Part I: A World Divided between the Heroic Resistance and Complicity in Genocide

In May 2024, two events coincided in a way that revealed the wretchedness into which the U.S. has sunk as it faces the real possibility of a return to office of the fascist Donald Trump.

First, Trump was finally convicted of a crime, that of election interference, by a New York jury. This was followed by chest-thumping cries of foul by the entire Trumpist Republican Party, who challenged the very rule of law itself. For their part, mainstream liberals applauded a great victory for the rule of law, which they vowed to stand behind to the end.

Second, during the same week, those very liberals completely rejected the rule of law when they joined their Trumpist sworn enemies in inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to receive the high honor of addressing a joint session of Congress. This occurred within days of Netanyahu being recommended for indictment for genocide by the International Criminal Court of the United Nations, the same court that has indicted state criminals like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Sudan’s Omar al Bashir.

As these U.S. politicians were either egging on Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza or making weak gestures about slowing it down, Gaza had already fallen into famine. Famine is most acute in northern Gaza, where people have started to trickle back to their bombed-out homes. According to the United Nations World Food Program head Cindy McCain, “There is a famine – full blown famine in the north, and it’s moving its way south” (Liam Stack et al., “Parts of Gaza Are in ‘Full-Blown Famine,’ U.N. Aid Official Says,” New York Times, May 5, 2024).

Even in the face of genocide, the people of Gaza have refused to give up, to surrender. They are not turning in Hamas fighters, nor have they tried to flee across the border in large numbers, which may be Israel’s real war aim. As the Palestinian writer Elias Sanbar explained the startling absence of people fleeing across the border into Egypt:

This surprise is explained by two factors: Hamas put up an unexpected level of resistance, and all Gazans know this – like all Palestinians since the Nakba – that if one leaves, one cannot return. In light of the attacks to which it is exposed, the population massed at Rafah could easily blow up the Egyptian gates at Rafah and leave Gaza in order to find refuge in the Sinai. But it doesn’t do that, because it has grasped that this would be the end of living at home, on their land. The massacres could become more terrible and we could see an exodus. But for now, the Gazans hold firm. They refuse to leave the scene. (“Elias Sanbar ‘Netanyahou et les colons jouent l’irrémediable’,” interview with Benjamin Barthe, Le Monde, May 7, 2024)

Sanbar emphasized that the last several years have seen a series of very well-crafted collective statements by Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli detention, including the noted leader Marwan Barghouti. United in the Administrative Prisoners Committee, their statements, which sometimes take months to make their way out of these prison hellholes, have addressed “the government [of the Palestinian authority], the factions, the resistance, the people, the institutions and the international community” (“Freedom Revolution — Administrative Detainees’ Intifada: Prisoners’ movement announces 18 June hunger strike,” Samidoun, June 5, 2023 https://samidoun.net/2023/06/freedom-revolution-administrative-detainees-intifada-prisoners-movement-announces-18-june-hunger-strike/ )

The Palestinian writer Hala Alyan also noted the decision of the people of Gaza not to flee across the border, but connected it to the student protests that have surged across the U.S. and several other countries:

One of the most poignant moments of these horrific months has been watching Palestinians say, I will not leave here. Many were then killed in the homes they refused to leave — while others were killed in the “safe zones” they evacuated to. The encampments we’ve seen erected on campuses interact with this phenomenon: Protesters enter a space and say, We will not leave here. They say, We will not leave here because elsewhere people are cleared out of homes and hospitals and universities in dismembered parts, and mothers recognize their dead children from the inked names on their forearms. (“Are Protests a Turning Point for Support of Palestinians?” Los Angeles Times, May 9, 2024).

The deep resolve of the Palestinian people and of their supporters around the world, particularly the youth, is in the process of creating a new generation of revolutionaries. Their encampments at universities are a mild but nonetheless significant echo of the tent encampments of those suffering genocidal attacks inside Gaza.

