MHI here discusses the reasons for its opposition to the U.S./NATO bombing of Libya, as well as discussing our support for the rebels there and in the other ongoing revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa. We think it is important to take a position on the difficult and contentious issue of military intervention; waffling, as many Left groups have done by failing to take a firm stand on U.S./NATO intervention, hinders the development of both theory and activity that can actually aid revolutions. Our position rejects the false alternatives of “taking sides” and attempts instead to sharpen and develop the dimension of liberatory ideas and action. For a minority position within MHI on these issues, see Libya and the Left in the Forces of Revolution section below.

Whereas mass movements in Tunisia and Egypt, at the beginning of this year, won their revolutions to overthrow entrenched dictatorships relatively quickly, other Middle Eastern and North African countries are locked in longer struggles marked by much bloodshed and many reversals of fortune. Thousands have been slaughtered in mass demonstrations and rebellions in some 19 countries, and the struggles continue.

In Libya in particular, the rebels have sometimes appeared to be on the brink of success and at other times on the brink of being eradicated. Libya’s dictator for 42 years, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, has vowed to kill every rebel, and is doing so wherever he is able. Much of the rebel movement asked the UN to establish a “no-fly” zone in order to stop Qaddafi from bombing his own people and from flying in mercenaries and supplies. The UN passed a resolution in support and NATO proceeded to implement a “no-fly” zone; it has been bombing Qaddafi forces since March 19. Government-held and rebel-held areas of the country keep changing hands, while more and more civilians and rebels are killed.

A “Youthquake” in the Middle East and North Africa

The success of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions in deposing long-time dictators inspired the masses to rise up in Libya as well as in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Oman, Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, and elsewhere, and it caused renewed anti-government demonstrations in Iran and Iraq. Thousands of unarmed civilians are risking their lives every day attending demonstrations, even in tightly-controlled Saudi Arabia. Many civilians have taken up arms; some soldiers and government officials have changed sides. Called a “youthquake” because so many protesters and rebel fighters are young, the demands for democracy and equality of citizens, and often for women’s rights and for secular states, have changed the face of the region forever.  (You can find a lot of information about the new movements on websites such as Al Jazeera-English (http://www.livestation.com/channels/3-al-jazeera-english-english) and Middle East Report (http://www.merip.org/)).

Never again will dictators and Western diplomats be able to justify Eastern dictatorships by invoking the old notion of “Orientalism,” the view that non-Western people lack the desire or will to fight for national or personal freedom. Months before Osama bin Laden was killed, his reactionary brand of “revolutionary” un-freedom was proven unpopular with the Muslim masses, who have an entirely different vision of the future. What will happen to the new revolutions remains to be seen, since a change in regime does not guarantee a change in people’s lives or by itself prevent the re-establishment of repression, and the economic problems facing most of the countries in the region are staggering. But we note that Egyptian youth who insist that the military give up its “interim” rule are still occupying Tahrir Square, and they swear to do all they can to move the revolution forward.

Of course, it is impossible to know the aims of all the elements among the Libyan and other rebels; certainly there are Islamist fundamentalists among them. Apparently even the CIA doesn’t know, and you can bet that they have operatives on the ground trying to find out and are hedging their bets by funding more than one group of rebels. This should not prevent us from taking a principled position in support of the rebels and against Qaddafi and the other rulers, as we do. Our position, however, does not require that we support U.S./NATO intervention.

Disputes over Military Intervention in Libya

Within the U.S. and internationally, disputes are raging over whether the U.S. role in Libya (both individually and through its virtual control of NATO and the UN) constitutes naked imperialism, designed to preserve U.S. oil and strategic interests, or whether it constitutes humanitarian aid that is warranted because the dictator is so evil and the threat of mass killings so imminent. As was the case during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, some support U.S. intervention either on the humanitarian grounds of saving lives, or because they believe U.S. intervention will turn the tide in favor of the rebels. “Humanitarian intervention” is sometimes condemned as being pro-U.S. government, but that is not always the case. People who oppose intervention are often accused of supporting the dictators involved, but that is not always the case either. There are supporters of Qaddafi who oppose intervention based on a position that boils down to “the enemy of my enemy is my friend;” we call such thinking “knee-jerk anti-imperialism” and have frequently condemned it for resulting in support of repressive regimes (one place is our editorial “We Support, We Condemn“). Other Leftists take more nuanced positions, but still feel that ultimately they have to choose between supporting intervention in order to support the rebels, or opposing intervention on the grounds that U.S. imperialism is the “greater evil” in the world.

