When the International Marxist-Humanist Organization last met in Convention two years ago, we said Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine marked a geopolitical turning point, since it initiated a new Cold War between Russia and the U.S. and the solidification of a Russo-Chinese axis. Israel’s genocidal war against Palestine also marks a global turning point, though of a somewhat different kind, since it has been met with massive protests worldwide that are giving birth to a new generation of revolutionaries.

Periods of birth are difficult—sometimes they lead to new beginnings, and other times they turn out to be stillbirths. We don’t yet know how this movement will ultimately play out. But one thing is for sure: new stages of protest are always met with a counterattack by the ruling class and its supporters. We see this now in the coalescence of two seemingly opposed forces that are demonizing critics of Israel: neo-fascist Populists driven by a racist agenda and left-of-center neoliberals who present themselves as fair-minded democrats defending diversity and inclusivity. The coalescence of Republicans trying to shut down critical discourse and mainstream Democrats trying to suppress criticism of Zionism has given birth to a dangerous new McCarthyism. But make no mistake: it will not stop at critics of Israel. With Trump’s possible return to power in January, a virulent attack on everyone on the Left will be unleashed. And if Harris takes the reigns, the effort to demonize any and all criticism of Israel and Zionism will reach a fever pitch. Will we be prepared for this, and how will we respond?

Part I: Facing the Realities of a New Global Turning Point

Of course, more is at stake with the upcoming presidential election than the state of our organization or even the U.S. Left. Netanyahu is doing everything he can to avoid agreeing to even the most minimal call for a ceasefire since he wants the war to continue as long as possible—and he knows if Hezbollah and Iran fully enter the fray, whoever is in office in Washington will feel compelled to intervene on his behalf. But Netanyahu is clearly hoping for the election of Trump, who will give him whatever he wants and needs to rid Gaza and the West Bank of its Palestinian populace. The same is true of Putin—he is banking on Trump to force Ukraine to its knees by cutting off all U.S. aid.

So, what will leftists who claim that supporting Ukraine’s fight for self-determination makes one complicit with Western imperialism say when the Trump-Orban-Putin Axis imposes the dismemberment of Ukraine?

For years Israel’s rulers, and the bulk of its Jewish citizens, lived under the illusion that they no longer had to worry about Palestine. Israel had pacified the Palestinian Authority, reduced Gaza to an open-air prison, massively expanded Jewish settlements on the West Bank, and was about to make peace with several Arab countries that completely ignored the plight of Palestine. And then October 7 happened. What shocked Israel was not so much the death of 1,200 of its citizens as much the sudden realization that “the question of Palestine” is very much alive. As I see it, this explains the ferociousness of its assault on Gaza (and increasingly on the West Bank) that has killed at least 40,000. There has been mass destruction of cities by state powers in recent years (30,000 killed by Syria in Aleppo, 25,000 killed by Russia in Mariupol) but never have we witnessed such an industrial-scale mass slaughter of over two million people in real time.

In a dialectical inversion, what quickly arose in response were massive protests calling not only a permanent ceasefire in Gaza but also cutting off all economic, financial, and political support of Israel, its total withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank, and the end of its apartheid policies. The slogan “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea” may mean different things to different people, but for the vast majority of activists, it means the end of an apartheid system that offers freedom and democracy to Palestinians and Jews alike.

But what was truly unexpected—at least to much of the political elite—is how rapidly encampments sprang up at 150 U.S. colleges this spring demanding divestment from Israeli-connected entities. Here is where thousands of students found their political voice, many for the first time, as the encampments became a training ground for activism and a shared space to exchange ideas, learn about the history of the Middle East, and explore connections between Palestine and other social struggles. Most of all, it gave rise to new forms of socialization, as Muslim and Jewish students came together to defend each other from right-wing Zionist goons who attempted (often violently) to break up the encampments.

These protests have made an impact in Gaza: Akram al-Satri, a freelance journalist sheltering from Israeli attacks in Rafa, said he and his colleagues were “watching with hope and gratitude the student movement in the U.S.” Bisan Owda, also in Gaza, stated, “I’ve lived my whole life in Gaza Strip and I’ve never felt hope like now.”[1]

Clearly, opposition to Israel’s genocide and support for Palestinian self-determination has become the litmus test for a new generation of activists, while generating a new level of international solidarity.

