with police and President Mohamed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood government had lost control of the city.

The protests quickly voiced calls to bring down Morsi and the Brotherhood, and even a declaration of "the Republic of Port Said" as a repudiation of the incompleteness of the revolution. Workers, students, shop owners and even police officers joined in strikes and protest marches. Unrest spread to cities including Muhalla and Mansoura, with highway and railway blockades and campaigns to stop paying utility bills.

A nationwide wave of strikes and industrial actions broke out, advancing both political and economic demands. For 16 days in February 1,200 striking temporary workers shut down shipping--except for basic foodstuffs and tourism--at the port of Ain Sokhna, sleeping each night in empty shipping containers until they won their demand for permanent jobs. In the same town another 100-200 workers held their seventh sit-in in March, halting construction of a power plant, with a similar demand for full-time contracts.

In Alexandria 450 workers occupied the Portland Cement Factory in February to demand full-time contracts and payment of overdue bonuses, until the paramilitary Central Security Forces stormed the plant, attacking the workers with police dogs. One month later, 18 of the strikers were still being detained.

Egyptian workers have never considered the revolution finished, holding more than 3,000 strikes or demonstrations over wages, working conditions and political demands since Mubarak's overthrow. More than 600 workers have been fired for union activities, with five independent union leaders sentenced to three-year prison terms for leading a strike at Alexandria Port Containers Co. But repression could not stop the class struggles from below, even though the new Islamist-written constitution treats strikes as criminal, calling them "aggression against the right to work." Morsi's replacement of over half the executive board of the state-sanctioned Egyptian Trade Union Federation with Brotherhood members only highlighted its division from the 1,000 independent unions that have sprung up in recent years.

After Morsi claimed extraordinary powers last November in the process of pushing through the new constitution, protests started targeting Muslim Brotherhood offices. On March 22, at least six offices were attacked in different cities. Protesters chanted "Revolution renewed," as well as 2011 Tahrir Square slogans such as "bread, freedom and social justice" from Muhalla to Cairo, where residents again formed neighborhood self-defense committees like those created in January 2011. They blocked dozens of buses transporting members of the Brotherhood from entering the area.

The deep contradictions within the opposition to the Brotherhood are seen in the fact that, at the very time the neighborhood committees, important forms of working-class self-organization from below, were revived, many protesters in Cairo, Alexandria and Port Said were calling for the military to oust Morsi and retake power. When activists are still fighting to ban military trials of civilians and to free those jailed by military tribunals, when the military's attempt to halt the revolution and its repression of strikes and protests are still fresh in the memory, such a call is a dramatic sign of the impasse at which the revolution has arrived.

Here the void in philosophy makes itself felt. Organizations of the Left, whether Marxists or the April 6 Youth Movement, allowed themselves to be reduced to choosing between tailending the military, the Brotherhood, or the pro-capitalist liberal opposition parties--just at the time when self-organization from below is resurfacing.

The neighborhood self-defense committees, the idealism of youth self-organizing their occupation of Tahrir Square, the workers' strikes organized in opposition to both bosses and state-recognized unions, the women defying sexism to exert self-activity in strikes and occupations and fight sexual harassment: these were and are beginnings--beginnings only, it is true, needing to be developed--toward the masses building the capacity to take power in their own hands, smash the rulers' state power, and break down capitalism, imperialism and sexism. But lack of confidence in the Idea of freedom goes hand in hand with lack of confidence in the masses' capacity to revolutionize society.

The group Revolutionary Socialists exemplified this problem when they advocated voting for Morsi as the lesser evil in last year's presidential election. Despite wishful thinking that the Brotherhood would be swayed by pressure from below to be revolutionary instead of counter-revolutionary, the fundamental reason for their opportunistic positions is their belief in the backwardness of the masses. The masses are not "ready" for socialist revolution, but "our position is always to be 'wherever the masses are.'" Even if they imagine that to be behind a reactionary movement that attacks the most advanced struggles of women, workers and youth!

In truth, while Left groups fail to make a category of just those struggles and the forms of organization arising from them, and instead blur the divide between revolution and counter-revolution, the masses of countries from Tunisia to Egypt, Syria to Yemen, are determined not to allow a repeat of the political Islamists' hijacking of the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

The concrete history of that revolution, philosophically comprehended, can shine a light on the current predicament, which is not unique to Egypt. The practicality of philosophy, as concretely worked out in confrontation with decades of revolution and counter-revolution in the Middle East, is the reason News and Letters Committees has just published Crossroads of History: Marxist-Humanist Writings on the Middle East by Raya Dunayevskaya.

