Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 1999-2000
August/September 1999
World crisis and the theoretic void: Taking responsibility for
Marxist-Humanism
by The Resident Editorial Board of NEWS & LETTERS
Note: As part of the preparation for our upcoming national gathering, News
and Letters Committees publishes the Draft of its Perspectives Thesis each
year directly in the pages of NEWS & LETTERS. We urge your participation in
our discussion around this Thesis because our age is in such total crisis
that no revolutionary organization can allow any separation between theory
and practice, workers and intellectuals, "inside" and "ouside," philosophy
and organization. We are raising questions and ask you to help in working
out the answers.
I. Kosova reveals Achilles heel of the Left
Ten years after the collapse of the state-capitalist regimes that called
themselves "Communist" in Eastern Europe, the war over Kosova has brought
to the forefront the depth of reorganization needed to concretize a
philosophy of liberation for our life and times. The war has exposed new
fault lines in world politics, exposed the missing link in the radical
movements, and demonstrated anew the need to meet the challenge posed by
the self-determination of the Idea of Marxist-Humanism.
The post-war occupation of Kosova by 50,000 NATO troops, 7,000 from the
U.S., will be no short-term affair. Officials talk of the troops remaining
there for years, even decades. As Carl Bildt, UN Kosova mediator said, "An
international military presence to guarantee peace in the Balkans must be
seen in the coming decades as something as natural as it was to have troops
in divided Germany during the cold war years."
As we pointed out from the start of the crisis, the U.S. intervention in
Kosova had nothing to do with aiding the victims of genocide.
(1) Since 1991
Serbia murdered hundreds of thousands in Bosnia and thousands more in
Kosova, and the U.S. did nothing to stop it. It instead treated Milosevic
as an ally for his help in supporting the partition of Bosnia through the
Dayton accords. Clinton decided to intervene against Serbia only after
Milosevic's murderous attacks against Kosova threatened to make NATO look
like a helpless giant. Yet despite the U.S.'s attack on Serbia, what it has
never wavered about, even after killing hundreds of Serbian civilians in
its imperialist air war, is opposition to Kosova's independence.
No sooner had Serbian troops begun withdrawing from Kosova in late June
than the Kosovar Liberation Army (KLA) moved in and set up interim
governments in several cities, establishing new schools, community centers
and other associations. A kind of self-government sprang up in the
aftermath of Serbia's defeat. This led to conflict between the KLA and NATO
troops as to who is in control. One report noted, "Western officials here
have been startled by the guerrillas' move to take the helm of nascent
civil structures being formed in Kosova, and they are uneasy about it."
U.S. troops responded by aggressively disarming the KLA.
The speed with which the KLA filled the vacuum left by the departing
Serbian army did not come out of thin air. Throughout the 1990s the
Kosovars created a second, underground society in direct opposition to
Serbia's oppression. Though Milosevic's ethnic cleansing of Kosova was
aimed at destroying this, he did not succeed. Even in the refugee camps
Kosovars opened up newspapers, internet services, schools, and other forms
of communication and development. As they returned to Kosova, they further
re-created the nascent political and social structures that had held them
together during the years of Serb military rule.
NATO's military occupation of Kosova is actively undermining this by
denying the central aim of the Kosovars-independence. As R. Jeffrey Smith
of THE WASHINGTON POST put it, "A long held Western objective in Kosova is
to drain away the KLA's militant spirit by integrating its leadership into
more moderate ethnic Albanian political structures. The strategy is meant
in turn to make the KLA more vulnerable to Western pressures and undermine
the group's demand for independence from Serbia." Whether or not Serbia
will eventually be able to assert sovereignty over Kosova, NATO's
protectorate over it will stifle any move for real independence.
Meanwhile, Serbia's military defeat has enabled new opposition to arise in
Serbia. Serbia's defeat resulted not only from NATO's air war, but also
from the resurgence of the KLA which put thousands of fighters in the field
despite a U.S.-imposed arms embargo. This had a remarkable effect on
Serbian nerves. Whereas during the war few in Serbia spoke out against
Milosevic, large rallies now demand his dismissal. For the first time, many
Serbs are speaking out openly against ethnic cleansing.
Regardless of whether or not Milosevic retains power, it remains to be seen
whether these voices of opposition will fully come to grips with Serbia's
responsibility for genocide in Kosova and in Bosnia-and centrally its
horrific responsibility for the mass rapes of tens of thousands of women.
What is already clear, however, is that any opposition in Serbia that tries
to go beyond the bounds of bourgeois politics will face the presence of
50,000 NATO troops across the border.
The U.S. intervention in Kosova has also produced new intra-capitalist
rivalries. Though West Europe seemed willing to play second fiddle to the
U.S. during the war, as soon as it ended the European Union announced plans
to form its own military force to free itself from military dependence on
the U.S. This may turn out to be a quixotic move, given the time and
expense that would be needed for West Europe to catch up to U.S. military
firepower. Yet it is a sign of the unease that exists just beneath the
surface about the extent of U.S. power.
This disquiet is far more glaring when it comes to relations with Russia
and China. Russia's quarrel with NATO over the stationing of its troops in
Kosova was followed by such ominous signs as holding its largest military
exercise since the end of the Cold War. Russia also announced in May that
it is developing a new generation of low-yield, pinpoint nuclear weapons.
This is part of Russia's adoption of a policy of first-use of nuclear
weapons, as a way to offset its military weakness.