Yet this is precisely why so much repression has been unleashed against the students. The comment voiced by many of them—“We may suffer from our actions, but it is nothing compared to the suffering we are trying to stop in Gaza”—gives the lie to claims they are self-serving narcissists brainwashed by “wokeness.” But while college administrators were at first taken by surprise at the encampments, that will not be the case this Fall. An intense effort will be made to slander and suppress any hint of an effort to further extend the upsurge of activism we have seen in the U.S., which continues to foot the bill for Israel’s genocide.

The false equation made by both major parties that criticism of Zionism represents antisemitism does not change the fact that Israel has lost the battle of ideas. As Adam Schatz, author of an excellent new biography of Frantz Fanon put it, “The destruction of Gaza will be as formative for [this generation] as the struggles against the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa and the Iraq War were for earlier generations. Their image of a child murdered by a genocidal state will not be Anne Frank but Hind Rajab, the six-year-old girl killed by Israeli tank fire as she sat in a car pleading for help, surrounded by the bodies of her murdered relatives.”[2]

When a new subjective and objective turning point is reached, one either catches the new moment and aligns with it…or retrogresses. It is a fact of life as of philosophy: there is no standing still; one either moves forward or backward regardless of what ideas one claims to adhere to. We saw glaring evidence of that this year when two other tendencies of Marxist-Humanists (News & Letters and the Marxist Humanist Initiative) issued statements on the war proclaiming a plague on both their houses—as if Hamas’ killing of civilians on October 7 (which we surely do not condone) is on the same level as Israel’s endless war on Palestine. “Two-sideism” has nothing to do with a “dialectical” analysis; it is an evasion of reality.

We left News and Letters Committees in 2008 because its old guard resisted any effort to develop Marxist-Humanism, either theoretically or organizationally, preferring to indulge in a stale reciting of phrases. The group has now regressed so far as to proclaim that the founding of Israel in 1948 was a “revolution”—as if the only ones ethnically cleansing Palestinians were the Irgund and not the “socialist” Ben Gurion who was in power at the time!

Far more important than the views of such dying sects, is that the protests for Palestine are impacting class politics. For decades, even the most progressive unions in the U.S. and Europe tended to be pro-Israel. That is changing: one of the largest U.S. unions, the UAW, has come out for a ceasefire and 48,000 members of UAW Local 4811 employed at the University of California system voted to authorize a strike to protest police violence against its encampment. Half a dozen other major unions (including the NEA, the largest in the U.S.) have also come out for an immediate ceasefire. The class struggle is being re-energized by support for Palestine.

The class dimension also is integral to unfolding events in the Middle East. Israel’s failure to defeat Hamas after ten months and the fact that Hamas continues to engage Israeli troops in parts of Gaza that Israel claims to have secured has raised its stature in the eyes of many inside and outside the Middle East. However, Hamas has never sought to establish links with grassroots movements in the region; it has instead sought alliances with political elites in Qatar, Syria, and Iran (and before that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, from which it sprang). It has never supported movements challenging class domination.

The same is true of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which could inflict irreparable damage on Israel with its 100,000 precision-guided missiles. It has chosen for now not to use them (its attacks on northern Israel are limited to local targets). This is because it knows the Lebanese masses are fed up with its political and military control of the country, and it does not want to risk losing it through an all-out war with Israel. Nor does Iran want one, since it is facing a severe economic crisis and is struggling to contain the mass movement by women, national minorities, and workers that broke out against it last year. The price paid for not being clear about these class dynamics is to implicitly or explicitly ally oneself with oppressive capitalist powers in the name of opposing one pole of global capital, U.S. imperialism, and its proxy, Israel.

As Ashley Smith recently put it, “There is no real ‘axis of resistance.’ All these states are posturing to keep a lid on popular solidarity with Palestine from tipping over into opposition to their own despotic rule. And when faced with any domestic resistance, all, from Egypt to Iran, have repressed it with brute force. They are all counter-revolutionary capitalist regimes.”[3] And as Roja, an independent Iranian feminist collective stated,

For us, defending the Palestinian cause and international solidarity can know no other path than opposition to the Islamic Republic of Iran…. For us, members of Roja, the Islamic Republic of Iran does not weaken the apartheid imposed by the colonial state of Israel but reinforces the conditions that reproduce it. The path to the liberation of all the peoples of the region requires a dual struggle: one against the Israeli apartheid regime and its supporters, and another against states like the Islamic Republic of Iran.[4]