MHI refuses to choose among any of the above positions, which we consider false alternatives. We firmly support the Libyan masses who are striving for freedom, but we do not conflate their needs with any actions of the U.S. government. We hope people-to-people solidarity will help them to obtain material aid to carry on their struggle, and we are sorry that at this moment, we are not able to help except through the power of the pen, but we believe that ideas are also important for the future of revolutions.

When Gen. Francisco Franco’s fascist forces were fighting to take over Spain in the 1930s, people around the world who were opposed to capitalism and oppression sent international fighting brigades and provided other support to help the Spanish people defend themselves. We lament the fact that this kind of support for the Libyan rebels is not now an immediate option. But we do not believe that foreign intervention by the U.S. or other major powers is ever justified––not just because imperialism is wrong in principle, but for reasons we discuss below.

In brief, we believe that when Leftists take as their focus the actions of the U.S./NATO, they are downplaying the agency of the Libyan rebels and their ability to shape their own destiny. Whether it is meant to save lives in the short run or to turn the tide of a revolution, intervention by the U.S. affirms that it is the only force that can make history, and Left support of intervention indicates its agreement with that view. The Left itself loses an opportunity to develop its capacity to provide its own material support for rebels, as well as losing an opportunity to develop a perspective that is not tied to any state power. In other words, we believe the Left should take a position that sharpens and develops the dimension of liberatory ideas and activities, and thus contributes to the dialectic of history.

Who Cares What Position U.S. Leftists Take?

One could say that no one cares what position U.S. Leftists take, because the Left is too weak to influence events. Be that as it may, the Left still has good reason––in fact an obligation––to analyze and inform people of its views. Specifically, it has an obligation to work out its views on the basis of what will aid the needed world revolution. Because only the end of capitalism and the beginning of a new mode of production and new human relations that flow from that can substantially and sustainably change the way ordinary people live, we need to evaluate every position in terms of what is needed to make that happen.

We oppose U.S./NATO intervention not only because imperialism is bad for the country invaded (even where it might have a desirable result in the short run), but because military intervention strengthens the might and the influence of the intervener. When the intervener is the U.S. or its proxies, it is especially important to take a position based upon what will help to bring down this strongest pole of world capital. For revolutionaries, our main enemy is always at home—our own ruling class—and our main focus is to weaken its power, for the sake of our own working class and, in the case of the singularly powerful U.S., for the sake of the workers of the world.

U.S. intervention in Libya strengthens its control over other countries––others as well as Libya––by serving notice to the world that the U.S. will continue to employ its military might whenever and wherever it wishes. Since all governments represent and serve the underlying economic systems in their countries, the U.S. military serves and preserves capitalism—above all, by maintaining a stable environment for investment and finance. If another severe financial crisis erupts, capitalism can survive only if there is confidence in the debt guarantees of the U.S. government, and U.S. military might is key to such confidence. We in the U.S. believe in fighting our government’s power at every opportunity.

War and Imperialism: Our History

Our position that people in the U.S. should strive to weaken U.S. power follows the logic of a perspective articulated by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the leaders of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and continued by Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism. All three wrote that the duty of revolutionaries in imperialist countries during wartime is to contribute to the defeat of their own governments.

During World War I, a war among European imperialist countries, Lenin argued that the military defeat of the Russian tsar was desirable because it would give impetus to a revolution at home (“On the Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War”). His slogan was, “Turn the imperialist war into a civil war.” And that is precisely what happened, when the Russian Revolution followed on the heels of Russia’s defeat.