Nowhere is this truer than in California, where students have staged dozens of encampments, often suffering arrests, police beatings, suspensions, and doxxing. Still, they have persisted. At UCLA, in the heart of Los Angeles, less than a mile from a major Federal Building, a rightwing Zionist mob composed of hundreds attacked the Palestine encampment in the early hours of May 1. They were armed with sticks, iron bars, and all kinds of injurious sprays. To be sure, these reactionaries were probably unaware that this was International Workers Day. What they were aware of is that the daily massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, it’s condoned at the highest levels in the U.S., both locally and nationally, plus the overall breaches of democratic norms by the Trumpist fascists, might give them a new kind of opening. They were right. University and local police stood by for three hours and did nothing while the students were left to fend for themselves, which they did tolerably well. Luckily, no one was killed. Moreover, the encampment was cleared by police soon the next day, with a number of students arrested. As to the mob, only one of the attackers has been arrested, and this is over three weeks later, even though video footage makes a number of them identifiable. By “coincidence” the first arrest took place a day after UCLA Chancellor Eugene Block was grilled about the attack by Representative Ilhan Omar during Congressional testimony in Washington.

And while the liberal mainstream tried to forget that May 1 at UCLA had ever happened, students certainly did not. By the end of May, they had begun a strike based on the notion that administrative failure to stop the fascist mob and arbitrary arrests of student protestors, many of them graduate teaching assistants or lecturers, constituted unfair labor practices because they endangered them as campus workers. At their strike rallies, one can find Palestine flags alongside signs from the United Auto Workers (UAW), their union. Under the recently elected reform leadership of Shawn Fain, the UAW has exhibited a new militancy and begun organizing in the South, while also calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Two really serious possibilities of new forms of solidarity have emerged as a result of the unions coming out against the Gaza war. First, this strike raises the possibility that the side of the UAW representing these intellectual workers could connect more to the autoworkers who have long formed the basis of the union. If so, we could have the type of unity of worker and intellectual out of which truly radical change can happen.  Second, as with Tahrir Square in 2011 or Occupy in 2011-12, there is something to be said for the experience of staying together and sharing resources and dangers as part of an occupation or encampment. This not only builds solidarity, but it can also give participants a glimpse of genuinely new social relations, whether those of mutual aid or even a taste of what real communism might look like.

These remarks are not intended to minimize the destructive gravity of the situation we face in 2024. In the U.S., forces of reaction are mobilizing, not only the Trumpist fascists but also the Israel Lobby and its supporters, which encompass the dominant wing of the Democratic Party as well. That is a big part of why we’ve yet to see arrests of those engaged in the May 1 mob attack. Will the dominant classes, divided as they are over Trumpism, still be able to unite, even in dreadful competition with each other, to repress this new generation of revolutionaries? In this regard, the bipartisan congressional invitation to the genocidal criminal Netanyahu is not encouraging. Nor are the similar positions taken by most of the governments of the European Union countries, with Germany the worst case in this regard.

Nor should we underestimate just how deeply Israel’s genocidal war policies are rooted in that country’s overall political/military/economic structure. As French scholar Samy Cohen notes, those who think simply pressuring Netanyahu will achieve a peaceful settlement with a free Palestine often underestimate how much Israel has moved to the right. (1) Netanyahu will not bend because his government’s very survival depends on the far right, the actual fascists who openly declare they want the occupied territories cleared of Palestinians. (2) Should any attempt be made as part of a peace agreement to remove the West Bank colonizing Jewish settlements, it should be noted that huge quantities of arms have recently been distributed to them by the fascist Itamar Ben Gvir, Minister of Security. (3) Should the army be ordered to clear some settlements, it should be remembered that by now the top infantry units have large proportions of religious Zionists, many of them from the settlements. Would they follow any such order, especially if their rabbis tell them to disobey?

Also consider Yair Lapid, the most important opposition leader, who stated recently that “if the Palestinians were to prove that they were as placid as the Swiss, as pacifist as the Dutch… we would be prepared to separate from them. This would mean a process that would last years and the burden of proof would be on them” (Samy Cohen, “Ceux qui appellant à un cessez-le-feu et à la creation d’un État palestinien éludent les contradictions d’un tel scenario,” Le Monde, June 4, 2024). As to the universities, protest is being marginalized if not muzzled by pro-war voices. When on May 22 some 400 Israeli professors signed an appeal for a ceasefire in exchange for a return of the hostages, the national union of Israeli students responded with a call for the firing of dissident professors and for the defunding of any universities that did not adopt such measures (Samuel Forey, “En Israel, les universités menaces de boycott,” Le Monde, June 5, 2024).