Russia may appear to be in no position to seriously threaten the U.S.,
given its weak economy. Indeed, at the very moment Russia was objecting to
U.S. actions in the Balkans, Yeltsin came to Clinton hat in hand to ask for
another round of IMF loans. Yet Yeltsin is trying to compensate for
Russia's economic weakness by asserting himself on the political front.
This was seen in July when he invited Syria's Assad to Moscow, as part of
an effort to breathe new life into its relations with the Arab world,
though Clinton has the upper hand there.
Most important of all is Russia's strengthening ties with China. The
bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade infuriated China and led it to
freeze U.S.-China relations. Faced with ever-present worker and peasant
revolts-such as the massive peasant revolt in January in Dalin in Hunan
Province-China's rulers are playing the nationalist card to divert
attention from its internal crises. Though Clinton boasted last year about
a new "strategic partnership" with China, that phrase is now used by
China's rulers to refer to its ties with Russia, which it sees as a way to
counterbalance U.S. power.
Clearly numerous flashpoints for future conflicts and wars abound in our
nuclearly armed state-capitalist world, from relations between the major
powers to those between regional ones like India and Pakistan over Kashmir
where full-scale war can break out at any time. The notion that the war
over Kosova forebodes some "new era" defined by "humanitarian
interventions" is an empty illusion.
This is seen not only in the U.S.'s refusal to support independence for
Kosova or the Kurds, but in its silence about crises in Africa. In Congo,
the civil war this year displaced 500,000 from their homes, 200,000 of whom
have fled the country. In Angola, 1.2 million of its 13 million people have
been displaced since the renewal of its civil war. In Sudan, tens of
thousands of the Massaleit people have been killed this year in a genocidal
campaign carried out by the government. Just as the West earlier stood by
and did nothing while 800,000 were slaughtered in Rwanda, so none of these
crises have the ear of our "humanitarian" interventionists.
When it comes to Kosova, however, the prize for short-mindedness belongs to
the Left. Its disarray is seen in how its opposition to the war was
virtually indistinguishable from that of some rightists who also opposed
the bombing of Serbia.
The Left's response reveals all that is wrong with those who fail to see
the importance of a philosophy of liberation. The Left focused so much
attention on opposing the U.S. bombing of Serbia that it failed to take a
firm stand in support of the Kosovars. This was true not just of small left
groups, but of major intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and organizations like
the Black Radical Congress. Even those who paid lip service to the Kosovars
as victims refused to support the right of the KLA to obtain arms-though
this effectively meant allowing Milosevic to slaughter the Kosovars.
When the Left cannot even extend support to those facing genocide, it has
forsaken its ability to say anything meaningful about human liberation.
What we are seeing today is that the economic, political, and military
reach of the U.S. is so overwhelming that there is a tendency to accept
anything as an alternative to it, no matter how narrow or reactionary it
may be. Indeed, the U.S. drive for single world mastery is so overwhelming
that it is viewed as "enemy number one." In case the limitations of that
are not evident, one need only recall Mao's notion of "Russia as enemy
number one." He used it to justify allying with anyone, no matter how
reactionary, so long as it suited his agenda of opposing Russia. A not
dissimilar situation prevails today when it comes to the U.S. Some are
willing to make apologies for any power which opposes it, even if it is a
neo-fascist state like Serbia. Meanwhile, what drops from sight are the two
worlds within each country, the forces of liberation which can uproot
capitalism.
Perhaps no event since the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 has shown how total
is the ideological pollution in the Left. Stalin's 1939 pact with Hitler
gave the green light to World War II. The Left which followed Stalin turned
away from the anti-fascist struggle until Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. In
contrast, Raya Dunayevskaya responded to the crisis in thought revealed by
1939 by embarking on the labor that led to the theory of state-capitalism
and ultimately the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism.
Theory becomes truly practical when objective crises show a philosophy of
liberation to be a matter of concrete urgency. Such a situation faces us
today.
We have no illusions about the hypocrisy which guides U.S. actions in
Kosova or anywhere. But we do not allow opposition to U.S. imperialism to
stop us from recognizing that the way to oppose the forces of global
counter-revolution is to solidarize with those struggling against genocide.
What allowed us to project our distinctive position in support of Kosova
was not just that we held to certain political conclusions, but that we
approached the events from the standpoint of the Marxist-Humanist
philosophy of liberation. This philosophy, developed over half a century,
singled out the forces of revolution not just as force, but as Reason-that
is, as subjects of liberation reaching for a philosophy of liberation.
The war in Kosova was not only about the force of arms, it was also part of
a struggle for the minds of humanity. This was seen at a NATO summit held
right before the war, which formalized the inclusion of Poland, Hungary,
and the Czech Republic into NATO. Polish Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek
and others declared that NATO's expansion "validated the deeds of those who
revolted against Soviet domination in the Budapest uprising of 1956, the
Prague Spring of 1968, and the Solidarity movement that was born in Gdansk,
Poland" in 1980.
This totally distorts history. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 which pried
Marx's humanist essays of 1844 from the archives, the Prague Spring of 1968
with its slogan "Socialism with a human face," and the Polish Solidarity
movement of 1980-81 which projected a concept of workers' control of
production are reduced to a straight line of march to Western capitalism.
The rulers are trying to erase from memory the Reason of the East European
masses who aspired for a new humanism opposed to both private and
state-capitalism, and so convince humanity that it has no choice but to
place its destiny in the hands of state powers like the U.S.