"Iran: Unfoldment of, and Contradictions in, Revolution" (chapter 8 of the book) begins with the many new kinds of spontaneous organization taking on the form of a dual government and the mass outpouring of women that began on International Women's Day, 1979. But the Left in Iran and internationally largely advocated "critical support" for Khomeini as "anti-imperialist" and therefore downplayed or even opposed the women's fight for freedom. This once again exposed the narrowness of their vision of the future, which is at the same time a lack of theoretical preparation for revolution:

"Under these cir­cumstances of ever new forces of revolution, for male revolutionaries to disregard how total the revolution must be if it is to uproot the exploit­ative, racist, sexist society, and once again try to subordinate women's struggles as a 'mere part of the whole' (as if the whole can be without its parts), is to play into the hands of the reac­tionaries, be that the 'secular' Bazargan government or the Ayatollah Khomeini who is trying to 'institutionalize' his Is­lamic 'revolution,' that is to say, confine it to where he can steal the fruit of the revolution--freedom--and leave the mass­es who made it at the bottom, as in any and all class societies....

"Unfortunately, Khomeini still remains very nearly unchallenged, that is, seriously un­challenged....And unfor­tunately the Left, too, had unfurled no new banner of freedom, and some are willing to settle for much, much less: being part of State Administration, that is, part of the new ruling bureau­cracy, while shouting 'anti-imperialism.'

"...we must not permit the indigenous Iranian counter-revolution to hide under the slogan of anti-imperialism, as some in the Left are trying to do by branding not only U.S. imperialism but Kate Millett and, indeed, the whole women's revolutionary movement as if they are 'agents of imperialism.' Nothing could assure the victory of the counter-revolution more than that kind of 'anti-imperi­alism.'...The great weakness of the movement now, and not only in Iran, is the lack of theory, a theory stemming from a philosophy of total liberation such as is Marx's Humanism."

Soon, the dialectic of events called forth the remarkable piece "Not So Random Thoughts on: What Is Philosophy? What Is Revolution? 1789-1793; 1848-1850; 1914-1919; 1979" (chapter 10). It begins with Hegel responding to the French Revolution by elaborating the power of the Idea as "second negativity," and how Marx worked that out in theory and practice as revolution in permanence. Marx's insistence on the need for a total uprooting and for showing not only what we are against but what we are for was rooted in his recognition of "the dialectic of negativity as the moving and creating principle."

In the wake of the betrayal and collapse of the socialist Second International when World War I broke out, Lenin felt compelled to reorganize his method of thinking by returning to Marx's roots in Hegel. This turned out to be the indispensable preparation for revolution in Russia 1917, at which time his dialectical view of revolution/counter-revolution allowed him not to fall for "critical support" of the revolutionary government.

It is on this basis that Dunayevskaya analyzed the way the pseudo-revolutionary seizure of hostages at the U.S. embassy in Iran diverted attention from the completion of Khomeini's counter-revolutionary "Islamic Republic" constitution. [9]

So today it is not only a question of recognizing Egypt's new constitution as counter-revolutionary; it is not only a question of recognizing that calls for a new Constituent Assembly to replace that constitution are a diversion from the self-activity of the masses, which is the only force that can create a second revolution that could lead to "all power in the hands of the masses, their forms of organization, their control of produc­tion and the state, their smashing of the bourgeois state." It is a question of releasing the power of philosophy, of revolutionaries engaging in theoretical preparation for revolution and no longer allowing the separation of organization and a philosophy of liberation, and thereby working out a new relationship of theory to practice on the way to the establishment of new human relations. [10]

Today that entails not only returning to Hegel and Marx, and comprehending the history of revolutions from their time through the Russian to the Iranian, but returning to the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism, rooted in that history of thought and actuality and at the same time developing a new philosophical breakthrough for our era. Therefore this year we return to the philosophic moment of Marxist-Humanism, its birth in Dunayevskaya's 1953 Letters on Hegel's Absolutes, for purposes of releasing the missing link of philosophy. (See "On the 60th anniversary of Dunayevskaya's Philosophic Letters: Hegel's Absolute Idea is for workers".) That philosophic moment made a category of the movement from practice to theory that is itself a form of theory, which posed a new relationship of theory and practice; and in embryo it posed the dialectics of organization and philosophy. Our central organizational task this year is to project and develop these ideas in concrete intervention into the ongoing revolutions and social movements as well as into the battle of ideas. All other tasks, from expanding our revolutionary journalism to organizational growth, flow from this task and serve as tests of how we carry it out.

