On September 11 (see below), I posted the following comment on a piece by Kevin Anderson published on his group’s website.

One important obstacle to dialectical thought is the practice of throwing around unsubstantiated and false charges. For instance, allegations like this:

“the attempt to ground a viable Marxist-Humanist organization in an ever-narrower set of formalistic rules about organizational structure that crowds out the philosophical-political grounding necessary to any serious Marxist organization.”

I’m reminded of Hegel’s comment that “I have been only too often and too vehemently attacked by opponents who were incapable of making the simple reflection that their opinions and objections contain categories which are presuppositions and which themselves need to be criticized first before they are employed.”

Presuppositions like the “crowding out” bit–as if it were self-evident that Marxist-Humanist philosophy and Marxist-Humanist organization are, and must always remain, opposites that jockey for position and crowd one another out!

And presuppositions like the “attempt to ground” garbage. You know damned well that Marxist-Humanist Initiative (which you’re attacking but refraining from saying so) is attempting “to create an organization so firmly rooted in its philosophy that it will not succumb to diversions that may arise from personal agendas, and that will be capable of developing and concretizing that philosophy over the long haul, regardless of who its members may be.” [www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org, home page]

There’s a HUGE difference–a veritable Grand Canyon–between that and an alleged “attempt to ground a viable Marxist-Humanist organization in an ever-narrower set of formalistic rules about organizational structure that crowds out the philosophical-political grounding”

Now it is true that, to support his false allegation, Anderson refers us to Peter Hudis’ attack on Marxist-Humanist Initiative. But the problem is that Hudis falsely represents MHI’s position on the relationship of philosophy to organization, as has been demonstrated in detail in “Hudis Falsely Represents MHI Position on Relationship of Philosophy to Organization” [www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/philosophyorganization/hudis-falsely-represents-mhi-position-on-relationship-of-philosophy-to-organization].

Six months have passed since this document was published. Its disproof of Hudis’ false allegations has not been challenged. That’s because the disproof cannot be challenged.

Truth is good. Falsehood is bad.

For some reason, his group’s website has not (yet) published the comment.

The reason can’t be that the comment is critical. The website does publish critical comments. For instance, one comment on his piece contains the following statement: “your marxist humanism must turn into stalinism.” That’s a good deal more critical than what I wrote. So there has to be another reason why my comment hasn’t (yet) been published. Maybe the truth hurts?

[Note, added on Oct. 2, 2010: I've been asked to explain the picture below. It's a screenshot that I took when I submitted my reply, in order to be able to provide evidence that I did submit it. You can see, above it, another comment on Anderson's piece that was published and does appear below it on the site. (When you submit a comment to their site, it appears on your screen just as if it were published, but other people can't see it unless and until the powers that be approve it, and they haven't approved mine.)]

]]> http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/philosophy-organization/reply-to-kevin-anderson.html/feed 0 http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/philosophy-organization/what-is-marxist-humanist-internationalism-draft-dont-publish.html http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/philosophy-organization/what-is-marxist-humanist-internationalism-draft-dont-publish.html#comments Mon, 13 Sep 2010 05:00:30 +0000 MHI http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/philosophy-organization/what-is-marxist-humanist-internationalism-draft-dont-publish.html What is Marxist-Humanist internationalism? Although a full answer requires a much longer analysis than this piece, the question provides a useful context for evaluating some recent events. So we ask here whether internationalism means (1) establishing an organization with the word “international” in its name, like the International Marxist-Humanist Organization (IMHO) that insists on excluding Marxist-Humanist Initiative (MHI) even though we share its philosophic principles, or whether it means (2) contributing to a world-wide development of Marx’s humanist philosophy of revolution by analyzing capitalism at this historic moment of crisis. We counterpose these two concepts of internationalism in light of the recent practice of organizations calling themselves Marxist-Humanist: on one hand, IMHO’s refusal to recognize the propriety of MHI’s joining with it, and on the other, MHI’s own unique practice of Marxist-Humanist internationalism which focuses on (2) above.

I. IMHO admits it excludes MHI for a reason contrary to its own stated principles.

When IMHO was established earlier this year, it published Principles and invited all who agreed with them to join with it in the new organization. Yet when MHI responded that it was doing so, IMHO  rejected our participation even though we share its philosophic principles, as it well knows (its principles have much in common with our own, both deriving from the years in which our members worked together). Since our earlier report about this matter, MHI has received a second letter from IMHO, again rejecting our participation. What is interesting about the second letter is its outright admission of IMHO’s reason for rejecting MHI: it admits that its action is based not on any principled, philosophic differences, but on our public objection to Peter Hudis’ untrue characterizations of us in an earlier public writing of his. Here is what IMHO wrote in its second letter rejecting MHI’s participation (sent June 18):

“In response to your disingenuous statement of June 6 2010 that you haven’t attacked the IMHO, we would point out that your article of March 19 2010 (‘Hudis Falsely Represents MHI Position on Relationship of Philosophy to Organization’) attacks an IMHO members [sic] who is who is [sic] helping to organise the [IMHO] conference and who serves on the steering committee of the USMH [US Marxist-Humanists] – the body that initiated the conference call in the first place.”

Apparently, IMHO has collapsed itself into Peter Hudis! How else can it claim that our setting the record straight about what this one person wrote about us, in his own name and months before the existence of IMHO, is now equivalent to an attack on IMHO? How bizarre that our setting the record straight on Hudis’ statement is even called an “attack” on Hudis, when it is a factual refutation of his untrue description of us.

Since our only statement about IMHO is our June 1 statement that announced our full agreement with IMHO’s principles and our decision to join with it, this is surely a false and unprincipled reason for excluding us–unless IMHO is really unable to distinguish between itself and Hudis, that is, if it is in fact a clique centered around one person rather than an organization centered around the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism. Dislike of our response to Hudis’ criticism of us is not a legitimate reason for excluding a group which shares IMHO’s principles.¹ Surely this is a bureaucratic maneuver to exclude MHI from IMHO for personal or competitive reasons, or even worse, to protect and maintain a clique if not outright cult of personality around Hudis.

In spite of our having been excluded from the formation of IMHO, we said only good things about its Principles. And we attempted to join with it, as the statement invited all who agreed to do. We must continue to insist that we have joined with IMHO, because we cannot allow USMH and IMHO to claim a monopoly on the principles we share. That could mislead people into thinking that MHI’s philosophy is not Marxist-Humanist. So we join with IMHO even though we remain unrecognized and relegated to a special, lowly class of members, lacking the right to participate in any of its functions–contrary to all principles of Marxist-Humanist organization.

By their refusal to recognize our existence and right to join with IMHO, our former comrades boxed themselves into having to admit outright their real reason for excluding us, which is an illegitimate one. Their June letter is an admission that they simply eschew principle when it comes to their wish for exclusive control. This is cliquish behavior, just like the clique that took over News and Letters Committees three years ago and pushed out half the members (see “Why a New Organization?”). There is a lesson in this sad repetition of principle-jettisoning when one’s clique’s control is threatened: those who refuse to examine history more deeply than by repeating “News and Letters lacked an understanding of philosophy,” are bound to succumb to the pull of the same bad practices that infected News and Letters.

IMHO/USMH have made clear that they don’t want us to participate because we spoke up to correct Hudis’ gross public misrepresentations of us in our article “Hudis Falsely Represents MHI Position on Relationship of Philosophy to Revolution,” which also calls for cooperation among Marxist-Humanists. In addition to the fact that our document has nothing to do with IMHO and is not an “attack” on anyone, one wonders: Is it IMHO’s policy to expel anyone who says anything critical about another member, or just anything critical of its leaders? We hope that this policy appears in the rules that IMHO said it was going to produce at its recent conference, the one we were excluded from. The public has yet to see any information about IMHO’s structure or rules. What about the case in which one person or group has told falsehoods about another? Apparently, IMHO is unconcerned with truth, honesty, and proper debating tactics.