What makes this such a serious problem today is that for so many the idea
of socialism has been discredited. It means that emerging struggles do not
speak in the language of revolution that we have been accustomed to hearing
in earlier struggles. This does not mean the quest for a new way of life
has been stilled. It means that this quest is not easily voiced and worked
out in the absence of a clear anti-capitalist alternative.
It is imperative that revolutionaries face the reorganization demanded by
this situation, otherwise they will be unable to impact ongoing events. To
make explicit the striving for a different future which is implicit in
today's struggles, it is necessary to meet them with a philosophy which
itself embodies the Reason which has inhered in the freedom movements of
our time. Such a philosophy is Marxist-Humanism.
It is not just that the retrogressive times in which we live show a "need"
for philosophy. It is that without such a philosophy of liberation it is
impossible to penetrate beneath the appearance of political crises and
discern the aspirations of the actual human forces of opposition who are
trying to be heard, but whose voice is being subsumed by reigning
ideologies and crises. Marxist-Humanism is as integral to the historic
development of the past half century as the revolutionary developments
created by the masses. Bringing this body of ideas to bear upon reality is
not a matter of applying certain concepts to reality, but rather of
elucidating from reality the nodal points of forward movement embedded
within it.
This is needed, not only for approaching events in the Balkans, but for
each objective and subjective crisis which confronts us here at home.
II. New battles on the homefront
The oppression of the Kosovars is rooted in the racist attitudes that
characterize not just the Balkans but this entire stage of globalized
capitalism. Nowhere is that racism spelled out more sharply than in the
conditions confronting Black America. Its lethal forms are measured in
everything from the rates of young Black male homicides and Black infant
mortality, to the level of Black unemployment in urban centers and the
staggering percentage of Black and Brown youth in prison.
While most of this "everyday" racism rarely rates national headlines,
except when it explodes into a 1992 Los Angeles rebellion, it cannot be
separated from the acute form it has taken this year with the growth of
deadly home-grown fascism-as seen in the shooting spree in the Chicago area
by Benjamin Smith, who celebrated the Fourth of July by gunning down Jews,
Blacks and Asians, killing two and wounding nine in the name of a "racial
holy war" before he killed himself. Nothing more proves that the Littleton,
Colorado massacre-carried out by two other well-off, alienated suburban
teenagers to celebrate Hitler's birthday and that likewise ended in their
suicide-was no aberration. The news that two brothers in California had
been charged with a spate of synagogue burnings and the murder of two gay
men there gives a sense both of how extensive is this home-grown fascism
and how closely it identifies itself with what transpired in Kosova as seen
in the fliers left after the synagogue burnings that blamed a "Jew world
order" for the war in Kosova.
The proliferation of hate groups like the World Church of the Creator, to
which Smith belonged, is seen in over 250 media-savy neo-Nazi groups now
recruiting on the Internet. Many of these groups are aiming at well-to-do,
upper-to-middle-class suburban youths. As one older Black worker told
N&L,"Never before has the alienation been so extreme that young people like
these killers, who seem to have everything, are willing to even give their
own lives to preserve the status quo."
This is not the only sign of the decaying foundations upon which U.S.
capitalism is driving for single world mastery. Clinton's much-touted
"poverty tour" in July reveals the alienation that Marx showed defines
relations in capitalism, which denies humanity its human-ness by perversely
turning all relations into relations between things. The very language used
on his trip shows how everything is being subjected to the logic of capital.
Those barely eking out an existence in Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta,
the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation or an urban ghetto in California, were
all defined as mere "human capital" while the excessively depressed sites
were seen as "responsible markets" and sources of cheap wage labor. In
Watts, where the unemployment rate is three times the national average, we
were told that such pockets of poverty offer a great untapped market that
will keep the economy growing without inflation if Clinton can just
convince Congress to approve $1 million in Federal tax incentives to
encourage $5 billion in private investment.
As against such free market fantasies, the areas Clinton visited all have a
rich revolutionary history. All of them have been and remain integral to
the development of Marxist-Humanism. The most powerful of these historic
struggles was the coal miners' general strike that erupted 50 years ago. It
was the first strike against automation, and broke out where it was first
introduced into the labor process, in the coal fields of West Virginia and
Kentucky-the very area Clinton just visited, evidently completely unaware
of its revolutionary history. What brings this anniversary front and center
is that in the 1949-50 strike workers raised a new and profound question
that remains to be worked out today.
Whereas the question on workers' minds before the strike concerned the
fruits of one's labor, which translated into wages and benefits in a union
contract, in 1949-50 the workers opposed automation in the form of the
continuous miner, which they called "a man killer." In going out on wildcat
strike against the company and union, the strikers posed the question of
"what kind of labor should man do?" The roots of Marxist-Humanism are found
in the way in which Raya Dunayevskaya saw that question as making concrete
for our age Marx 's vision of ending the division between mental and manual
labor, which he called the hallmark of capitalist alienation.
(2)
Such a search for a different future has characterized our era's struggles.
In the 1970s, the Native American movement awakened the whole world. It has
not ended, as seen in the protest that took place a week before Clinton's
tour of Pine Ridge, when 2,000 Oglala Sioux marched from there to
Whiteclay, Neb. to protest treaty violations and unsolved slayings. Clinton
said nothing of this in his offer of tax credits and loans to address its
85% unemployment rate.