At the same time, the overall logic of the situation since October 7 is pointing toward some type of forced pullback by Israel, at least in the long run. For one thing, Israel has no hope of eradicating Hamas, nor of armed Palestinian resistance more generally. Even now, the areas of northern Gaza supposedly cleared of Hamas are seeing new attacks on Israeli soldiers. Second, the absolutely genocidal tactic of starving out Gaza, should it reach full-blown famine visible to the world, will cause both an even more powerful surge of protests and these, combined with generalized humanitarian pressure, will force some sort of weakening of Israel’s support from the U.S./UK/EU. Obvious levers that could be applied here would include arms or trade embargoes. It should be remembered that Israel is not only hugely dependent on arms from its allies, especially the U.S., but also, as economist Thomas Piketty has reminded us recently, “70% of Israel’s exports go to the EU and the U.S.,” thus giving economic boycotts or sanctions tremendous potential leverage (“Pour un État binational Israel-Palestine,” Le Monde, May 13, 2024). Third, big capital, whether Chinese, “Western,” or otherwise, is not happy to see a huge portion of Suez Canal maritime traffic now requiring expensive rerouting as a result of ongoing attacks on Red Sea shipping by Yemeni Houthis supportive of the Palestinians. Finally, threats of instability in Egypt, whose economy is suffering the most from the diminution of Suez traffic, as well as threats of uprisings in other Arab countries, or even predominantly Muslim ones more generally, are also something the global dominant classes would like to mitigate. Recall here that Egypt allowed an official pro-Palestine demonstration in late 2023, but soon had its police disperse the demonstrators when they started chanting anti-regime slogans and headed toward Tahrir Square. At a less dramatic level, the recent defeat at the polls of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s conservative Islamist party in Turkey has been ascribed, at least in part, to attacks on his hypocritical policy of verbally denouncing Israel’s genocide while continuing trade relations, even in the military sphere.

In this sense, time may be on our side in the long run. Unfortunately, people live in the short run, and the immediate issue is stopping the deliberate famine and other forms of genocide against Gaza. The threat of fascism in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere is also real and immediate. Only if the present global protests can deepen and extend themselves much, much further, might we be able to see the hand of genocide stay, let alone real steps toward a free Palestine.

As mentioned above, Palestinian writer Hala Alyan perceives deep links between today’s pro-Palestine protests between the student protestors and the millions of women, men, and children living under the direct impact of genocide in Gaza. We could also talk about other links on similar, if happier occasions, as in how the spirit of the Arab revolutions spread across the world in 2011-12, sparking the Occupy movement and the Indignados in Spain.

How can we think about such solidarities, and also about solidarities inside countries like the U.S., France, or Turkey, where ethnic or racial minorities suffer double oppression and also form loci of resistance not just to racial or ethnic oppression, but also to the system as a whole?  This is why Marxist-Humanists have always spoken of Black masses as vanguard in the U.S., why we’ve seen groups like the Kurds in Turkey and Syria playing leading roles. It is also why we have pointed to the deep racial divide in places like France, as evidenced by the massive anti-police uprising there in 2023 by youth of color in impoverished suburbs and city neighborhoods, whose votes helped bar the way to fascism in the July 2024 elections.

What did Karl Marx think about these kinds of divides, whether across the global economic/political system or among the working people and other revolutionary forces inside a particular society?  Let us explore those issues, also drawing some organizational conclusions for today.

Part II: The Late Marx for Today: Multilinear, Multiethnic Pathways to Revolution and Revolutionary Organization

 A. Rural Communes, the Western Proletariat, and Theorizing/Organizing the Revolution

How did Marx theorize the global divide between more technologically developed capitalist societies that had accumulated wealth via commodity production and less developed ones that in his day were not even fully incorporated into the capitalist system?  How did he think of these divides in terms of world or regional revolution?  How did he think about these issues organizationally?

Most of us are already familiar with his last publication, the 1882 preface he wrote with Engels for a new Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto:

Can the Russian obshchina, a form, albeit heavily eroded, of the primeval communal ownership of the land, pass directly into the higher, communist form of communal ownership?  Or must it first go through the same process of dissolution that marks the West’s historical development?  The only answer that is possible today is: Were the Russian revolution to become the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two fulfill each other, then the present Russian communal landownership may serve as the point of departure for a communist development. (Teodor Shanin, Marx and the Russian Road: 139, French original: MEGA2 I/25:296)

This remarkable short text is based upon hundreds of pages of research notes, including the Ethnological Notebooks. In his last years, 1879-82, Marx studied Indigenous and rural communism, especially in precapitalist societies, including Native Americans and the villages of India and Russia. But let us look more closely at the Russian example, as this is the only setting in which he makes his overall theoretical/revolutionary framework from these notebooks explicit.