We believe in rational argument, not attacks, and we have refrained from saying publicly (or, for that matter, privately) anything about Hudis’ organizations or their members which is not political, philosophical, and/or organizational–and true. We value honesty and openness, and condemn lies and gossip. But USMH cannot say the same. In addition to Hudis’ essay perpetuating lies about us, as “Hudis Falsely” details, USMH and IMHO’s public statements criticizing unspecified organizations in the abstract are clearly aimed at us. How else to explain critiques that seem to come out of nowhere and seem absurd? For only one example: IMHO’s call for a conference says, seemingly gratuitously, in its third sentence, that Marxist-Humanism is not “a mere set of organizational statutes and rules that guards against the threat of bureaucratic practices,” followed, in a dizzying juxtaposition, by a statement that it is instead “a philosophy of liberation.” Of course that statement is true, but no one ever said anything to the contrary! It is obviously meant to imply that MHI thinks Marxist-Humanism is “a mere set of organizational statutes…”  In truth, our Principles and By-Laws stress the integrality of philosophy and organization, and they do not even mention bureaucratic practices. IMHO’s silly juxtaposition is undoubtedly part of USMH’s attempts to claim that we are somehow less “philosophical” than they are because we created a new structure and conduct ourselves in accordance with rules.

A pattern of behavior has emerged in which Hudis and USMH apparently think they can state any lie at all as long as it doesn’t actually name us, even if it is clear to anyone familiar with our shared history and current organizations that it means to defame us. They seem to think this is a proper standard of behavior, but it is not. We suggest that IMHO be honest enough to recognize that USMH has been on a campaign to discredit MHI. Perhaps USMH is still trying to justify the fact that its future members broke up the interim organization to which we all belonged in March 2009, without any notice to or consultation with our future members, and that they refused to consider an umbrella organization when we raised the idea then, and that USMH has not had one word to say to us since it pre-arranged that vote, and it has done its utmost to exclude us from IMHO and to alienate our mutual friends from us.

Anyone can start an “international” organization (or pancake restaurant) by declaring it to be international. Now apparently not only News and Letters, but other organizations that call themselves Marxist-Humanist, violate essential principles of Marxist-Humanism by operating though bureaucratic edicts or cults of personality. The proofs of internationalism and of Marxist-Humanism lie not in an organization’s name, but in the content of that organization’s practice.

2.  MHI practices internationalism by engaging in international cooperation to develop theory that can help transcend capitalism.

Although MHI doesn’t have the word “international” in our name, our organization is open to international members and supporters. Today, it is possible to actually have an organization without borders–just as the working class has no borders–and that is our orientation. More important than one’s name or location, we believe, is the content of one’s organizational practice. In our view, there exists a Marxist-Humanist form of practice of internationalism, and it does not consist of signing up old friends overseas to merge with a particular U.S. group. Rather, it consists of contributing theoretically to the development of Marxist-Humanist philosophy in light of objective events internationally and in partnership with people around the world who also see Marx’s theory as a force for revolution.

MHI is internationalist in the Marxist tradition because we are engaged internationally in sharing and deepening Marxist-Humanist ideas pertinent to this period of world economic crisis. Recent visits to England, France, and Argentina, as well as international correspondence and conferences, have revealed an interest outside the U.S. in the recovery of Marx’s Marxism and the development of its meaning for today, and, specifically, an appreciation for the theoretical and empirical work that MHI has produced to date.

MHI’s analyses of the crisis are being discussed internationally and are becoming rallying points for those who oppose current popular Left analyses that lead away from Marx and revolutionary change. Works published on our website and in print² are finding audiences and discussants overseas among those who see the failings of the popular Left idea that this is an irreducibly financial crisis. Some actual Marxists do remain in the world, and they are happy to find our work: people who reject the notion that the latest crisis is a crisis of “neoliberalism/financialized capitalism” instead of a crisis of capitalism, and who reject the politics that flow from this (or create it). They are joining us in discussing and spreading what we have presented in order to elaborate Marx’s concept of crisis for today.

Such work is the practice of dialectics. It consists of digging into the essence and functioning of capitalism in order to understand what must be uprooted and transcended. We need to understand capitalism before we can envision with any concreteness a social transformation in which capitalism will be replaced with a mode of production planned and run by freely associated workers. We believe that this practice, and not factional maneuvering dressed up as “internationalism,” is what the world needs from an organization claiming a Marxist-Humanist philosophy.

Our model is the work of Raya Dunayevskaya, who analyzed 20th century events–the transformation of the Russian Revolution into state-capitalism; the Third World national revolutions that, once in power, chose the capitalist road over relying on their own resource of “human power”; Mao’s substitution of voluntarism for workers’ and peasants’ self-development in China. All were compared and contrasted by her to Marx’s categories of capitalism and to what its abolition would mean. Her theory zoomed in on, and revealed the economic relations at the heart of, all seemingly political positions. In this tradition, we are looking at the actual fall in the rate of profit underlying the current crisis (see “The Persistent Fall in Profitability Underlying the Current Crisis”) in order to discern its implications for capitalism’s transcendence.

Inextricably related to understanding this moment of capitalism is the problematic of what has to be changed in order to break with it and begin a new society based on a new mode of production. MHI is not merely talking about this question as needing to be theorized; rather, we have taken the plunge into beginning to work out some of the questions involved. We have presented some ideas in our public talks this year, most recently presentations in London on “What must be changed in order to transcend capitalism?”

We are engaged in this work not to vindicate Marx or ourselves, but to give Marx’s Marxism a chance to flourish and become a “force for revolution,” as Raya Dunayevskaya called the power of ideas. Only an actual revolution in the mode of production will give the world a chance to create a truly socialist society. This cannot come about if we stop at analyzing the phenomena of capitalism without working out how it generates its own destruction and lays the ground for releasing a new mode of production that entails and engenders new human relations.

IMHO’s practices are insufficient to meet the challenge of the times because its principles remain abstract (in addition to being controverted by its practice). A truly international Marxist-Humanist organization cannot be declared successful when, like IMHO, it is a mere organizational regroupment. A truly international Marxist-Humanist organization only begins to succeed if it engages in the process of developing an international, concrete dialogue that actually begins to develop answers to the vital problematics of today and tomorrow.

Put in terms of dialectical philosophy, the hollowness of IMHO’s declarations of “success” in articles about its recent conference, is described by this passage in Hegel’s Science of Logic:

“The impatience that insists merely on getting beyond the determinate–whether called beginning, object, the finite, or in whatever other form it be taken–and finding itself immediately in the absolute, has before it as cognition nothing but the empty negative, the abstract infinite; in other words, a presumed absolute that is presumed because it is not posited, not grasped; grasped it can only be through the mediation of cognition, of which the universal and immediate is a moment, but the truth itself resides only in the extended course of the process and in the conclusion.” (A.V. Miller translation, Humanities Paperback edition, pp. 841-842)

IMHO presents itself as being “immediately in the absolute,” when the “international” in its name is merely an “empty negative” of “national.” Declaring oneself international is hardly original and does nothing to work out the dialectic of Marxism needed in these times. Restoring and developing Marx and Dunayevskaya’s Marxism is still the task that remains to be done.

Marxist-Humanist Initiative

September 12, 2010

____________________________________

1. Also illegitimate is the letter’s reference to us as “a group which has declared both the USMH and LCC [London Corresponding Committee] as its ‘enemies’.” This fabrication is apparently a reference to a letter we wrote to the LCC’s publication, The Hobgoblin, in which we complained that it had made itself our enemy by publishing only Hudis’ misrepresentations of us and not answering any of our many letters asking it to publish our response. We never “declared” anyone our enemy–we never even mentioned USMH or IMHO. IMHO’s letter to us gets backwards who has made whom into an enemy; its exclusion of us from participation in its organization is the best evidence of that.

2. Including, among others, “Appearance and Essence: Neoliberalism, Financialization, and the Underlying Crisis of Capitalist Production” and “The Persistent Fall in Profitability Underlying the Current Crisis: New Temporalist Evidence.”

On June 6, we received this e-mail message signed “The International Marxist-Humanist Organisation”:

Dear MHI,

We wish to inform that you are not members of the IMHO. Nobody becomes a member of an organisation just by declaring themselves a member. The IMHO is not a regroupment initiative; nor is it an attempt to rebuild links with people who have proven that they are incapable of behaving in a comradely manner, as seen in the MHI’s recent public attack on us.

While anyone is welcome to attend our July 2 public forum on the centenary of Dunayevskaya’s birth, any effort to force one’s way into our conference the next day without a invitation would be an aggressive infringement on our democratic right to assemble and function as an organization.

—The International Marxist-Humanist Organisation

Needless to say, we were quite dismayed by this message, and responded on June 9:

Dear International Marxist-Humanist Organisation,

You write that we “are incapable of behaving in a comradely manner, as seen in the MHI’s recent public attack on us.” We are quite perplexed by this statement. The only thing we’ve written about IMHO is our public statement of last week, which announces our joining with it. The statement doesn’t attack IMHO, or even criticize it. It highly praises IMHO.