In the 1970s, Shainape Shcapwe, an Oglala Sioux woman resident of Pine
Ridge, wrote about the attempt of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to develop
small factories on the reservations and how workers organized a strike
against conditions in them. The movement's most important accomplishment,
she said, was "not that we found ways to make the white man listen to us,
but that we created a new awareness of our own strength and ability." What
the workers most needed to still work out, she said, was "Where do we go
now?" In her effort to answer that, she opposed others in the Native
American movement who rejected Marxism and argued that alienation was not
within their culture. She pointed to the sexism within the movement and
called it one of the deepest forms of alienation yet to be overcome.
Dunayevskaya's concept of "woman as force and Reason of revolution," she
wrote, gave her a direction not only to dig into Marx's ETHNOLOGICAL
NOTEBOOKS to see the distinctiveness of Marx's Marxism, but also into
Marxist-Humanism as a philosophy that "speaks to what we really want,
especially what we want after the revolution."(3)
This reaching for the future is seen in a different way with young Black
women workers in the Mississippi Delta who have been organizing unions in
the catfish industry where they had been told none were possible. Yet they
say the changes that are needed "go deeper" than unionism.
Describing a discussion held at a recent conference to plan for a workers'
school, one Black woman activist said, "We made a lot of changes [since the
Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s] but the chains aren't just around the
ankles. There are mental chains, and that's what needs breaking...People
want this society to change; they want the workplace to change, but they
don't know how to go about it. Unionism is an important part of making
changes and people see it needs to be improved and the political structure
needs to be changed... But to change our society, not just as a Black race,
but as a whole, we need to look more at changing the mind and not stop at
changing the unions."
There is no question that the most abysmal form of the alienation
characterizing capitalism today is found in the prison system. With the
warehousing of a whole generation on lock-down, the new millennium will
arrive with the prison walls cracking at maximum capacity. The huge growth
in the number of women prisoners and the degradation they are subjected to
has led to a new movement of women in the "free world" demanding that these
conditions be changed.
A whole new economy has grown out of the "celling" of America, a
prison-industrial complex in which the prison population, Black, Brown and
white, grinds out production for multi-million dollar corporations looking
for ever cheaper and cheaper labor. It is no accident that Huntsville Walls
Unit in Texas, where labor is exploited with no pay to the convict, has
been named by prisoners "the Lone Star State's Death Factory," where "state
murders are cranked out in assembly line fashion." It easily makes George
Bush Jr., as governor of a state whose press releases proudly proclaim it
to be "the largest prison system in the free world," the greatest serial
killer in U.S. history. What is integral to such a vicious system is the
attempt to dehumanize those whom this society puts in chains.
What is arising against this attempt to destroy the human spirit is a quest
for a new humanism. It is proved by two events we have experienced over the
past year. One is our pamphlet VOICES FROM WITHIN THE PRISON WALLS, written
by a prisoner who elicited our help in achieving a back-and-forth with
hundreds of prisoners. The other is the torrent of responses we have
received to it, in which prisoners not only describe the oppressive
conditions but raise profound questions of philosophy and politics, history
and current events, of the human condition as a whole. Here are but two of
the responses:
One Black prisoner, commenting on our critique of the Left for its
failure to respond to genocide in Kosova, quotes one of Dunayevskaya's
writings on the need "for the Left to face itself...None of the mass
revolts have suffered either from lack of sacrifice by both masses and
leaders. Nevertheless, what the past two decades have revealed is a
failure to meet the challenge from the masses. What was demanded was a
totally new relationship of theory to practice which was grounded in the
new movement from practice that was itself a form of theory." He sees in
this the need "to reach out to others not simply on prison issues but
issues of concern to all, where prison becomes the U.S. (in)justice
system's application of the 'Final Solution.' We have been involved in a
Civil War for several decades. The parties of this class war are the poor,
people of color, women, lesbian and gay rights activists, and humanists.
Non-conformity results in imprisonment. It is important that prisoners,
besides their own personal struggles inside the gulags, be involved with
the struggle to make revolution, a truly universal concept which
promulgates viable change."
Another prisoner writes of the impact on him of the recent articles in
N&L on Marx and Hegel: "What I am fascinated by-and terrified by-is Marx's
connection between the bourgeois perception of a commodity and theology.
The things we produce now appear to define who we are and how we relate to
one another. The intellectual may well be deceived in that s/he is
conditioned to the theology of the commodity, but the worker is equally
deceived in the belief that s/he is engaged in 'freely associated'
labor...I agree with Dunayevskaya that the 'proletarian' does indeed
'grasp the truth of the present'-I just think we are afraid of it."
The outpouring we have experienced from the deepest of "the voices from
below" shows that an ongoing relationship between a revolutionary body of
ideas and the subjects of revolt can elicit and help develop the most
revolutionary force of all-the mind of the oppressed. The challenge is to
develop such an active relationship between philosophy and revolution in
all emerging struggles.
One of the most vibrant of these is the movement against police abuse,
which was galvanized by the murders of Amadou Diallo in New York, Tyisha
Miller in Riverside, and LaTanya Haggerty and Robert Russ in Chicago. The
movement is not only national but multiethnic and crisscrosses with
solidarity with prisoners, the struggles against the death penalty, and the
effort to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. The intermerging of these movements brings
out the need to wage the struggle on the level of changing the whole of
society, and shows the todayness of the category of Black Masses as
Vanguard of the American revolution.
To fully confront what is involved in working out the needed relationship
between a revolutionary body of ideas and the subjects of revolt, we need
to take a closer look at the nature of the present historic moment ten
years after the collapse of the state-capitalist regimes which called
themselves "Communist" in Eastern Europe.