As he writes, resistance on the part of Russia’s communal villages to capitalist encroachment could form the “point of departure” for a European revolution if it developed links to the Western proletariat. This is connected to the fact that by the late 1870s, he saw Russia as the country with the greatest level of revolutionary unrest, with the most determined revolutionary movement, with the greatest interest in Capital, and therefore the most likely starting point for a wider European revolution. He sees its villages as more communistic in their internal relations than their Western European counterparts under feudalism or capitalism. He spells this out in several other key writings, some going back to 1877. Thus, he is talking about a new type of revolution, one that can, under certain conditions, move from rural or Indigenous communism to modern communism, and do so across the world, across the social divide.

But there is a second aspect here, an equally important one often missed in today’s discussions about indigeneity or rural communes and revolution. For Marx conditions the possibility of such a communist revolution in rural Russia on its linking up with something outside itself. Such a Russian communist revolution can succeed “only,” he writes if it can “become the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two fulfill each other.”

But how would that process work? Marx certainly does not say so in his 1882 preface. However, an important piece of evidence of his thinking on this point has recently surfaced, an 1879 letter from Marx to French revolutionary socialist Jules Guesde. In this letter, Marx details his thinking on how a Russian revolution could spark a wider European one:

I am convinced that the explosion of the revolution will begin this time not in the West but in the Orient, in Russia. It will first impact the two other harsh despotisms [illegible word], Austria and Germany, where a violent upheaval has become a historical necessity. It is of the highest importance that at the moment of this general crisis in Europe we find the French proletariat already having been organized into a workers’ party and ready to play its role. As to England, the material elements for its social transformation are superabundant, but a driving spirit is lacking. It will not form up, except under the impact of the explosion of events on the Continent. It must never be forgotten that however impoverished the condition of the greater part of the English working class, it takes part nonetheless, to a certain extent, in the British Empire’s domination of the world market, or, what is even worse, imagines itself to be taking part in it. (Jean-Numa Ducange, “Une letter inédite de Karl Marx à Jules Guesde sur la France, l’ ‘Orient’ et l’ ‘Occident’ (1879),” Actuel Marx 73 (2023), p, 112)

Clearly, Marx sees Russia as the starting point for the next revolution, not France or Britain. This was not a momentary idea on his part, as he had already said something similar in an 1877 letter to a German comrade.

What is especially notable here in 1879 is how Marx is also talking about organization and how he does not see the coming revolution at all in national terms, as we so often do today. He theorizes the revolution as spreading from Russia to France, a key juncture for the working class movement. He is of course very aware of the Paris Commune of 1871 and its suppression, and the continuing repression of the left in France, which is just beginning to reorganize itself. In fact, the amnesty for Communards was not issued until a year later, 1880, which meant that even referring to it in a letter likely to be read by the police could have endangered Guesde.

Much of Marx’s 1879 letter is about healing divisions among French socialist tendencies. But the point of greatest interest here is that this French revolutionary tradition, especially that of the Commune, means that the French working class has a better chance than the English one to “form up” into a really revolutionary class with an organized revolutionary socialist movement. The collapse of the First International a few years earlier, which was connected to reactionary panic over the Paris Commune, was surely a factor in his thinking. All this left the British workers in a weaker position due to their lack of a sufficiently developed revolutionary consciousness. But no more than in his 1869-70 reflections on an Irish revolution and Britain, where he expresses similar sentiments about the British working class, is he giving up on them. For one thing, he indicates that their pro-imperialist leanings are present only “to a certain extent.” Secondly, the overall emphasis in Marx’s 1879 letter to Guesde runs in the opposite direction, on how revolutionary events in the rest of Europe will lead the English workers to “form up.” They will develop such a consciousness “under the impact of the explosion of events on the Continent,” especially in France. And the latter will develop under the impact of the eastern, non-industrialized periphery, Russia.

If we put the discussion of the Russian revolution itself, of its unique basis in the peasant commune, in both the 1882 preface and his other writings on the Russian village commune together with the 1879 letter to Guesde, we now have a full picture of how the process will work.

Or do we? Not completely. This is because the organizational element is still insufficiently developed. Clearly, Marx in 1879 is thinking not just about spontaneous outbreaks of revolution and how they might cross from Russia all the way to Britain, but also about organization, how socialist activists like Guesde could help the proletariat in France to form up and get ready to play their part in the next revolution. This is striking because at that time the First International no longer existed and the Second International would be formed only a decade later, in 1889.