You write, “Nobody becomes a member of an organisation just by declaring themselves a member.” True, but one can join with an effort by being invited to do so and accepting the invitation. That’s what we’ve done.

All who agree with IMHO’s statement of principles have been invited to join with it, and your invitation isn’t accompanied by any other conditions. So, if we were to refrain from joining with IMHO, the impression would be created that we do not agree with these principles. We cannot allow that to happen. We cannot allow the particular groups within IMHO that refuse to cooperate with MHI to monopolize the principles shared by MHI and IMHO.

The unsupported hypothesis that we intend to crash the conference, by force no less!, is baseless and false. Having joined with IMHO, we wish to participate in the normal fashion.

We look forward to an honest discussion of the above issues.

Comradely regards, Marxist-Humanist Initiative

At this time, we have received no direct response to our June 9 e-mail. On June 10, the U.S. Marxist-Humanists published on the homepage of their website a single line “Clarification,” attributed to the “International Marxist-Humanist Organization”: “Despite some recent claims to the contrary, we are not affilitated [sic] with the New York-based Marxist-Humanist Initiative.”

Again, as stated in our June 9 e-mail, those who agree with IMHO’s statement of principles were invited to join with it. If we were to refrain from joining with IMHO, the impression would be created that we do not agree with these principles. Moreover, we cannot allow the particular groups within IMHO that refuse to cooperate with MHI to monopolize the principles shared by MHI and IMHO. And, again, we call for an honest discussion of the issues.

The future of Marxist-Humanism is by no means assured. Forging the broadest unity possible among people and groups that have expressed agreement with some basic Marxist-Humanist principles is therefore urgently important. As part of our continuing effort to achieve this goal, we intend to provide an analysis of, and fuller response to, the latest turn of events in the near future.

Executive Committee of Marxist-Humanist Initiative

In a April 18, 1976 piece, “Our Original Contribution to the Dialectic of the Absolute Idea as New Beginning:  In Theory, and Leadership, and Practice,” Dunayevskaya stated,

[A]t the height of Capital, we see [Marx] breaking up the Absolute Idea by speaking about the general absolute law of capitalist accumulation.  But its opposite was always taken to be only the unemployed army – and not the absolutely, totally opposite which we take it to be now.  Marx only mentioned it as ‘the new passions and new forces for the reconstruction of society.’  The negation of the negation at that point certainly wasn’t spelled out.

What I think Dunayevskaya’s original contribution was – what she made explicit that was only implicit in Marx – is her philosophic moment of 1953.  The revolutionary development of the working class is impelled by the logic of capital.  That’s the process of capitalist accumulation.  It has an Absolute: accumulated capital at one poll, misery and unemployment at the other.  There’s a diremption; we cannot go further.  To transcend this absolute opposition, we need a new beginning.  To have a new society, we can’t rest on the dialectic generated by capital.  There needs to be a second moment of negativity, one that doesn’t arise spontaneously from the logic of capital, but is self-liberation.  This second moment of negativity is rooted in a passion to reconstruct society on new beginnings, not just in the oppressiveness of capitalism.

Dunayevskaya is singling out the subjectivity of self-liberation, which Marx’s discussion of the negation of the negation only intimated.  It is at this point that Logic is “thrown out”; it gives way to a new relation of theory to practice.  There’s a new dialectic in which the movement toward freedom is not driven by the logic of oppressive capital; the movements from theory and practice now develop through one another.  This intermerging of theory and practice does not come spontaneously – this is Dunayevskaya’s original contribution – they must freely self-develop together.

To begin to flesh out the textual basis of the above interpretation, I offer the following comments:

(1) I believe that the “Our Original Contribution” text is, in part, a return to and elaboration of pp. 92-94 of Dunayevskaya’s Philosophy and Revolution, which also discusses the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation (AGLCA) in Marx’s Capital, the negation of the negation, and “new passions and new forces.”  It is an extremely important passage, in my opinion. Dunayevskaya refers to the accumulation of capital vs. misery and unemployment as a “diremption – absolute, irreconcilable contradiction[ ]” in the first paragraph on p. 93.  This is the basis of my comment that the AGLCA is “a diremption; we cannot go further.  To transcend this absolute opposition, we need a new beginning.”  In the next paragraph on p. 93, Dunayevskaya writes, “‘The negation of the negation’ allows in but the faintest glimmer of the new, ‘new passions and new forces’ for the reconstructing of society, but no blueprints of the future there.” It seems to me that this is another way of saying that “new forces and new passions” is only implicit in Marx’s discussion of “negation of the negation,” though other interpretations are perhaps also plausible.

(2) “[T]he absolute general law of capitalist accumulation” (AGLCA) is stated on p. 798 of Capital, Vol. I (Penguin/Vintage editions.), near the end of section 4 of Chapter 25, though the chapter as a whole is also called “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.”  To understand the importance of “absolute” here, it is helpful to read the whole chapter, and see how frequently the laws of capitalist development that Marx identifies here are not absolute, but “relative.”  Part of what is involved in this distinction, I believe, is that much of the trajectory of capitalist development depends upon (is “relative” to) contingent factors, but the growth of the reserve army (and the increasing misery – in a specific sense – of the proletariat (p. 799)) are inevitable (“absolute”) under capitalism.

(3) It is also helpful to read what comes before p. 798, including Chapters 23-24, to get a sense of the AGLCA as the culmination of a process of development.  This will be important to Dunayevskaya’s understanding of “the logic of Capital.”  This is a phrase from Lenin’s Philosophic Notebooks.  He didn’t refer specifically to a real process of development (he was referring to section 3 of Chapter 1 ofCapital, on the “form of value” being modeled on Hegel’s U-P-I (universal-particular-individual)). But in her May 12, 1953 letter on Hegel’s Absolute Idea and thereafter (e.g., Philosophy and Revolution, pp. 93-94), Dunayevskaya interprets “logic of Capital” as a real process, the logic of capital; her words are “the dialectic of bourgeois society.”  Both the May 12, 1953 and the discussions in Philosophy and Revolution compare Lenin’s claim (the “form of value” is based on U-P-I) – to her claim (the AGLCA is based on the Absolute Idea); apparently, Dunayevskaya sees her insight as being rooted in and as a further development of, Lenin’s insight.

(4) Dunayevskaya’s “new passions and new forces” comes from Marx’s phrase “new forces and new passions” in Ch. 32 of Capital, Vol. I (p. 928).  A page and a half later, Marx calls the revolution against capitalism “the negation of the negation,” because capitalism “negates” the individual property of the direct producers, while the revolution will restore their individual property (thus negating the negation), but on a “higher level” (in the Hegelian manner), i.e., as common property.  Dunayevskayavery audaciously reads the reference to “new forces and new passions” as part of the process of “the negation of the negation.”  This is very audacious not only because they are a page and a half apart, but also because Marx’s “new forces and new passions” is a reference to the bourgeoisie and their greed!  (See “the most infamous, the most sordid, … of passions” later in the paragraph on p. 928.)  Marx is referring to the so-called “primitive accumulation” he has been discussing in Chapters 26-31, the bourgeois expropriation of the direct producers (small, independent peasants) that gave rise to capitalism.  The connection of this to the negation of the negation is indeed very implicit!

(5) But there is some textual warrant for Dunayevskaya’s interpretation, and her point, if I understand it, is brilliant. Marx writes (p. 928) that “new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society, forces and passions which feel themselves to be fettered by that society.  It has to be annihilated; it is annihilated.”  If I understand Dunayevskaya’s point, it consists of two things.

• What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.  If Marx understood that revolution involves new forces and passions, why should we limit that recognition to the immediate context (the capitalist revolution against the free peasants)?  What is to prevent it from being part of the revolutionary process “as such”?  Why should it not apply equally to the revolution againstcapitalism, the negation of the negation?
• More importantly, Marx’s “feel themselves to be fettered …. It has to be annihilated” is a recognition that material conditions in the narrow sense are not the sole driving force of the revolutionary process (I say “narrow sense” because, in the previous sentence, Marx refers to the new forces and passions as the “material means of … destruction” of the old society).  Dunayevskaya undoubtedly saw in this passage not only the drive to be free (unfettered), and not only the subjectivity (feeling) involved in the process of liberation, but the anticipation of the new (in the case of the bourgeoisie, they were salivating after the money they could make in the new society!).  The reason I say this is that when she referred to “new passions and new forces,” she regularly defined this more precisely as “‘new passions and new forces’ for the reconstructing of society” (Philosophy and Revolution, p. 93), or some similar expression.