III. The untrodden path: Organizational responsibility for Marx's
philosophy of revolution
A. Ten years after the collapse of 'Communism'
The tenth anniversary of the collapse of the state-capitalist regimes that
called themselves "Communist" in East Europe is an important moment to
reflect on the meaning of that event for today. The speed with which the
"Communist" regimes collapsed in 1989 was surely unexpected. Yet it is not
as if it came out of thin air. It was preceded by some 40 years of mass
struggles. This included the East German revolt of 1953, the Vorkuta labor
camp uprising in Russia in 1953, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the
Prague Spring of 1968, and the workers' revolts in Poland in 1970 and 1976.
1980 marked a new stage in this long history of revolt. That was when a new
kind of trade union spontaneously arose in Poland-Solidarnosc. With over 10
million members, Solidarnosc brought together virtually all of Poland's
production workers with farmers, intellectuals and women's and community
groups in a new kind of workers' organization which directly challenged the
power of the Communist Party.
Faced with this, the Polish government declared martial law in 1981 and
drove Solidarnosc underground. But it failed to crush it. After Solidarnosc
launched two major strike waves in 1988, Poland's rulers realized that they
had little choice but to make a deal with it. In a series of roundtable
talks that began in early 1989, the government and the leaders of
Solidarnosc worked out an arrangement which led not to the revolutionary
uprooting demanded by so many in 1980, but rather to the dismantling of the
regime along the lines of "free market" capitalism and parliamentary
bourgeois democracy. What brought about this remarkable transformation into
opposite?
The question is not only important for understanding what happened in
Poland, for the roundtable talks there set the stage for events that soon
followed in the rest of East Europe. After a series of mass demonstrations
swept through East Europe in the Fall of 1989, and Russia announced that it
would not intervene militarily to support the regimes, the rulers realized
that they had little choice but to allow the opposition to come to power.
Unlike China's rulers, who crushed the Tiananmen revolt and relied on its
army to strengthen single-party rule while pursuing economic
"modernization," East Europe's rulers were forced to surrender their
monopoly on political power. In turn, the opposition leaders there agreed
to limit themselves to goals achievable within the framework of the
existing class structures. Those who argued for a more radical
transformation were quickly marginalized.
This had a global impact. It set the stage for events in South Africa where
the apartheid rulers were forced to strike a deal with Mandela, in which
they surrendered political power in exchange for the African National
Congress' dismantling of the mass movement.
The surprise of 1989 was not how fast the regimes collapsed, but how
quickly their collapse led to the ideological resurgence of Western
capitalism. What predominated was a return of the old. Neoliberalism in
economics and bourgeois democracy and narrow nationalism in politics
predominated everywhere.
This was all the more striking given the decrepit state of Western
capitalism which had become especially evident with the 1974-75 world
recession. It disclosed a deep, structural crisis and proved that the
post-World War II economic "boom" was over. But the 1974-75 global
recession crisis did not affect only Western capital; it also impacted
Russia and East Europe. Whereas Western capital embarked on a massive
restructuring after 1974-75 which included everything from new attacks on
labor to the use of new high-tech technologies to promoting the "free"
movement of capital across borders, the East European regimes found
themselves falling further behind. By the late 1980s, the ruling cliques in
Russia and East Europe realized their only hope for survival lay in some
sort of accommodation with Western capitalism.
As the economic crisis in East Asia in 1997 showed, capitalism has yet to
extract itself from the problems revealed by the 1974-75 recession.
According to a recent UN report, vast income inequities and lack of medical
facilities for billions around the world have become more acute over the
past decade. It is surely not any ability to resolve its economic problems
which explains the ideological resurgence of Western capitalism. Nor can
its resurgence be due to lack of creativity on the part of mass movements
in East Europe and elsewhere. So what does explain it?
The fundamental reason is that the principles of Marx's humanism were not
explicitly restated and projected through ongoing dialogue between
revolutionaries and the movements from practice. Stalinism had clearly
discredited the very idea of socialism by the 1980s. Yet the anti-Stalinist
Left did not project an alternative concept of socialism that could be
seized by the minds of the masses. This was already evident by 1981, when
the intellectuals advising Poland's Solidarnosc promoted the notion of a
"self-limiting revolution." Instead of fulfilling their historic
responsibility of meeting the mass movement with a restatement of Marx's
philosophy of revolution, they satisfied themselves with proposing partial
reforms. By 1989, this abdication of responsibility for articulating any
radical alternative enabled all the old ideas, like "free market
capitalism," to rush in and fill the void.
The events of 1989 underlined the importance of what Dunayevskaya called
several years earlier the "untrodden path" in the revolutionary movement
-the unity of philosophy and organization. It is not that what was needed
was "leadership" by some "vanguard." Rather, the problem, as she wrote in
1986, is that none "took organizational responsibility for Marx's
philosophy, not just of revolution 'in general,' but specifically the
question of what happens after the overthrow of capitalism."
(4)
Since 1989, an array of new freedom movements have arisen. Abroad, we have
seen the Zapatista revolt in Chiapas and the massive labor protests in West
Europe in 1995-97. At home, we have seen the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992,
a new generation of Black women worker-organizers in the Mississippi Delta,
and a nationwide movement in defense of political prisoners. These
struggles are in search of a concept of a new society which can help them
realize the revolutionary strivings contained in the mind of the oppressed.