Formally, Marx was not even part of any socialist organization in 1879.  Yet he surely was part of an organizational network of revolutionary communist activists and thinkers, above all himself and Engels, but also the kind of people to whom the Critique of the Gotha Program was addressed, German communists affiliated with the two of them. In France too, there were numerous socialist individuals and groups to which Marx was connected, and smoothing out tensions among them was a central purpose of his 1879 letter. Above all, as stated in the Critique of the Gotha Program, it was a mistake to think about revolution and to organize within the existing nation-state borders rather than truly internationally. In this regard, his correspondent Guesde missed the point, never mentioning in his reply Marx’s whole scenario about the revolution as an international movement that would begin in Russia. Instead, the Eurocentric French socialist concentrated only on his own country.

Let’s look at all this from a wider lens, that of Marx’s new thinking about revolution in his last years, 1869-82. Let me quote a summary of this from my book, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads, due out from Verso in spring 2025:

Briefly, the three new concepts of revolution in Marx’s last years centered on (1) colonialism, ethnicity, and the working class in Ireland, Britain, and France; (2) communism and abolition of the state in the programs of socialist groups and in the Paris Commune; and (3) revolution in the Russian communal village in relation to the Western European working class. He develops these new concepts of revolution and, to a degree, of the alternative to capitalism, only briefly, but with sufficient detail to allow us to discern at least some of the new directions in his thinking in his last years.

This I think is familiar to many of us. But why does he seem to concentrate in his last writings more on rural Russia rather than rural India, which also had communal villages and a long history of revolt, as seen especially in the gigantic Sepoy uprising of 1857-59, the largest ant-colonial rebellion of Marx’s lifetime?

Of course, we need to consider here the objective possibilities. For example, India was colonized whereas Russia was an independent country; India was further away from the centers of the labor movement; the British state was far stronger than the Russian one. But is that all?

I don’t think so, for we also need to think about the subjective possibilities in the 1880s as well, specifically in terms of revolutionary organization. First, consider the intellectual revolution going on in agrarian Russia at the time. Its intellectuals published the first translation of Capital, not those of France or the U.S/UK, as Marx had expected. Moreover, Russia, which was full of revolutionary intellectuals, saw far more discussion of the book than its original German edition had experienced, even in Germany and Austria. Marx took part in this discussion with his new Russian interlocutors, including in the 1872 preface to the second German edition of Capital.  It was at this point that he also began to learn the Russian language, eventually gaining a good reading knowledge.

Second, Russia had a number of organized revolutionary groups, from Populists to socialists and anarchists. These groups had journals, possessed activist cells operating underground inside Russia, had attempted to go to the peasantry to stir up revolution, and had engaged in armed struggle against the state. A number of these revolutionaries were in touch with Marx, with whom he was in constant discussion. Thus, Russia was a place that had an organized revolutionary movement that was to some extent trying to ground itself in Marx’s own writings.  In fact, his writings like the 1882 preface to the Manifesto or his 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich were not only theoretical statements but also political and organizational interventions.

Above all, Marx was trying to convince his Russian followers to be more flexible and dialectical, to realize that the process of “primitive accumulation” outlined in Capital was not intended to apply to Russia, but only to those countries already embarking upon the capitalist road, which agrarian Russia was not yet doing in the early 1880s. In this regard, Russian socialists needed to take account of the peasantry as a revolutionary subject, to be aware of its Indigenous communism, and above all, not to adopt a sectarian and dogmatic attitude toward the Populists, the tendency that was trying hardest to root itself in the peasant communes. Third, as we have seen, he placed the Russian revolution in a broad European context. On this third point, he agreed with the Populists in one sense, that the Russian peasant commune could be the social base for a real revolution. But he disagreed with the view dominant among them that Russia could thereby withdraw from global capitalism and build agrarian socialism on its own. Here, Marx agreed with the socialists, his ostensible followers, who saw the importance of international links, especially to the Western European proletariat.