(6) There is a whole lot involved in this.  I’ll just single out one thing.  The standard post-Marx Marxist understandings of the revolutionary process were either vanguardist/voluntarist – the vanguard party, with its advanced consciousness “from outside,” was the driving force behind the revolutionary development of the masses – or fatalistic and spontaneist – the process of capitalist development creates its own gravediggers automatically, spontaneously, with the inevitability of a natural process.  The Johnson-Forest Tendency, of which Dunayevskaya (Forest) was co-leader, had already broken with the former conception a few years before 1953.  In the 1953 letters, I believe, Dunayevskaya was above all breaking philosophically from C.L.R. James’ (Johnson’s) spontaneism.  It is quite important that James continually stressed and stressed again Marx’s phrase “trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production” in the paragraph right before “negation of the negation” on p. 929 of Capital, Vol. I.  Taken by itself, the phrase, and indeed the whole paragraph, can easily be read as suggesting that Marx, too, had a fatalistic and spontaneist conception of the revolutionary process.  What I think Dunayevskaya was saying is that, while the workers are indeed spontaneously revolutionary – this flows automatically from them being “trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production,” and from the AGLCA that continually separates them from the means of making a living and from property, that makes technology an alien power, etc. – this is necessary but not sufficient for there to be a new society.  There also needs to be a positive moment, the creation of the new.  The new society is founded upon the idea of a new society, the passion to reconstruct society on new beginnings, but this is only a beginning. Subjective self-liberation is a process that requires self-development.  In her May 20, 1953 letter on Hegel’s Absolute Mind, Dunayevskaya writes, “Mind itself, the new society, is ‘the mediating agent in the process.’” And this requires a dual movement of theory and practice, in which both sides develop.  I could try to justify this last point through a fairly complex and difficult interpretation of her interpretation of the three final syllogisms of Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind.  In lieu of that, let me just refer now to p. 60 of Dunayevskaya’s Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (emphasis in original):

Luxemburg was absolutely right … that the Marxist movement … “reckons on the organization and the independent, direct action of the masses” …. However, she is not right in holding that, very nearly automatically, it means so total a conception of socialism that a philosophy of Marx’s concept of revolution could likewise be left to spontaneous action.  Far from it.  … in the 1905 Revolution, … spontaneity was absolutely the greatest, but failed to achieve its goal.

Note the linkage of automaticity and spontaneism, the implication that a total conception of socialism is needed for a successful revolution, and the claim that this cannot be left to spontaneity. There needs to be a new relation of theory and practice, a new relation of masses to Marx’s philosophy of revolution. Groups like ours are needed to help the masses acquire the total conception of socialism that they themselves will need in order to have a successful revolution.

There’s a lot more I could say.  For instance, I haven’t even touched on what Dunayevskaya called Hegel’s “throwing out of the Logic” at the end of the Philosophy of Mind, which I think was related, in her view, to the subjectivity of self-liberation, as against the development of the proletariat by means of the logic of capital.  I hope to take this up in a future essay.

The author examines Dunayevskaya’s method of concretizing Marx and suggests that Hegel and Marx together spell out the material, conceptual ground for developing an alternative to capitalism today.

Note: This essay was originally published in the June 2004 issue of News & Letters. It received a virulently negative response from some of those who now lead the remnants of News and Letters Committees. They rejected the perspective that Marxist-Humanism needs to be concretized anew in the face of new realities. Pretending that their abstractions were concrete, they rejected the very idea that Marxist-Humanism needs to be concretized *in theory*–as if events and actions make philosophy concrete by themselves, without the need for theoretical mediation.

Raya Dunayevskaya’s essay, “Marx’s Humanism Today,” published in Erich Fromm’s collection, SOCIALIST HUMANISM: AN INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM (Doubleday, 1965; Anchor Books, 1966) …, was a response to the battles over the humanism of Marx that she faced in 1965. It was not only a summary of her earlier work on this theme, but it intervened in the battle of ideas going on at the time in order to meet the demands of the moment in a concrete way. Taking this method as a challenge to us to be just as concrete when responding to today’s objective situation, I will argue that we face a new situation in 2004, different from that of 1965, and that, if we are to respond concretely, revolutionaries need to begin theorizing an alternative to capitalist society.

SPECIFICITY OF THE 1965 ESSAY

Let us begin by looking at the history leading up to Dunayevskaya’s essay. It came seven years after her groundbreaking book MARXISM AND FREEDOM. A key purpose of that book was to expose the “veritable conspiracy” to hide the humanism of Marx that had prevailed for decades. On the one hand, Marx had been suppressed by official Communism–not only by the Russians, who failed to publish his 1844 HUMANIST ESSAYS, but also by deliberate mistranslations and misinterpretations of his works, including his greatest work, CAPITAL. The suppression was perpetuated not only by the Russian and Chinese governments, but also by fellow-traveling intellectuals all over the world. The Marxist Left had so little interest in Marx’s 1844 ESSAYS, that the first to resurrect them were European Catholics after World War II, who used them in their struggles with the Communist parties for the hearts and minds of the masses.

On the other hand, McCarthyism in the U.S. suppressed Marx by identifying him with existing Communist states. As Dunayevskaya wrote, in MARXISM AND FREEDOM’s introduction, “Today, in the face of the constant struggle of man for full freedom on both sides of the Iron Curtain, there is a veritable conspiracy to identify Marxism, a theory of liberation, with its opposite, Communism, the theory and practice of enslavement.” The book drew a sharp new division in the world. It both exposed “existing Communism” as state-capitalism, and challenged the anti-Stalinist Left to develop Marx’s philosophy of liberation as an alternative pole of attraction.

But the world changed radically between 1958 and 1965. Starting in the 1940s, and up to MARXISM AND FREEDOM’s publication, Dunayevskaya had been virtually the only English-language theorist (except for Herbert Marcuse) to write about Marx’s humanism. His 1844 ESSAYS had not even been published in English until she included two as an appendix to MARXISM AND FREEDOM. But the 1950s witnessed the start of new mass movements that pulled Marx’s humanism out of the archives and onto the world stage. Third World revolutions against colonialism, Eastern European revolts against so-called Communism, and the Black “Freedom Now” movement in the U.S. compelled discussion of Marx’s humanism.

Fromm’s collection was a culmination of this resurgent interest in Marx’s humanism. Widely read and translated into many languages, it contained essays by authors from many countries who had varied concepts of socialism and humanism, including Bertrand Russell and Norman Thomas, as well as Marxists and Marxologists. The breadth of the new discussion compelled Dunayevskaya to sharpen the differences between her thought and those of others.

By 1965, Marx’s humanism had become such a hot topic that even some Communist parties and theorists began to claim they were for it. As Dunayevskaya writes in the 1965 essay, “the Russian Communist line changed….the claim now became that the Soviets were the rightful inheritors of ‘militant humanism.’” A battle raged in and outside the French CP over its purported endorsement of humanism; fellow-traveling intellectuals such as Sartre supported it, while those such as Althusser vigorously attacked it. His READING CAPITAL, which contains a critique of Sartre for his defense of humanism, was also published in 1965.

Far from welcoming this new-found Communist “humanism,” Dunayevskaya recognized it as an attempt to quiet the masses’ interest in genuine Marxism. It was no longer sufficient to reveal the humanism of Marx; she now needed to distinguish it from its misrepresentations and distortions. Her essay sharply separates Marx’s humanism from the Communist version, but she also distinguishes it from liberal interpretations of Marx. By stripping Marx’s humanism of its specificity, she argues, the liberal academics “leave the door wide open” for Russia and China to cloak their exploitative, capitalist character and policies.

In response to this problem, the essay not only warns against leaving Marx’s humanism abstract; it also demonstrates how CAPITAL “signifies Marx’s ‘return’ to his own philosophic humanism…on a more concrete level, which, rather than diminishing Marx’s original humanist concepts, deepens them.” If Marx’s humanism is invoked without specifying its further, concrete development, its enemies can transform it “into an abstract[ion] that would cover up…the need to abolish the conditions preventing ‘realization’ of Marx’s philosophy, i.e., the reunification of mental and manual abilities in the individual.”