The question is, will revolutionaries respond to this challenge, or will
they continue to evade organizational responsibility for Marx's philosophy
of "revolution in permanence"?
B. The new moments of Marx and Marxist-Humanism
In the decade since the events of 1989, new developments have arisen not
only from practice, but also from theory. This is seen in new discussions
and debates on Marx's work, despite the prevailing ideological notion that
Marxism is dead.(5)
As we noted last year about the conferences and discussions on the 150th
anniversary of Marx's COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, many are being hit with a shock
of recognition concerning the relevance of Marx for understanding our
globalized capitalist world. Yet while there is an emerging sense of the
need to return to Marx to grasp globalized capitalism, few are projecting
Marx's concept of the alternative to it. Even those who recognize the
importance of restating Marx's concept of socialism act as if the task can
be left to spontaneous action, as if theoreticians do not have a crucial
role to play in speaking to what upsurges from below.
In response, this year we held a nationwide series of classes on "The
Dialectic of Marx's CAPITAL and Today's Global Crises." In them we explored
CAPITAL in light of its underlying Hegelian foundations by including as a
core reading Dunayevskaya's "Rough Notes on Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC ,"
which will appear in a new forthcoming collection of her writings on
dialectical philosophy, "The Power of Negativity." Studying CAPITAL in
light of Hegel's LOGIC is crucial not only for grasping the logic of
capital. It is also crucial for projecting its alternative. The Hegelian
dialectic of negativity signifies not just the destruction of the old, but
the creation of the new through the "negation of the negation." Hegel's
concept of "absolute negativity," Marxist-Humanism holds, contains the
philosophic expression of the struggle for total freedom. Our study of
Marx's CAPITAL and the "Rough Notes on Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC " was part
of an effort to fill the void in the restatement of Marx's concept of a new
society.
One part of CAPITAL which we focused on, and which speaks directly to our
age, is its concluding section on "the absolute general law of capitalist
accumulation." As Dunayevskaya argued from as early as her 1953 "Letters on
Hegel's Absolutes," the "philosophic moment" for the entire development of
Marxist-Humanism, Marx's chapter on "the absolute general law of capitalist
accumulation" is based on Hegel's Absolute Idea. In a letter of May 12,
1953, she said that just as the Absolute Idea in Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC
contains "the highest contradiction within itself," Marx showed that the
logic of capitalist production contains an internal, irreconcilable,
absolute contradiction-the accumulation of capital at one pole and the
emergence of "new passions and new forces" striving to uproot it at the
other.
Yet what is distinctive about Dunayevskaya is that she did not stop by
pointing out the connection between Hegel's Absolute Idea and Marx's
accumulation of capital. That became for her a new beginning as it signaled
the need to go even deeper into the dialectic by venturing into the work
intimated at the end of the LOGIC, the PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. In that work
Hegel projects his concept of full-blown liberty which he calls
"individualism which lets nothing interfere with its universalism."
Marx had broken off his commentary on the PHILOSOPHY OF MIND with ¶384 in his 1844 Manuscripts. Without being conscious of this at the time, Dunayevskaya b
egan her commentary on the PHILOSOPHY OF MIND with ¶385. This also led to
her philosophic break from post-Marx Marxism, as no prior Marxist-whether
Lenin, Lukacs or her then-colleague and co-founder of the Johnson-Forest
Tendency, C.L.R. James-had recognized the importance of Hegel's PHILOSOPHY
OF MIND. In exploring the PHILOSOPHY OF MIND in a letter of May 20, 1953,
Dunayevskaya achieved continuity with Marx's Marxism in light of the
realities of our age.
Marxist-Humanism's contribution centers on this movement from the LOGIC to
the PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. For it poses the challenge of meeting the forces of
revolt arising against the accumulation of capital with a full-fledged
notion of freedom. As Dunayevskaya said in a 1958 letter to Herbert Marcuse
which will appear in "The Power of Negativity," our task is to "make the
abolition of the division of mental and manual labor as concrete for our
day as Marx had made 'the absolute general law' of capitalism concrete for
the movement of 'the new passions and new forces' for the establishment of
the new society."
To work this out for today, we need a closer look at what Marx meant by a
new kind of freely associated labor. He addressed this in his 1875 Critique
of the Gotha Program: "In a higher phase of communist society, after the
enslaving subordination of individuals under the division of labor, and
therewith also the antithesis between mental and manual labor, has
vanished; after labor, from a mere means of life, has itself become the
prime necessity of life; after the productive forces have also increased
with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of
cooperative wealth flow more abundantly-only then can the narrow horizon of
bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banner:
from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
This vision took on new concreteness in the post-World War II era, when
workers battling automated production posed such questions as "what kind of
labor should man perform?" As we noted earlier, this was central to the
1949-50 miners' general strike where workers focused not only on the
distribution of the products of labor but on conditions of labor.
Dunayevskaya drew from this that the question of "what kind of labor" had
to be worked out in the very course of the freedom struggles in order to
realize the "quest for universality."
Creating a new kind of non-alienating labor, however, is not only a class
question. It is inseparable from the question raised by the women's
liberation movement of how to uproot alienated man/woman relations. The
women's movement's critique of the family and man/woman relations raises
the issue of how to develop non-alienating forms of social relations that
break down the division between thinking and doing. The same is true of the
struggle of the Black masses against racism which has raised the question
of consciousness of self, of gaining a mind of one's own, in the fight
against the ultimate thingification of human relations-racism. The quest
for new, non-alienating human relations is likewise central to youth's
struggle against parental authority which Marx called a "cruel substitute
for all the submissiveness and dependency people in bourgeois society
acquiesce in, willingly or unwillingly.'"(6)
Abolishing capitalism clearly involves far more than changing property
relations, deeds of ownership, or eliminating the personifications of
capital-the capitalists and bureaucrats. The abolition of capital requires
the creation of new social relations which dispense with the division
between mental and manual labor.