What can help us is to recognize this year's other important anniversaries as not accidents of the calendar but the process of the self-determination of the idea. As our Constitution states, because the Marxist-Humanist trilogy of revolution, Marxism and Freedom, Philosophy and Revolution, and Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution "are rooted in and parallel the movement from practice to theory of our age with our own theoretical development since our birth, they are the theoretical foundations for the Marxist-Humanist organization, News and Letters Committees. However, they are not a 'program.' They are a contribution to the theoretical preparation for revolution without which no revolutionary organization or grouping can match the challenge of our era." [11]

It adds that American Civilization on Trial, completed 50 years ago, concretizes that body of ideas on the American scene and for the Black dimension.

Philosophy and Revolution, published 40 years ago this year, developed Marxist-Humanism's original contribution as Absolute Idea as New Beginning, which our Constitution relates to "the need of integrality also of philosophy and organization. As against 'the party to lead' concept, such integrality of dialectics and organization reflects the revolutionary maturity of the age and its passion for a philosophy of liberation."

Part of projecting and providing an entry into this body of ideas is completing the publication of our forthcoming book of selected writings by Raya Dunayevskaya on Karl Marx, which will help show how needed for today is his philosophy of revolution in permanence.

Philosophy as missing link means not just philosophy in general but dialectical philosophy of revolution. That means Marx's new continent of thought, which Marxist-Humanism comprehends as revolving around revolution in permanence. In our age the question of "what happens after the revolution" moved from the realm of theory to that of staving off counter-revolution, making the vision of a new society a weapon in that concrete struggle. Negation of the negation as self-determination of the idea of freedom is a material force, needed to make the new society real.

Just as failure to listen to the voices from below blocks the development of theory and philosophy, the philosophic void prevents would-be revolutionaries from hearing the voices from below. Working out the needed historically grounded philosophy of liberation and working out a new, Marxist-Humanist relationship between theory and practice are not two tasks, but one and the same. The urgency of the task is underscored by the multiplicity of the crises and the simultaneity of revolution and counter-revolution. The aim remains the total uprooting of this racist, sexist, heterosexist, capitalist order and the creation of a new society on truly human foundations.

____________

Notes:

1. Martin Ford, The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future (W. Sheridan, 2009), p. 237.

2. "Report: Foxconn Boss Compares His Workforce to Animals," by Damon Poeter, PC Magazine, Jan. 19, 2012.

3. "Dawn of the Digital Sweatshop," by Ellen Cushing, Aug. 1, 2012, East Bay Express, http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/dawn-of-the-digital-sweatshop/Content?oid=3301022.

4. See "Marx to Market," by Peter Coy, Business Week, Sept. 14, 2011; "Karl Marx Explains the Problem with the Apple, Google No Poaching Conspiracy Allegations," by Tim Worstall, on forbes.com, April 6, 2013; "Marx's Revenge: How Class Struggle Is Shaping the World," Time, March 25, 2013, which held, "Marx's biting critique of capitalism—that the system is inherently unjust and self-destructive—cannot be so easily dismissed....the workers of the world may just unite. Marx may yet have his revenge."

5. "How Much Will Tar Sands Oil Add to Global Warming?" by David Biello, Jan. 23, 2013, Scientific American.

6. See http://www.carbontracker.org/carbonbubble; http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/English.pdf.

7. Read the whole statement at http://www.redd-monitor.org/2012/06/19/no-redd-in-rio-20-a-declaration-to-decolonize-the-earth-and-the-sky/.

8. http://ww4report.com/node/11197. For more on these struggles see https://nacla.org/blog/2012/12/13/bolivia-end-road-tipnis-consulta, http://intercontinentalcry.org/venezuela-despite-overwhelming-problems-in-sierra-de-perija-the-yukpa-remain-hopeful/, http://intercontinentalcry.org/stand-with-the-shuar-oppose-the-mirador-mine-in-the-headwaters-of-the-river-amazon/.

9. Crossroads of History, p. 81.

10. Crossroads of History, p. 69.

11. See the Constitution of News and Letters Committees, available through the literature listing, and online at http://newsandletters.org/Constitution.htm.

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