WHAT’S NEW TODAY

Following Dunayevskaya’s method of being concrete when responding to the objective situation, let us identify what is new and what is not in 2004, so that we can think through the needed response. I argue that we face a different situation in 2004 from that of 1965, and that, to respond to it concretely, we need to theorize an alternative to capitalism. Today, although there are still “vulgar communists” around who defend statified property as socialism, few argue any longer that Marx rejected his youthful humanism when he became “scientific.” And despite an anti-humanist reaction in parts of the academic Left, the concept of humanism has had a great influence in the world.

Many social movements of the past 40 years have based themselves on humanist ideas that share some aspects of Marx’s, such as the goals of individual freedom and self-development, including the Black liberation movement and the women’s and GLBT movements. So established is “humanism” in the U.S. that liberal intellectuals like the editors of THE NEW YORKER, present the political struggle in the U.S. today as one between Christian fundamentalists and humanists. A hair-raising cartoon by Lee Lorenz in the May 10 issue shows a full-scale military assault on a suburban home with a mild-looking man in the doorway. The caption reads, “2:12 p.m. Aug. 16, 2007. The last secular humanist is flushed from his spider hole.”

But the concept of humanism most often expressed is undeveloped and fuzzy. It is surely a step backward that, in today’s reactionary climate, we are called on to defend secular humanism. Marx’s humanism does not even figure in the battle of ideas, because Marx barely appears. So we are facing a different, perhaps harder job than in the 1960s, when there was widespread discussion about Marxism.

The changed terrain hits you when you read Dunayevskaya’s 1965 essay. It remains a great summary of Marx’s humanism, but the Russian and Chinese Communists against whom she argued are no longer the main enemy. Nor is there much of a Marxist Left to contest the implications of Marx’s humanism. As Dunayevskaya argued, what is crucial for a successful revolution that actually establishes a new, human society, is the re-creation of Marx’s philosophy for our age. But few are working to re-create it today.

Instead, public discussion of Marxism has dwindled to almost none, and most people view thoroughgoing social transformation as so impossible that it is hardly worth discussing. So the 1965 essay certainly does not solve the problems we face. Our job, it seems to me, is not simply to re-publish it. We need also to accompany it with a discussion of what it means to be continuators of Marx’s and Dunayevskaya’s ideas at a historic moment when revolution seems to be off the agenda. I suggest that the first order of business is to show that an alternative to capitalism is indeed possible.

This problem is addressed in News and Letters Committees’ Perspectives for 2003-04, which calls upon revolutionaries to concretize a vision of post-capitalist society. To begin this work, it is necessary to study Marx, for a fuller understanding of his achievements on this. It is crucial to explicate the inner workings of capital, rather than discussing his work at a level so general that people fail to catch the historic specificity of capitalism’s mechanisms. And it is crucial not to read Marx in light of one’s own particular concerns, but rather to draw out of his work the principles that can aid our search for capitalism’s absolute opposite.

If we have correctly identified the challenge facing us today, our task may be harder than ever. That is because Marx gave only brief hints about what a post-capitalist society would be like. To break through his and our own abstractions about it, we need to understand his method of analysis with sufficient precision to get inside the dialectic of CAPITAL and concretize it.

Dunayevskaya’s warning in 1965 against turning Marx’s humanism into an abstraction, and her discussion of the need for “thought to proceed to…concrete truths,” seem to me to be crucial to the perspective of concretizing an alternative to capitalism. Some of us have long repeated the goal of abolishing the separation between mental and manual labor and of becoming whole human beings. It is high time to say what we mean by that. If we fail to “proceed to concrete truths,” why should any one believe that a new society is possible?

‘PROCEEDING TO CONCRETE TRUTHS’

Dunayevskaya writes, “The totality of the world crisis demands a new unity of theory and practice, a new relationship of workers and intellectuals….This new stage in the self-liberation of the intellectual from dogmatism can begin only when, as Hegel put it, the intellectual feels the ‘compulsion of thought to proceed to… concrete truths.’”

The dogmatism she had in mind here was the intellectuals’ belief in the backwardness of the masses, which resulted in their tailending “actually-existing socialism.” What I am concerned with here is a different dogmatism, the belief that “there is no alternative” to capitalism. What remains key, however, is Hegel’s methodology, which we need in order to work out a new direction for revolutionary thought, and thereby break through this new dogmatism.

Hegel’s reference to “proceeding to concrete truths” is no call to leave theory behind and rush into practice, since his dialectic remained in the realm of thought. Rather, Hegel is describing the method of development of ideas–how thought, when allowed to continue its own logical development, can end up at concrete truths. Dogmatism cuts off the dialectic in thought before it can develop to its logical end

Throughout her writings, Dunayevskaya developed the importance of the dialectical impulse to follow out the logic of ideas. In a 1985 talk called “The Power of Abstraction” (contained in THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY, Lexington Books, 2002), she said,

Remember how rarely you think something through to the end. Indeed, if you do follow an abstract thought to the end, and if your Idea is the wrong one, you will wind up sounding like an idiot. That is, thinking ‘in and for itself’ will end up by proving that the Idea is no Universal. But if your Idea was correct, the concretization will prove you a genius. Ideas ‘think,’ not sequentially, but consequentially, related to other Ideas that emerge out of HISTORIC ground, and do not care where all this might lead to….

Why do we so rarely think through ideas to the end? Why are we so reluctant to do hard mental labor? It seems that many in today’s anti-war, anti-globalization, and other movements think of ideas as bare, undeveloped abstractions. They think that ideas can only be concretized by political practice–usually in the form of the same old street demonstrations around single issues, sometimes even by making unprincipled alliances. Such people must be assuming that a new, human society will just flow out of more and more protest activity, or from their good intentions, without the need ever to face any theoretical problems.

Why do some assume this, when history has so clearly proven otherwise? Perhaps many don’t consider ideas as a force for revolution because they have never considered it possible to make ideas concrete, and have never experienced the process. Therefore they cannot grasp Hegel’s notion of concretizing IDEAS as a necessary mediation between the objective world and the ideal one we seek to realize.

Perhaps some hold back from thinking through alternatives to capitalism because the present moment looks so bleak that the project seems futile. But the objective situation only underscores the need to engage in this process. We need to do so not only because we live in retrogressive times, but because, as the U.S.’s morass in Iraq shows, the empire is unstable. There are opportunities for fundamental change.

Hegel’s method alone is not sufficient, however, for thinking through alternatives to capitalism. As noted above, we simultaneously need a firm grasp of Marx’s Marxism, which alone contains an understanding of the specific “nature” of capitalism that allows it to be transcended.

Hegel cannot tell us what the new society will be like; his idea of freedom remained abstract. Marx alone laid the basis for envisioning non-capitalist society. But Marx can “tell” us this only if we practice what Dunayevskaya singled out from Hegel–following an idea to its conclusion. Indeed, she understood Marx to have followed the drive to freedom inherent in the Hegelian dialectic to its conclusion; she said that he transformed Hegel’s revolution in philosophy into a philosophy of revolution.

Thus, Hegel and Marx together spell out the material, conceptual ground for developing an alternative to capitalism. Only hard mental labor can give direction to the tasks we face today. Even though Marx avoided giving a “blueprint” of postcapitalist society, the need to work out an alternative to capitalism has been the perspective inherent in revolutionary Marxism since its birth 160 years ago, in Marx’s 1844 ESSAYS. It is time for those who dream of a different future to proceed to concrete truths.

Concretizing Marx’s Alternative To Capitalism: A Marxist-Humanist Perspective

Chair: Ray McKay
Presenters:
Joshua Howard – “Commodity Fetishism and Today’s Economic Crisis.”
Seth G. Weiss – “Silicon Valley Socialism: A Critical Examination of Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick’s Conception of Post-capitalist Society.”
Anne Jaclard – “One System, Two Moments”
Discussant: Andrew Kliman

My title is tongue in cheek because I can’t possibly talk about all that in a few minutes. My point is to pose a theoretic challenge to feminists to work out the relationship of women’s liberation to the transformation of society as a whole. I think such a transformation of all human relations necessitates tearing up capitalism and starting a new society based on a new mode of production. My view is that the mode of production and women’s freedom are inextricably intertwined, not as if one were first and the other second, but as a revolutionary process of self-emancipation by massive movements of people before, during and after the overthrow of capitalism. And I argue that a philosophy of liberation—Marx’s humanism—is essential to this process. I can’t discuss very much of this project today, but I invite you to join the investigation.