The questions and demands posed by the multiple forces of revolt is where
the work of projecting an alternative to capitalism begins. But it is not
where it ends. For these forces are themselves in need of a philosophy of
revolution rooted in the dialectic of negativity. Recognition of that is
what drove Dunayevskaya to dig into the Hegelian dialectic as early as
1949, during the miners' general strike. Her studies on dialectics in that
period, some of which will appear in "The Power of Negativity," led her to
explore Hegel's Absolute Idea and Absolute Mind in 1953. The philosophic
breakthrough of 1953 led to the projection of a new concept of organization
rooted in a unity between forces of liberation and a philosophy of
liberation.
The tragedy of our times is that this new unity has yet to be realized. In
the post-World War II era many revolutionaries tailended one or another
form of state exploitation calling itself "socialist," cutting themselves
off from the "new passions and new forces" as well as from recognition of
the need to restate Marx's vision of a new society. Their limitations,
however, are rather easy to see. No less important are those who did oppose
the state-capitalist regimes on revolutionary grounds and who did try to
root themselves in the new passions and new forces-but who fell down by
saddling the spontaneous struggles with the responsibility for spelling out
Marx's vision of a new society. This was the case with tendencies ranging
from the Council Communists to anarchists to followers of C.L.R. James.
None took organizational responsibility for projecting philosophy as a
force of revolution, specifically, one rooted in a restatement of the
dialectic of absolute negativity for our life and times.
C. From LOGIC to MIND: Concretizing absolute negativity as new beginning
We do not view ourselves as outside this problem. For we were so excited by
the mass subjectivities that arose in the post-World War II era that we
were hardly as concrete about taking organizational responsibility for
Marxist-Humanism's philosophic contributions. Dunayevskaya spoke to this in
a speech given to News and Letters Committees in 1976, entitled "Our
Original Contribution to the Dialectic of the Absolute Idea as New
Beginning: In Theory, and Leadership, and Practice":
Whether we take our very founders, Marx and Lenin, or any of the Hegelian
Marxists: Lukacs when he was at his best, Marcuse when he was at his best,
Adorno when he was at his best, the East Europeans when they were at their
best-in an actual revolution-NO ONE, no one, had formulated or even given
us any indication that if you are going to break your head over [Hegel's]
Absolute Idea, IT WOULD BE AS NEW BEGINNING. THAT'S OUR ORIGINAL
CONTRIBUTION. That's our original contribution. It isn't only that we did
this great thing by saying Absolute isn't absolute in the ordinary sense of
the word-it's the unity of theory and practice; Absolute isn't absolute in
the bourgeois sense of the word-it's the question of the unity of the
material and the ideal. But who ever said Absolute was a new beginning?
None but us. And if we don't understand that original contribution-THAT WE
HAVE TO BEGIN WITH THE TOTALITY-then we won't know what a new beginning is.
A new beginning could just be that we discovered the four forces of
revolution. We're certainly very proud of that-but that isn't all we're
saying. In fact, I would say that if there's anything we do understand,
it's the movement from practice. We certainly have that embedded in our
being. We DO understand that part of the Absolute. We do not understand the
other part, Absolute Idea as second negativity. And until we do understand
it, we will not be able to project.
This stress on working out Absolute Negativity as New Beginning, which is
central to Dunayevskaya's PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION, was at the heart of
all she developed from then to the end of her life. It remains our
fundamental challenge. New forces of revolt clearly will arise. But what is
not clear is whether the IDEA of SECOND negativity-which signifies not just
the negation of the old but the creation of the new-will be projected anew.
For this reason, this year we took the step of publishing in four issues of
our newspaper the "Rough Notes on Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC." It is also why
we put together "The Power of Negativity." We aim to assume responsibility
not just for the forms of struggle and consciousness which comes from
below, but for the projection of the idea of absolute negativity itself.
As Dunayevskaya put it in ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND MARX'S
PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION, "Absolute negativity manifests its pivotal role
in the Idea precisely because it is both totality (summation) and new
beginning, which each generation must first work out for itself....It is
not a question only of meeting the challenge from practice, but of being
able to meet the challenge from the self-determination of the Idea, and of
deepening theory to the point where it reaches Marx's concept of
'revolution in permanence.'" (p. 194-5)
This was the point of departure for her work on "The Dialectics of
Organization and Philosophy" in 1986-87. Though her work on this was left
unfinished at the time of her death in 1987, she left important indications
of where she was headed in a series of writings in which she returned with
new eyes to her 1953 Letters on Hegel's Absolutes. What became newly
concrete was the way the 1953 Letters moved from the Absolute Idea in
Hegel's LOGIC to Hegel's PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. She now viewed this movement
in terms of the challenges facing revolutionary organization itself.