On the eve of World War II, Trotsky published “A Step towards Social-Patriotism: On the Position of the Fourth International toward the Struggle against War and Fascism.” [1] It is a response to a Palestinian Trotskyist group’s document calling for the Fourth International to take a position in support of those countries fighting Hitler.[2] Both articles discussed whether Lenin’s “defeatist” position was applicable in light of Nazism. The Palestinians wrote that  pursuing a defeatist policy was “hardly … possible” in 1939 because “Fascism … so strangles the working class [in fascist countries] as hardly to make it possible to comply with Lenin’s third condition for defeatist policy,” namely “the possibility of giving mutual support to revolutionary movements in all warring countries.”

Trotsky disagreed. He did not give up on the possibility of international solidarity being able to create the possibility of revolution. There also seems to have been an under-current of questioning by the Palestinians as to whether a defeatist position is the right position even if it is tenable, because immediate circumstances might make it the wrong position. Trotsky’s response characterizes them as arguing that “fascism nowadays represents a direct and immediate threat to the whole civilized world” (emphasis added).  And the final paragraph of his response contains the following characterization of their thinking: “‘But fascism might be victorious!’ ‘But the USSR is menaced!’ ‘But Hitler’s invasion would signify the slaughter of workers!’ And so on, without end.”

In his response, Trotsky did not dispute any of those dangers. He affirmed all of them: “Of course, the dangers are many, very many.” But he argued against basing decisions on such considerations. Fighting only the immediate threat is “a narrowing down of revolutionary tasks.” “That policy which attempts to place upon the proletariat the unsolvable task of warding off all dangers engendered by the bourgeoisie and its policy of war is vain, false, mortally dangerous. … It is impossible not only to ward them all off, but even to foresee all of them. Should the proletariat attempt at the expense of the clarity and irreconcilability of its fundamental policy to chase after each episodic danger separately, it will unfailingly prove itself a bankrupt.” We agree.

Moreover, such a position surrenders the possibility of an independent path, one that is not tied to one or another pole of capital because it is forever “chas[ing] after each episodic danger separately.” The central question that needs to be asked––and answered––is: do we hold fast to fighting for what we are for, or do we get sidetracked by this, that, and the next crisis, about which we can do nothing immediately, onto a path of supporting rulers who are fighting the immediate threat, the immediately “greater evil”?

If we allow the immediate situation to determine our response for us, then another path, independent of all capitalist powers and solutions, never has the opportunity to develop, since the “episodic danger[s]” are never-ending. And so we become bystanders to history. And much worse, we recommend that potentially revolutionary forces also become bystanders, taking sides from among that which is immediately given to them, i.e., the sides that others, capitalist powers and forces, have constructed as “the sides.”

Trotsky’s response ended by alluding to the danger of reducing the working class to the role of bystanders to history, or what he called “supervisors of the historical process”: “The workers will be able to profit to the full from this monstrous chaos only if they occupy themselves not with acting as supervisors of the historical process but by engaging in the class struggle. Only the growth of their international offensive will put an end not alone to episodic ‘dangers’ but also to their main source: the class society.”

Raya Dunayevskaya, like Trotsky and the Trotskyists of her time, refused to take sides in World War II. While many Leftists supported the Allies because fascism was so horrendous, she insisted that neither side should be supported by the Left. Our task, she repeated, was to defeat our rulers at home. Her advice to young men on serving in the military was that revolutionaries should serve—in order to organize fellow soldiers around socialist ideas.

International working-class solidarity is likewise possible now, and indeed, the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa have made it easier to envision. To think that the only choice is to be for or against U.S./NATO intervention effectively subordinates the Libyan masses’ struggle to the strategic interests of the U.S.  It also reduces the role of the Left to that of being bystanders to history. Whether or not it can immediately give material aid, the task facing the Left is to think our way out of the false alternatives and “lesser evils” presented by bourgeois thought, and instead to call for a path that fosters and develops revolutionary movements. This may require us to do some hard thinking and historical digging, but that is the way we can make a contribution.