Some background: The so-called second wave of feminism (1960s-80s) raised these issues in a period when there was widespread discussion of Marxism and revolution within mass social movements of African Americans, anti-war youth, students questioning their place in society and rank-and-file workers fighting automation. Many feminists came out of those movements and considered themselves to be “socialist-feminists” or “Marxist-feminists. ”

Debates raged over the relationship between feminism and Marxism. They centered on questions concerning the origins of oppression and the agents of revolutionary change, sometimes claiming a theoretic opposition between “workers’” interests and women’s interests. Some feminists turned against Marxism because they mistakenly identified Marx with the Soviet Union’s state-capitalism, the dominant Left tendency in the 20^th century. Some concluded that because no workers’ revolution had freed women, there was no use working for one; they failed to see that past revolutions had not freed men either.

“Radical feminism” developed theories of oppression and change based on patriarchy, a system of male domination said to explain the persistence and breadth of sexism. In my view, most theories of patriarchy suffer from the “genetic fallacy” (a philosophic term) in holding that the origins of a form of oppression determine the role that oppression plays in current society. No one disputes that patriarchal culture existed before capitalism, but that does not mean it plays the same role in reproducing modern society that it did in ancient ones. By making patriarchy the systemic basis for modern society, the radical feminists concluded that women need to fight against patriarchy instead of capitalism. When they declared “the personal is political,” they were eschewing much existing Left discourse around politics and economics. Unfortunately, most failed to investigate the Marxist-Humanist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya, who hailed the expression “the personal is political,” not as a rejection of things political, but as a broadening of its definition. In fact, she saw the slogan as a virtual re-statement of Marx’s warning that a socialist society cannot be based on any opposition between the individual and the society. He wrote as early as 1844, in his “humanist” essays, that in the post-capitalist society “the individual is the social entity;” a concept he later elaborated that remained the core of his vision of a new society based on individual freedom.

The women’s liberation movement had conceptualized and concretized ideas about human freedom that very much accord with Marx’s philosophy. Yet the assumption persisted in most feminist theory that there is an inherent opposition between feminism and Marxism. This led to the creation of “dual systems” theories, in which “economic” oppression was attributed to capitalism while the additional oppressions of women—from sexual harassment in the workplace to unpaid labor and degradation at home–were attributed to patriarchy. For many theorists, these constituted distinct systems—a system being a self-contained method of operation. If capitalism and patriarchy developed independently and are independent systems now, then they need be overthrown separately. Even socialist feminists who claimed they were not creating dual systems, ended up combining some concepts from Marxism with a separate system of patriarchal relations.

The relationship between the two systems was left external, as if they could co-exist without interpenetration. This leaves Marxist-feminists in a difficult position:what do we fight for, not just against, and will “victory” within one system really change women’s lives?This is why the concept ofsystem is important. If we fight only the outward manifestations of oppression without changing the system’s inner workings, then we cannot make deep or permanent changes—a lesson we have now learned from the rapidity with which the women’s movement’s victories, such as reproductive rights, have been taken away again.

The seminal work on “dual systems” is Heidi Hartmann’s “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism,” published along with other views in Women and Revolution in 1981. Hartmann comes to the same conclusion as the radical feminists:that because men receive benefits from sexist society, sexism must be fought in a separate sphere. By focusing on men’s relative advantages, she misses the fact that capital is the real beneficiary of sexism; a post-capitalist world is the only realm in which to work out freedom for everyone. As Dunayevskaya discusses Marx, it is his standpoint of a future socialist society that enables him to expose the unfree essence of this one and to see what must be changed.

With “dual systems” theory ensconced—some paying lip service to “Marxism” by taking up just one idea of his, or merely including “class” in a litany of oppressions—most theorists focused their analyses on women’s lives as separate spheres. For some feminists, the shortcomings of Engels’Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State became an excuse to substitute pseudo-Marxist alternatives for examining his philosophy, or to label him an economic reductionist and disregard him altogether. “Dual systems” theory discouraged serious study of Marx by separating the mode of production and “class struggle” from women’s development. Within another decade, the women’s movement had largely lost interest in both Marxism and revolution. The triumph of “dual systems” was so complete that women’s economic and personal concerns are now widely held to be separate matters, and Marxism is virtually unknown.

I would argue that capitalism is not just one aspect of the world today. It is a system that has filled and shaped every nook and cranny; little of even a personal or cultural nature survives today that is not influenced by capitalism’s attempts to mold all aspects of life into its service. Capitalism is a system whose method and object is self-expanding value; value self-expands by the system pumping labor out of workers; its tendency is to increase the relative magnitude of means of production in relation to workers, leading to the continuous lowering of “socially necessary labor time” (SNLT ) by means of technological change. SNLT is the very essence of the capitalist mode of production, the method by which it expands value. SNLT controls production relations, workplace conditions, women’s labor, and whatever else one calls the miserable way people work today, alienated from our own mental and physical capacities. Capital is not concerned with what use values it produces; it is driven to seek the highest rate of profit possible as it expands value. Today, a huge amount of value is produced by women in sweatshops around the world. Moreover, even women who do not work for wages, such as peasants, have their lives and labor shaped by the domination of the value-oriented world system. This is the case both in the workplace and outside it.

Some ancient relations of oppression serve capitalism well, so those relations, including sexism, have been remodeled and incorporated into modern life. For example, sexism and racism help the capitalists to pit workers against each other, to “divide and conquer” so they can pay low wages to everyone, only relatively higher ones to white men. Doing away with the capitalism’s mode of production for value would change the nature of work to an entirely new, human basis. This would lay the material basis for women, men and children to work out new relations and to construct an entirely new kind of society.

The fact that capitalism is the system within which sexism is perpetuated today does not, of course, mean that there is an economic solution to sexism. On the contrary, a revolution in the mode of production is necessary, but not sufficient, to lay the basis for socialism and women’s liberation. A huge, thinking Women’s Movement is essential to the process of transformation, before, during and after the transcendence of capitalism. Only such movements can work out what freedom will look like for women. Today, I believe our main task is to develop theory which can help give direction to such movements.

If we need a new philosophic ground to create a new direction for the women’s movement, we should begin with a reexamination of “dual systems” theory and of Marx’s own writings. I believe feminist theorists ruled Marx’s philosophy inadequate to ground feminism due to gross misconceptions about his work (whether they intended to mislead or not, and some of them surely knew better).

Marx’s concept of an alternative to capitalism is based not only on overthrowing capitalism, but on a second negation (to use the Hegelian concept, as he did). The second negation he termed “positive humanism beginning from itself.” In other words, instead of defining ourselves by what we are against any longer, we will first begin to develop our full capabilities. The forms of private property that characterize capitalism and “vulgar communism” are historical, transitory, subject to the transformative activity of live human beings, who can make a revolution in the mode of production and re-make all other relations as well.

Today many feminists and Leftists have given up on revolution. They put all their energy into exposing the horrors of this society and supporting campaigns for reforms. Those who have given up on revolution may cling to “dual systems” or patriarchal theories, because they do not think that total societal change of the kind envisioned by Marx is possible. But such theories allow one to believe that we can achieve women’s liberation within capitalism—it’s not possible. I urge striking out on another theoretic road. Marxist-Humanists have as a major perspective theorizing alternatives to capitalism. I invite feminists to participate in this project, and thereby to begin to work out the idea of women’s liberation in reality.

Our members are among the people forced out of News and Letters Committees (N&LC) in 2008 — nearly half the membership — by a clique that seized control of its assets and violated its Constitution and principles in order to suppress dissent. We had been expected to do the major work of the organization, including the significant theoretical work, but we were not permitted to make major decisions. Nor could we effectively stop members from substituting personal opinions that differed wildly from the Perspectives Theses we approved annually, for the organization’s own positions. We were expected to continue serving the needs of members whose only interests and contributions were to write for the newspaper or attend meetings of a talking-shop, or who publicly misrepresented Dunayevskaya and Marx’s philosophies, or who publicly presented their personal views but not those of the organization.

When we formed a tendency to try to change the direction of the organization and to instill some fairness into the control of finances and decision-making, we were ignored. When we attempted to employ the Constitution to remedy matters, we were summarily suspended, without a hearing and without being informed in advance of the charges against us, all in violation of the Constitution. A special convention was called without stating its purpose (undoubtedly to expel us). We were locked out of the office, website and e-mail account—effectively rendered non-persons. We had no choice but to leave last May.