(7)
Working out the organizational ramifications of the 1953 Letters for today
requires recognizing that the mind of the oppressed which arises from
spontaneous mass struggles is not the same as the full-fledged vision of
liberation which flows from a revolutionary body of ideas. This does not
mean that working out the dialectics of organization frees one from
responsibility for working out new relations between philosophy and the
movements from practice that are themselves a form of theory. Quite the
contrary. As Dunayevskaya put it in 1986, "Let us not forget that a form of
theory is not yet philosophy. Rather, it is the challenge to the
theoretician to end the one-sidedness of theory, as practice is challenged
to end its one-sidedness so that theory and practice can create a new
unity, the new relationship of practice to theory in order finally to reach
the realization of philosophy."
"In a word we must face what we consider the burning question of
today-ORGANIZATION AS INSEPARABLE FROM THE IDEA, i.e., Marx's philosophy of
revolution vs. the visage of Hitler and the ongoing reality of
Reaganism."(8)
IV. Philosophic-Political-Organizational Tasks
Taken together with Marxist-Humanism's major works, the projection of the
new collection "The Power of Negativity," for which we are now seeking a
publisher, creates an opening for making the dialectic of negativity
central in all our work. Part I of "The Power of Negativity" contains the
1953 Letters as well as an important commentary on it. Part II contains
summaries of Hegel's major works as well as letters to Herbert Marcuse who
asked "why do you need the Absolute Idea to express the subjectivity of
self-liberation." Part III contains lectures and essays on dialectical
philosophy and forces of revolt, especially the Black dimension. Part IV
contains studies of the Hegel-Marx relation, a critique of Lukacs, and a
speech to the Hegel Society of America on "Hegel's Absolutes as New
Beginning." Part V contains essays on the relation of dialectics to women's
liberation and youth as well as on dialectics of organization.
In focusing on "The Power of Negativity," this Plenum needs to demonstrate
that the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism can become the energizing principle
of outreach, action and elicitation. As part of our follow-through from our
CAPITAL classes, we propose issuing a pamphlet on Marx's value theory, to
explore today's economic reality and ongoing debates on the relevance of
Marx. We also plan to issue a pamphlet on Queer Theory, as part of our work
on the subjectivity of sexuality. We also aim to complete the work on the
Marxist-Humanist Statement on the Black Dimension, "Reason, Rebellion, and
Revolution." These new publications are part of our effort to deepen our
dialogue and activity with forces of revolt.
This year we also made important steps in participating in the battle of
ideas, as seen in Marxist-Humanists contributing to a new book on Frantz
Fanon, a book of Marx's writings on suicide, and to ongoing debates on
dialectics of organization and value theory in Left journals. Furthering
such battle of ideas in NEWS & LETTERS newspaper, in which ideas are
developed inseparable from voices from below and analyses of ongoing world
events, remains an ongoing challenge. As part of furthering our
organizational growth and outreach, we wish to undertake a major
subscription drive this year as follow-through from the modest beginnings
we made this year in tying such a drive to projection of VOICES FROM WITHIN
THE PRISON WALLS. This will be the core of our work around meeting our
financial responsibilities, for which we will need an additional $45,000
sustaining fund for the continuance of N&L.
We will also have to ensure that the major philosophic works of
Marxist-Humanism remain in print. We have obtained a new edition of MARXISM
AND FREEDOM, and we will now have to obtain one of PHILOSOPHY AND
REVOLUTION. We have also achieved a new step in the internationalization of
Marxist-Humanism this year with the Chinese edition of MARXISM AND FREEDOM
and German edition of ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND MARX'S
PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION, as well as with the new Marxist-Humanist
organization and journal in England, HOBGOBLIN.
Of foremost importance is our responsibility for the Archives of
Marxist-Humanism. At a moment when the rulers are trying to erase the very
memory of humanity's effort to transcend the horizons of capitalism,
projecting the Idea of freedom embodied in the historic-philosophic
development of Marxist-Humanism becomes the way to develop the
revolutionary potential of the mind of the oppressed. Nothing short of that
will put us on the path of dialectics of organization.
NOTES
1. See our analyses of Kosova in the April, May, June and July issues of
NEWS & LETTERS, as well as BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA: ACHILLES HEEL OF WESTERN
'CIVILIZATION' (Chicago: News and Letters, 1997).
[back]
2. For Dunayevskaya's participation in the 1949-50 strike and how it helped
lead to Marxist-Humanism, see THE COAL MINERS' GENERAL STRIKE OF 1949-50
AND THE BIRTH OF MARXIST-HUMANISM IN THE U.S. (Chicago: News and Letters,
1984).
[back]
3. BLACK, BROWN AND RED (Detroit: News and Letters, 1972); see also
Shainape Shcapwe'S column in the December 1985 NEWS & LETTERS.
[back]
4. "Marx's New Moments and Those of Our Age," reprinted in NEWS & LETTERS,
October 1998.
[back]
5. For these discussions, see our bulletin, ON THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE
'COMMUNIST MANIFESTO' (Chicago: News and Letters, 1998).
[back]
6. This comment is from Marx's 1845 essay "Peuchet on Suicide," which has
recently been published along with an Introduction by Kevin Anderson in
MARX ON SUICIDE (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999).
[back]
7. Dunayevskaya's work in progress on "Dialectics of Organization and
Philosophy" can be found in Vol. 13 of SUPPLEMENT TO THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA
COLLECTION. For her return to Hegel's PHILOSOPHY OF MIND in 1987, see
"Presentation on the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy of June 1,
1987," in THE PHILOSOPHIC MOMENT OF MARXIST-HUMANISM (Chicago: News and
Letters, 1989).
[back]
8. "Marx's New Moments and Those of Our Age," reprinted in NEWS & LETTERS,
October 1998.
[back]
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