B. “Poor Whites,” Racial and Ethnic Divisions, and Revolution

Marx also considered the relationship of white workers, farmers, and rural laborers to Black people in his writings on the U.S. Civil War and after. During the Civil War, in an article of October 25, 1861, for Die Presse (Vienna), he avers that the possibility of themselves becoming landowning slaveholders was a force binding the poor whites to the small dominant class of largescale slaveowners. This channeled their class resentment in a harmless direction, so long as slavery could continue to expand into new U.S. territories. Here, he also mentions the Roman plebeians:

Finally, the number of actual slaveholders in the South of the Union does not amount to more than 300,000, a narrow oligarchy that is confronted with many millions of so-called poor whites whose numbers have been constantly growing through concentration of landed property and whose condition is only to be compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the period of Rome’s extreme decline. Only by acquisition and the prospect of acquisition of new Territories, as well as by filibustering expeditions, is it possible to square the interests of these “poor whites” with those of the slaveholders, to give their restless thirst for action a harmless direction and to tame them with the prospect of one day becoming slaveholders themselves. (Marx-Engels Collected Works [MECW] 19: 40-41)

Nearly two decades later, Marx writes more directly on ancient Rome, in recently published notes from 1879, where he again uses an analogy from the U.S. for a society whose social divisions did not revolve around race: “Political struggle only on the part (the poor whites) of  the proletarians; in Athens and in Rome they attempted to humor them by providing them with cheap food and entertainment when it was no longer possible to relieve the pressure on the capital through… colonies” (MEGA IV/27, online only). The phrase “the poor whites” is Marx’s highly telling insert into a passage in his notes on Karl Bücher’s book about plebeian and slave revolts in Rome during the 130s BCE. Unlike the much later uprising led by Spartacus, these slave revolts occurred amid major revolts by the formerly free peasants dispossessed of their land, who swelled the ranks of the impoverished plebeians of the city of Rome. Led by the famous Tribune of the people, Tiberius Gracchus, they rose up against the aristocracy. In principle, the conjuncture of slave and plebeian revolts was a great opportunity for solidarity among the working people across free/enslaved lines, allowing them to rise up together against the ruling aristocracy.

What went wrong? Marx saw something akin to racism as the main problem, which is why he compared the Roman proletarians to U.S. “poor whites.” Animus toward slave “status” on the part of the Roman plebeians was present in their attitudes toward the enslaved population: Enslaved people took away jobs the plebeians could have performed, including working their former lands, by now larger plantations; from the point of view of the plebeians, the enslaved were “servile” in their behavior, something repugnant to them; they were also outsiders for the most part, without Roman “culture.” For all these reasons, it was not only a question of “unite and fight” vs. the aristocracy, but also one where the plebeians, especially their leaders, drawn from dissident aristocrats and philosophers, who might have influenced them in this regard, would have needed to really acknowledge the vastly worse position of the slaves, and, most importantly, their humanity. In the end, both the slave and plebeian revolts remained separated and were crushed. Marx sums up what happened in an 1877 letter to Russian intellectuals, “The Roman proletarians became, not wage-laborers, but an idle ‘mob’ more abject than those who used to be called poor whites of the southern United States” (Shanin: 136, MEGA2 I/25: 116-17)

But as Marx also stresses, Roman plebeian hostility and utter sense of superiority did not solidify all at once, or even in one generation. He seems to indicate that the most serious forms of misdirection of plebeian consciousness occurred over time. The 130s/120s BCE, when the plebeian unrest associated with the Gracchi brothers and the Sicilian and Anatolian slave revolts all took place in the same period, was one when the plebeian animus toward the enslaved may not yet have fully solidified. This is the other side of the dialectic, the real possibility of solidarity across the lines of free/unfree, just as Marx never stopped hoping for an alliance of Black and white labor in the U.S.

Marx makes an analogy to the U.S. “poor whites” in a third context, that of English working-class hostility toward Irish immigrant workers. Writing around 1870, a period when the First International was ascendant in relation to the English trade unions and the Irish national struggle was reaching a high point with the peasant-based Fenian movement, Marx attributed the lack of greater solidarity to racism:

In all the big industrial centers in England, there is profound antagonism between the Irish proletarian and the English proletarian. The common English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers wages and the standard of life. He feels national and religious antagonism toward him. He views him similarly to how the poor whites of the Southern states of North America viewed the Black slaves. This antagonism among the proletarians of England themselves is artificially nourished and kept up by the bourgeoisie.  It knows that this split is the true secret of the preservation of its power. (MECW 21: 88)

In terms of race, ethnicity, and class, it is this Irish-English example that Marx theorizes the most extensively. Here is how I sum it up in my forthcoming book on the late Marx:

1. France will probably spark the revolution but, unlike Britain, it is too underdeveloped economically to have a large enough working class and to win against global capitalism.
2. Irish peasants will also step in at the beginning, challenging both landlordism and colonialism in their pro-independence and anti-landlord struggle.
3. This will weaken the position of the British ruling classes since landlords stand alongside capitalists as one of the two major wings of the ruling classes; moreover, the sons of aristocratic landlords dominate the officer corps of the military, part of the hard core of the state.
4. In England, the power of the country’s burgeoning trade union movement is attenuated by the fact that English workers – in quasi-racist fashion, similar to the attitude of poor whites to formerly enslaved Black in the southern U.S. – despise the subproletariat of immigrant Irish workers. Revolution in Britain is impossible until this is overcome.
5. As the Irish struggle spills over into Britain, and with the help of agitation by the International in favor of Ireland and for class solidarity across the Irish-English divide inside Britain, the dialectics of revolution will kick in, as the consciousness of English workers will undergo a radical transformation, giving them a greater sense of solidarity with their Irish counterparts and therefore making them more amenable to revolution.
6. Thus, both materially and ideologically, an Irish social revolution will be the lever that pries open the British and the wider European one, which will probably begin in France.

How could Marx go from the statements about English workers lacking revolutionary consciousness to this, an outline of the coming revolution, in which the British workers would be a central element?

First, he was never – like many liberals or many of today’s “whiteness” theorists — saying that British workers’ prejudices were so baked in that they could not change under the right conditions.

Second, he had succeeded in getting the First International, with its strong ties to the English trade unions, to take a principled stance in favor of Ireland. This was accomplished with the crucial support of representatives on the General Council of the International from Continental Europe, who pointed to the inconsistency of British workers offering unstinting support for Polish national liberation amid a reluctance to support Ireland.

Third, and this is a crucial organizational point, the International was not just a group of socialist intellectuals but had an influence over the British working-class movement. It was working as an organization to shape the movement in a way that would break down the problem he referred to as the “poor white” type attitude of English workers. As he sums up in a letter to German comrades in New York:

England, the metropolis of capital, the power which has up to now ruled the world market, is at present the most important country for the workers’ revolution, and moreover, the only country in which the material conditions for this revolution have reached a certain degree of maturity. It is consequently the most important object of the International Working Men’s Association to hasten the social revolution in England. The sole means of hastening it is to make Ireland independent. Hence it is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland. It is the special task of the General Council in London to make the English workers realize that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation. (MECW 43: 475, letter to Meyer and Vogt April 9, 1870)

Marx mentions elsewhere that the resolution supporting Ireland “may bring the English and the Irish together” (MECW 21: 411-12). More specifically, he writes in the Confidential Communication of early 1870 of the significant influence that the General Council of the International in London, composed as it was of not just English but a range of international representatives, including himself, was exercising over the English working class: “The General Council now being in the happy position of having in its hand directly on this great lever of the proletarian revolution, what folly, we might even say what a crime, to let this lever fall into purely English hands” (MECW 21: 86-87-check translation with French). Marx reports in the letter to German comrades in New York that the International’s stances in favor of Ireland had broken through to Ireland itself, where national distrust of the British was such a barrier, and one result was “for the Irish leaders, journalists, etc. in Dublin to establish relations with us, something the General Council had hitherto failed to achieve” (MECW 43: 475).

The organizational aspect of all this is underlined in Marx’s proposal to his New York comrades also to reach out to Irish workers there. For the U.S., where the International had a strong base among German immigrant workers but much less of one among the Irish workers, who suffered tremendous prejudice at the time, he proposes: “You have a wide field in America for work along the same lines. A coalition of the German workers with the Irish workers (and of course also with the English and American workers who are prepared to accede to it) is the greatest achievement you could bring about now. This must be done in the name of the International. The social significance of the Irish question must be made clear” (Letter to Meyer and Vogt, April 9, 1870, MECW 43: 476)

I want to underline the fact that while Marx writes on race, ethnicity, status, class, and revolution in the Civil War U.S. and the Roman Republic, he develops his thinking in these areas the most in his writings on Ireland and Britain. A major reason for this is that Marx had obviously no organizational relationship with ancient Rome, somewhat of one with U.S. comrades, but a truly major one through the International with Britain and Ireland.