Intervention and its Practical Pitfalls

The U.S. has directly and indirectly intervened in Libya for a very long time: U.S. Marines landed in Tripoli during the Barbary Wars at the beginning of the 1800s. Libya was a colony of Italy for decades; the U.S. maintained military bases there for years until Qaddafi seized power in 1969 and kicked them out. In response to Qaddafi’s sponsoring of terrorist attacks in Europe, in April 1986 the U.S. sank Libyan boats and bombed alleged missile sites and Qaddafi’s compound. This military action broke the “Vietnam syndrome” that had halted overt U.S. interventions, and heralded the coming unipolar world filled with U.S. invasions of many countries.

Dunayevskaya immediately denounced the bombing and warned that it was a prelude to President Reagan’s intensification of attempts to overthrow the Nicaraguan government and to stop other revolutionary movements in Latin America and the U.S. (“Reagan’s attacks on Libya and Nicaragua,” News & Letters, April 1986, page 1). She did not live to see all the interventions that followed. The bombing also impelled her to write to us about the duty of revolutionaries to be immersed in revolutionary philosophy so as to be prepared to analyze rapidly whatever new events occur in the world (letters dated March 27 and April 10, 1986).[3]

In 1999, Qaddafi was miraculously rehabilitated as a respectable leader by the U.S. government when he decided to play ball with the West and renounced terrorism. No doubt the U.S. was in no hurry to see him fall in 2011, as long as he was cooperating with its policies, any more than it wanted to stop supporting Mubarak in Egypt. It did not stop supporting either one until it saw that the revolts could not easily be put down, and eventually stopped supporting them simply so it could be on the winning side.

History shows that the U.S. government’s kind of “humanitarianism” cannot be trusted to last. Instead, the masses will have to control their own revolutions if they are to control their countries afterward. U.S. military aid to mass revolts is too unreliable and its price is too high. But even were that not the case, intervention does not necessarily bring about military victory—as witness Qaddafi’s ability to retake much of the area he had lost to the rebels, in spite of U.S. and NATO bombing. What do supporters of “humanitarian intervention” advocate in such cases?

U.S. military intervention removed oppressive governments in Iraq and Afghanistan––at the continuing cost of tens of thousands of civilian lives and the sacrifice of the peoples’ right to determine their own futures. What is the conceptual difference between an invasion by troops, and one by planes, missiles, and drones in the air and CIA agents on the ground? And how should we decide who deserves the U.S.’ “humanitarian” help? Millions have died in Rwanda, Congo, Sudan, and other places where the U.S. government did not chose to “help.” We know the U.S. isn’t going to intervene where its relations with a current government are deemed crucial to U.S. interests. At this moment, it is doing nothing to support the masses rising up in Syria, a country of 22.5 million people compared to Libya’s 6.5 million, because Syria has greater importance for U.S. interests. So what principle governs our support for humanitarian intervention? Why do those who support it refrain from advocating that the U.S. intervene to protect innocent lives everywhere and always?

What Underlies the Acceptance of False Alternatives?

We worry that the failure of the Left to consider more than the false alternatives that our rulers have constructed for us indicates that many people have given up on the possibility of an actual world revolution that overthrows capitalism and thereby abolishes imperialism. Why else settle for narrowing the content of your support for revolutionary movements to the choice of whether to support or oppose your own government’s military actions?

Although MHI is too small to offer material support to revolutionary movements abroad, we can help them by developing ideas about what a thoroughgoing social and economic revolution entails. We believe that such a revolution is possible, and that worked-out revolutionary ideas are themselves a force that is needed in order to make that possibility a reality. Otherwise, there is no reason for the Left to exist, since the false alternatives of “taking sides” between given choices are already firmly established in existing society. We believe our role is to demolish false alternatives, not to perpetuate them, and instead to show another direction, that of revolutionary thought and activity.

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

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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.”

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