The underlying disputes within N&LC concerned the nature and direction of the philosophy and organization:  the meaning of Marx for today, and whether Dunayevskaya’s work was to be continued or, as the group that pushed us out favored, frozen in time. Their relationship to the Marxism of Marx had become more tenuous with each passing year since the death of Dunayevskaya. Unwilling and unable to treat Marxist-Humanism or Marx’s Marxism as a “live body of ideas in need of concretization,” as Dunayevskaya had characterized the latter, News and Letters failed to respond meaningfully to the changed world situation brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union, just as it is unable now to respond meaningfully to the economic crisis.

The people who were forced out of N&LC set up a temporary working group of individuals, called the Marxist-Humanist Committee (MHC), which sought to re-found a Marxist-Humanist organization. But that effort proved to be a still-birth. Against our will, the MHC was dissolved last month.

Those of us now forming the Marxist-Humanist Initiative were critical of parts of N&LC’s organizational structure and all its undemocratic practices following Dunayevskaya’s death. We regard them as factors that contributed significantly to its philosophical regression and inability to renew Marxist-Humanism as a living philosophy. We sought to establish a different kind of organization. We vowed that never again would we allow decades of hard work spent building a Marxist-Humanist organization, and the results of that work, to be destroyed by cliques and by members who sought to make the organization serve their individual purposes rather than the tasks of Marxist-Humanism itself. We therefore sought to establish a fair, open, non-hierarchical organization capable of protecting itself against cliques and attempts to make it serve ulterior ends — an organization worth rebuilding because it would be stable and resilient enough to withstand efforts to divert it from the task of continuing and renewing the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism.

Others in the MHC did not take these organizational goals seriously. They resisted efforts to examine the organizational dimension of N&LC’s philosophical retrogression and to do things differently in a new organization. The majority of the MHC hoped that, solely by virtue of having a different philosophical orientation, its different set of people would be able to withstand the pull of retrogression to which N&LC had succumbed. This diremption of philosophy from organization, however, soon led those members of the MHC to replicate many of the same practices that they themselves had been victims of only months before.

Rushing to “go public” and insisting that philosophic agreement by itself was a sufficient basis for organizational unity, the majority could not resolve the contradictions inherited by the MHC, and they began to operate like N&LC.  Some grossly and repeatedly misrepresented the positions of others, some retroactively re-interpreted the meaning of facts and decisions we had voted on, some just violated those decisions, and some threw mud. The philosophy of Marxist-Humanism came to be seen as embodied in one person, and “philosophic agreement” came to mean unquestioning support for that person on all “fundamental issues.”

The MHC had a rule that members must respect dissent and the formation of minority currents, but when we formed a current, the leaders of the MHC simply ignored our request that the organization discuss and consider adopting our principles, as well as our request that they inform us of our rights as a current within the organization. Meanwhile, some members secretly maneuvered behind the scenes, lining up the votes they needed to pass motions before we had a chance to discuss and debate them. Finally, to our complete surprise, a motion was made by e-mail to dissolve the organization, and members were told they had only a day and a half to discuss it. Our current’s counterproposal to form an umbrella organization, so that two currents could work together on matters of common concern, was summarily rebuffed, without any organization-wide consideration at all.

The diremption of philosophy from organization practiced by the other members of the MHC impelled them to force it to collapse over differences about “form of organization,” even though we did not have differences about philosophy. Ironically, although they claimed to regard philosophical differences as primary and form of organization as separate and secondary, they refused to continue to work with us, despite our shared philosophical outlook, merely because we and they favored different forms of organization.  Thus the people who claimed that philosophical agreement alone was a sufficient basis for unity refused to unite with other Marxist-Humanists with whom they were in philosophical agreement. Philosophical agreement, while necessary, proved to be an insufficient basis for unity by itself.

Thus, we are now on our own as the U.S. continuators of the perspective, propounded by Dunayevskaya, of overcoming the separation of revolutionary organization from the philosophy of revolution. The Marxist-Humanist Initiative (MHI) is the sole U.S. proponent of the perspective of rebuilding an organization capable of projecting, developing, and concretizing Marx’s Marxism and Marxist-Humanism, in order to renew the Marxist-Humanist tradition for our time.  (The other groups calling themselves Marxist-Humanist are not trying to rebuild, and their structures and practices undermine the rebuilding of, such an organization.)  The challenge is daunting and success is certainly not assured. We have no illusion that we are now that organization, but we hope to be a bridge to such a new kind of organization.

Our website will soon contain documentation supporting the facts we allege in this short statement, and we intend to publish continued discussion on the relationship between revolutionary philosophy and its organizational expression.

Our members are few but diverse in age, gender, color, and ethnicity.  Some members have decades of experience in N&LC, including working with Dunayevskaya, and in many radical movements. Others are thoughtful, bright and energetic youth who we hope will be the nucleus of Marxist-Humanism’s next generation. All of us are dedicated to developing aspects of Marx’s theory for today and to establishing a collective, fair, and sustainable form of working that is based in our revolutionary philosophy.

We hope you will read our Principles and By-Laws; we think they reflect important steps forward. Whether you are in the U.S. or abroad, if you share our aims, please contact us and help support our work.

The totality of the world crisis today makes apparent that the capitalist system cannot bring peace, economic security or social justice to the vast majority of people. Instead, working people are faced with continued poverty, exploitation, degradation, imperialist domination and war. Past revolutions have changed forms of property and political rule, but have failed to go on to uproot capital, abolish alienated labor and hierarchical society, and establish a truly new, human socioeconomic system.

The Marxist-Humanist Initiative holds that an important cause of the failures and incompleteness of past revolutions was the lack of internalization of Karl Marx’s philosophy of revolution. We have constituted ourselves as a new organization in order to contribute to the transformation of this world by projecting, developing and concretizing Marx’s philosophy and its further development in the Marxist-Humanism articulated by Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-1987).

Dunayevskaya built upon Marx’s interpretation of the Hegelian dialectic as a dialectic of revolution. She theorized two moments of revolution, the first negation or negation of what exists (the overthrow of the old), and the second, positive negation of that negation (the creation of the new). While making this dual rhythm of revolution explicit, she contended that the second moment is not automatic. That is because it is not just a cancellation or modification of the old, but a new beginning that requires creative development. Dunayevskaya called this process “absolute negativity as new beginning.”(1) Without such “new beginnings,” revolutions remain infected by, and therefore cannot transcend, the limitations of the old. They fail to break with the economic laws of capitalism, and fall back into capitalist relations. These philosophic concepts need to be worked out anew for our time and place as theoretic preparation for a revolution that goes on to create a new society.

The concretization of philosophy takes place in the realm of ideas; it is theoretical. Marxist-Humanist philosophy cannot continue to be significant if we treat it as a set of abstractions or simply attempt to translate its concepts into practice. Rather, ideas undergo their own self-development through rigorous theoretical labor. Theoretic preparation was a missing element in prior revolutions that we strive not to see repeated.

We make no pretense of being a political party. Nor are we trying to lead the masses, who will form their own mass organizations to transform society, and whose emancipation must be their own act. But we have seen that spontaneous actions alone are insufficient to usher in a new society. We seek a new unity of philosophy and organization in which mass movements that look for a path to freedom lay hold of Marx’s philosophy of revolution and recreate society on its basis. The interests of working people and freedom movements as a whole guide our thoughts and actions, as well as our structure and rules. We have no interests separate and apart from these.

We hold that the present period continues to be part of the state-capitalist stage of capitalism analyzed by Raya Dunayevskaya. In her concern to answer the question, “what happens after the revolution?” in the wake of the failed and aborted revolutions of the 20th century, she developed a theory of state-capitalism in the 1940′s on the basis of Marx’s Capital. She applied this theory both to countries in which state property was dominant, e.g. the Soviet Union and China, and to other countries in which state intervention into the economy on behalf of capital had become a permanent feature of life – as it remains in the U.S. We are still trying to expose as misconceptions the notions that state-capitalism is or can become socialism, and that nationalization or regulation of the economy or financial system changes the nature of capitalism. We oppose capitalism regardless of its particular property form and regardless of whether the economy is a “market” or “planned” one.

Since capital’s drive toward concentration and centralization, expressed through inter-capitalist competition, inexorably leads to war, we find moral calls for peace to be utopian. The opposite of war is not peace, but social revolution. As did Dunayevskaya, we look for the absolute opposite of capital in what she called “the totality of Marx’s Marxism”- his philosophy freed from post-Marx Marxists’ distortions and truncations – as well as in the self-activity of revolutionary mass movements.