The foremost task, of course, is forcing Israel to stop its murderous genocide and occupation. We cannot expect an independent class perspective to emerge in Palestine (and elsewhere in the Middle East) until Israel is defeated and its ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the West Bank, and repressive policies against Palestinians is reversed. No forward movement in politics is possible if the people are not permitted to live. And the Palestinian people clearly want to live—as shown by the fact that not a single suicide bombing has occurred in Gaza or the West Bank since October 7. This is in direct contrast to the Second Intifada of 2000, led by Hamas, in which suicide bombers killed over a thousand Israeli (and some Palestinian) civilians.

Palestinians, of course, are not the only ones who want to live: the same is true of Ukrainians. They are now facing an extremely perilous situation. Russia has bombed 1,100 schools and hospitals since February 2022, killing tens of thousands of civilians and laying waste to the country’s infrastructure. Ukraine’s recent setbacks are largely due to the pro-Putin wing of the U.S. Republican Party refusing to allow arms to be sent to Ukraine for nine months and the massive military and economic assistance provided to Russia by Iran, North Korea, and China.

A joint declaration issued in June by European ecosocialist, anarchist, feminist, and environmental groups that support the Ukrainian resistance while opposing its neoliberal government stated,

Due to the massive—and surprising—resistance of the Ukrainian population, the governments of Europe and North America began to support the Ukrainian army in its defense against the Russian occupying forces. However, they are backing Ukraine to assert their own interests in the global imperialist rivalry. The U.S. aim is to weaken its Russian counterpart while showing strength against rising China and setting the pace for the European powers which are both partners and rivals. But despite the U.S. Congress finally approving a comprehensive aid package for Ukraine on April 20…the support for Ukraine has always remained selective and insufficient.

Its statement concludes,

Occupation is a crime! We are guided by the principles of self-liberation, emancipation, and self-determination of working-class and all oppressed peoples beyond geopolitical considerations. In this sense, we also stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people, who have been fighting for their self-determination for decades.[5]

It is of course obscene for the Western powers to support Ukraine’s fight against Russia while doing all they can to facilitate Israel’s fight against Palestine—though it should be noted that while virtually all of the European far Right opposes aid to Ukraine it firmly supports Israel (including Germany’s AFD). But it is no less obscene to oppose genocide against one people while not supporting the struggle against it by another. Adib Shaheed, a Palestinian who lived for several years in Ukraine and was forced to flee to England after the February 2022 Russian invasion, stated in a recent interview in Spilne (Commons), the journal of independent leftists that continues to be published from Kiev,

From the very beginning of this war in Gaza, I went to pro-Ukrainian demonstrations with two flags. People asked me why I was doing this. I answered that I lived in both Palestine and Ukraine, so I know both contexts. The parallels, in my opinion, are obvious: there is an aggressor who behaves the same way everywhere. Both the Israelis and the Russians behave in the same way and even use the same rhetoric. They try to dehumanize those who are oppressed and attacked, while pretending that they are victims who are just defending themselves.

It’s not just about Palestine, it’s about humanism, about our basic rights. First and foremost, the right to life of all people around the world, which is being attacked by the Israelis in Palestine and the Russians in Ukraine, and which is being attacked by those who support and sponsor the aggressors (in Israel’s case, the Americans and the British).[6]

As we have emphasized many times, support for Ukraine’s right to self-determination is about a lot more than geopolitics. It’s about humanism. If Russia succeeds in subduing Ukraine it will unleash a bloodbath of unfathomable proportions. Refraining from trying to prevent this simply because of the hypocritical actions of Western imperialism is the very antithesis of humanism.