Finally, I would like to say that Marx’s organizational relations with the International, even its General Council, or with the Russian and French socialists in the years 1879-83, is not the same thing as what Raya Dunayevskaya called “a small group ‘like us’” (Power of Negativity, p. 7). Here, we have to think more specifically, about smaller groups like the German-speaking recipients of the Critique of the Gotha Program of 1875, to whom he also sent the French edition of Capital, his latest theoretical work. This smaller group, at least to an extent, shared not only his political positions but also his theoretical ones. Marx never of course created such an organization in a formal sense, but he did do so informally and continued to do so throughout his life from the time he first became a real revolutionary in the Communist League of the late 1840s.

Part III. Brief Thoughts on Our Organization, Today

Let us sum up what Marx faced organizationally in the period I’ve been discussing. First, the Russia aspect: Marx had no organization in Russia in the late 1870s/1880s. What he did have was contact with lots of revolutionary activists and thinkers, many of whom were studying his writings and trying to connect them to their own situation. Second, the Irish/English aspect: he was exercising some leadership within the large, sprawling, and multi-tendency First International. (Don’t forget the presence there of lots of Proudhonist utopians and Bakuninist anarchists, plus English trade unionists with pronounced reformist tendencies.) He influenced its positions and actions, but except for the German and Russian representatives, not the majority, they could not even yet read Capital. He partially remedied this by long presentations to the General Council, like Value, Price, and Profit (1865).

In general, we face something a bit like Marx and Russia in the sense that our writings are being read and debated in several societies with revolutionary possibilities, and where we have engaged in dialogue, whether in the Middle East, South Asia, or Latin America.  In terms of what Marx was undertaking with the International and Ireland/England, we do not at present have his level of influence in a major radical organization of that size or scope.  However, we have recently participated in groups like the Palestine and Ukraine solidarity movements, in the LA Committee for Peace, Revolution, and Social Justice until its breakup in 2019, as well as in other movements on a less sustained basis or one based upon participation as individuals rather than IMHO as such.

We also need to move away from a certain type of horizontalism rooted in CLR James and others and quite prevalent among social movements today, which denies the need for sustained organizing by experienced radicals before and during a radical upsurge like the one that has gripped U.S. campuses. For who would deny the importance of the years of preparatory organizing work by Students for Justice in Palestine or Jewish Voices for Peace? If that is the case, isn’t it equally important for a “small group” like the IMHO to dig down and prepare for the revolution well in advance, given our unique ideas and experience?

Taking all this into account, where do we go from here as the IMHO? Or, as a great revolutionary once put it, what is to be done?  Here is some food for thought:

1. Constitute ourselves as more of a real organization, capable of showing up at actions like the pro-Palestine movement under our own banner, i.e., with flyers, tables, and more than one person. We have done so on a limited basis in LA and Chicago, cities where we have public-facing groups, or even last November in London, when a number of us attending Historical Materialism handed out IMHO flyers at a massive Saturday Palestine march.
2. Intervene in the movements we consider the most important and where we have the organizational capacity to do so, with both support and critique. For example, we could create flyers or short statements that explicitly call upon today’s Palestine solidarity movement activists to be consistent in their anti-colonialism by supporting BOTH Palestine and Ukraine. This would also serve to differentiate us sharply from Stalinoid and decolonial tendencies so prevalent today.
3. Help participants in movements like the pro-Palestine movement to decide if they are really interested in a revolution that uproots capitalism, and if so, how can they extend themselves toward those social classes and groups that have the most revolutionary potential: those “Black masses as vanguard” or the working class as a whole. A related issue would be how to critique the bourgeoisie consistently, not just that of the U.S./UK/EU, but also that inside the countries of the Global South, most notably the BRICS group.
4. Help movements like the pro-Palestine movement think about the nature of the new society, the alternative to capitalism. Help them to move from their real and genuine appreciation of working and living together in the Gaza encampments to thinking about what Marx called “communism in living,” whether in his Ethnological Notebooks or his writings on the Paris Commune or, above all, in Critique of the Gotha Program.
5. None of this would be or should be separated from continuing to develop our very successful and increasingly respected online journal, The International Marxist-Humanist. Or to write and spread across the world, including in translations, articles, and books. In fact, we have been doing great for over a decade in the global battle of ideas, punching way above our weight given the small size of our organization. But what we need to do now is to move from a journal and book/pamphlet distributor and propaganda outlet to a real organization that can engage in debate inside the radical movement. We need to help to orient the movement in a truly revolutionary direction that is not merely one of tearing up the system by its roots, necessary as that may be, but one also imbued with, as Marx advocated in his 1844 Essays, a “positive humanism, beginning from itself” (Dunayevskaya translation, Marxism and Freedom, p. 329).