We base ourselves on the totality of Marx’s writings, from his doctoral dissertation of 1841 until his death in 1883. We also base ourselves on Marxist-Humanism as developed in the writings of Raya Dunayevskaya, principally Marxism and Freedom (1958), American Civilization on Trial (1963),Philosophy and Revolution (1972), Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (1983), and The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, her archive of Marxist-Humanism’s development over more than half a century.(2)

It falls on our generation to prove that a liberatory alternative to capitalism is possible by showing theoretically that socialism can be realized. With the collapse of “Communism” (Stalinism), masses of people and intellectuals alike gave up on the prospect of socialism. Yet since 1999, with the mass protests in Seattle and around the world, a movement against global capital has demanded to know if an alternative to capitalism is possible. We have recently seen the beginnings of what might develop into an explicit challenge to capitalism – occupations of factories and housing, and demonstrations of workers and students against new austerity programs and lay-offs – all around the world. This is an opportunity for Marxism to be reclaimed by the masses, and we endeavor to help.

But it is not an easy task to prove that a liberatory alternative to capitalism is possible, when the vision of socialism has been eclipsed by the false identification of socialism with “Communism” and by the idea that capitalism is permanent. In the absence of an emancipatory alternative to capitalism on the horizon, opposition to capitalism has taken the forms, on both the Right and Left, of politicized religious fundamentalism, authoritarianism, reactionary forms of nationalism and anti-imperialism, populism, nostalgia for past social forms, and romantic anti-capitalism of various stripes. We are encouraged to see capitalism in crisis revealing its inherent contradictions and instability, but the moment of crisis also presents new dangers, since not all alternatives to capitalism are emancipatory. Some can be worse, such as increased starvation, fascism and warlordism. We aim to challenge the workers’ and other liberatory movements, as well as Left intellectuals, to develop Marxism with us in order to lay the groundwork for a socialist outcome.

We reject the notion that Marx was exclusively a theorist of capitalism rather than socialism. In theCritique of the Gotha Program (and in the Poverty of Philosophy, the Grundrisse, Capital, and elsewhere), he dealt with the question of an emancipatory alternative to capitalism. He showed that the alternatives proposed by Proudhonism and similar tendencies would not be viable and would lead back to capitalism. And he worked out to some extent what would actually be needed in order to transcend capitalism and its indirectly social labor, alienated labor, commodification of labor-power, and “law of value,” and what would actually be needed for socialist society to develop to the point at which it can finally operate according to the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Along with Dunayevskaya, we hold that this pathbreaking work of Marx is “new ground” for organization. It is the basis of our organization’s opposition to capitalism and our vision of a socialist future, and it is the foundation upon which we build in order to work out the problem of an emancipatory alternative to capitalism.

Our theoretical work is engendered and informed by our opposition to this capitalistic, racist, sexist, heterosexist, class-ridden society. We participate in many class and other freedom struggles, nationally and internationally. We aim to solidarize through words and actions with working people and with oppressed minorities and peoples throughout the world. We support movements that are genuinely for national liberation, but we oppose reactionary trends that cloak themselves in anti-imperialist rhetoric while actually promoting only an anti-U.S., anti-Western, or anti-modern agenda. We base ourselves on the self-activity of movements of workers, women, African-Americans, youth, national minorities, neo-colonialized peoples, and others who are struggling for self-determination in order to freely develop their own human natures.

We strive especially to include workers, women, African-Americans, Latinos, other minorities and youth in our project. We base ourselves on the identification of multiple forces of revolution that has been part of Marxist-Humanism’s legacy since the 1950s. We note and support the leading role in challenging existing society played by the U.S. African-American masses when their mass movements question the basis of this society, as they did in the Civil Rights Movement. We emphasize not only the power of the working class to bring down capitalism, but its creativity in developing new, human relations of production. We stand with workers against the union bureaucracies, politicians, and others who try to hem in their self-activity and integrate them into the existing order. We look for the return of the movement for women’s liberation born in the 1960s and 1970s, which spread around the world and deepened the concept of freedom by challenging sexism in nearly every aspect of every nation and culture. We look to the idealism of youth to help change the world. They have been in the forefront of the last half century’s social movements, particularly the movements against racism, nuclear war and imperialist wars, globalized capital and environmental destruction.

We have come together as an organization because we believe that an organization is needed to fulfill our foremost aim, that of contributing to the transformation of this world by promoting, developing, and concretizing Marx’s and Marxist-Humanism’s bodies of ideas. This aim cannot be fulfilled by individuals working separately.

The organization created and headed by Dunayevskaya was capable of developing and concretizing Marxist-Humanism during her lifetime, but no organization currently exists that can fulfill these tasks. We seek to renew Marxist-Humanism by rebuilding an organization that can do so. We recognize that our small group is not that organization, but we hope to be a bridge to such an organization. That is why we call ourselves the Marxist-Humanist Initiative. We
are distinguished from the other organizations calling themselves Marxist-Humanist in this: we have the goal of rebuilding an organization capable of renewing Marxist-Humanism by concretizing and developing it as a collectivity.

A primary task of an organization with this perspective must be to create a collectivity of people capable of meeting this challenge. In contrast to other organizations since Dunayevskaya’s time that have called themselves Marxist-Humanist, we make the creation of such a collectivity a top priority. Further, we try to end the division between mental and manual labor in our own organization to the extent possible, and to build a non-hierarchical yet effective and sustainable organization.

We recognize the integrality of the Marxist-Humanist philosophy of revolution and a Marxist-Humanist organization. These are not distinct matters; organization is an objective expression and concretization of philosophy. Thus neither philosophy nor organization can be privileged over the other; we reject efforts to unite on matters of philosophy without there being unity on organizational perspectives, and vice-versa. Such unity is unstable and abstract, and risks replicating destructive tendencies from which previous organizations suffered.(3)

In particular, we regard it as imperative that organizational structures and rules–or the lack thereof–not serve to deter people from the aim of renewing Marxist-Humanism through the rebuilding of an organization capable of developing and concretizing this philosophy. Safeguards must exist to protect the organization’s accomplishments and help prevent it from being hijacked by cliques or diverted by individuals who foster other agendas. Only if such safeguards exist will members be willing to freely contribute the hard work, time, and thought needed to rebuild such an organization. This is a particularly pressing problem when attempting to build a democratic organization, since democratic organizations risk becoming ones that serve the purposes of their individual members. It is therefore necessary that organizational structures and rules help ensure that the organization not serve purposes other than those of the organization.

For these reasons, the Marxist-Humanist Initiative has a collective form of organization. That is, those who work for the organization make the decisions, and members freely assume the responsibility of contributing their fair share of work to accomplish the organization’s tasks, as spelled out in our By-Laws. To help us achieve our aims, we also seek formal “Supporters.” They have many of the privileges of membership but are not required to work for the organization, and therefore they have voice but not vote in our decision-making processes.

We consider it important to examine the histories of Marxist-Humanist and other revolutionary organizations as part of working out difficult questions concerning the relationship of philosophy to organization, and to help prevent bad experiences from being repeated. We recognize, as a major task, the need to fill the void in the history of revolutionary organizations by theorizing and working to create a democratic, non-hierarchical organization that is also efficient, fair, the least likely possible to be derailed from its purpose, and the most capable of continuing into the future regardless of who its individual members may be.

We hope ultimately to be part of a united international Marxist-Humanist organization. In the meantime, we will work with any Marxist-Humanist group or individual abroad who wishes to work with us. We will be willing to unite with others in a philosophically based organization only if it seeks to renew Marxist-Humanism by rebuilding an organization capable of developing and concretizing the philosophy. While maintaining our organizational integrity, we also hope to cooperate, on an ad hoc basis, with Marxist-Humanists and others in the U.S. outside our organization on issues of common interest.

Those who join us do so freely by accepting our general principles, agreeing to support and carry out decisions of the majority, and pledging to do their fair share of organizational work, as stated in our By-Laws. We invite others to join in this new initiative.

April 2009

NOTES
(1) The concept is elaborated in her book, Philosophy and Revolution (1972), and a posthumous collection of her writings, The Power of Negativity (2002).

(2) microfilm available from Wayne State University Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Detroit.

(3) Many of the founders of the Marxist-Humanist Initiative were members of News and Letters Committees, the organization founded by Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1950s, and then participants in the Marxist-Humanist Committee (2008-09). Those experiences are discussed briefly in “Why a New Organization?”, April 2009; further analysis and documentation will appear on the Marxist-Humanist Initiative website.