It’s not as if Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (which actually began in 2014) was its first military intervention into lands that were once part of the Soviet Union. Putin invaded Chechnya in the early 2000s, Georgia in 2008, Belarus in 2021, and Kazakhstan in 2022. Yet the invasion of Ukraine is different from all these due to its genocidal implications. Neil Abrams explains:

As far as the [the Russian nationalists] are concerned, Ukraine is the birthplace of the Russian nation. If that is true, then the very presence of a separate Ukrainian identity, much less a Ukrainian nation-state, is nothing less than an attack on Russia’s conception of itself. If Ukraine exists, then Russia does not. To Russia, this is intolerable. It means that Ukraine, and anyone who considers it their national home, must be destroyed. It is also what makes Ukraine distinct from every other place Moscow has attacked over the past thirty years. Ukraine, and only Ukraine, endangers the very idea of Russia. As a consequence, it is Ukraine, and only Ukraine [of the former Soviet territories], which faces a genocide.[7]

Marxist-Humanists have an obligation to actively support for struggles for self-determination in both Palestine and Ukraine and to make our position known to others. Many are receptive to that message while many others are not. Either way, engaging in the battle of ideas is a central aspect of developing our group from a discussion circle to an actual organization.

This is illustrated by the response (or the lack of it) to the massive demonstrations that have broken out in the Republic of Georgia. Several Georgian leftwing activists report in a recent article in LeftEast, “Since early April, Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, has been the scene of protests on a scale unprecedented in modern Georgian history against the so-called Foreign Agents Law or, as protesters would call it, the ‘Russian Law.’” It is so named because it is modeled on laws imposed by Putin to silence his opponents at home. Promoted by Georgia’s increasingly pro-Russian government, “the law stipulates that all non-commercial, non-state organizations receiving over 20% of their funding from foreign sources must register as ‘carriers of the interests of foreign power.’”[8] It also enables the state to bypass court-approved search warrants to investigate any organization, regardless of its funding sources. Many Georgians see these moves as an effort to stifle any independent democratic discourse.

One would be a fool not to see Putin’s hand in encouraging the Georgian government to impose these restrictions. Another report notes, “Russia is hoping that recent successes on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine can help reverse the many setbacks it suffered in its prestige and influence in a strong of former Soviet states earlier in the war.”[9]

The authors of the LeftEast article add, “We have to acknowledge the unprecedented scale of the ongoing protests in modern Georgian history. The sheer quantity of people taking to the streets for more than a month—ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands—is by itself a clear demonstration that large sections of the Georgian population are afraid of being deprived of the most basic democratic rights” (the total population of Georgia is only 3.7 million).

Oddly, there has been very little discussion of these developments in the Left; and the little that has appeared (as in Jacobin) dismiss the protests as a vehicle of U.S. and EU-funded NGO’s seeking to bring down a government that is trying to maintain close relations with Russia. In reducing the issue to a geopolitical struggle for influence and power between the U.S. and Russia, the voices of those protesting on the streets get totally sidelined.

And this is not the only critical event being sidelined: even more serious is the civil war in Sudan. In the last 14 months battles between the military government and the powerful paramilitary force it helped create (the RSF) have killed 150,000 and forced nine million from their homes. Khartoum, just a year ago a thriving city of nine million, has been devastated. One resident stated, “A city of this size, this wealth. And nothing remains? It must be the biggest episode of looting in human history.”[10] Though it rarely makes the headlines, the war is not going unnoticed by a host of state powers. Iran, Egypt, and Ethiopia are arming the military government, the United Arab Emirates, Libya, and Syria are arming the RSF, and Russia is arming both sides while sending troops to support the military government. The U.S. is supporting neither side—perhaps this is one reason there is so little discussion of what is happening there. Are we to pay attention only when the strongest superpower gets involved?

Russia is extending its influence in Africa, sending troops to regimes that came to power through military coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and the Central African Republic, filling the void left by the gradual departure of French and U.S. military forces. Putin is competing with the U.S. in the Middle East as well, in following up its support for Assad’s crushing of the Syrian Revolution by forging a strong military alliance with Iran.

As I argued in my Convention report two years ago, the claim that the U.S. and NATO were itching for a fight with Russia and jumped at the chance when Putin invaded Ukraine gets it all wrong. Major imperialist conflicts are most often based on economic factors, such as the drive to accumulate capital on an ever-expanding scale at the expense of one’s rivals. But this does not apply to today’s conflict between Russia and the U.S., since Russia’s economy is too weak to pose a threat to the U.S.’s economic dominance. As Russian sociologist Ilya Matveev points out,

Post-Soviet Russia’s economic clout has always been far too limited to threaten the centers of capital accumulation in the Global North…In fact, the Kremlin’s decisions in 2014 and 2022 were the product of a specific ideological vision that overemphasizes Russia’s vulnerabilities and calls for preventive military action under the slogan of “offense is the best defense”… Russia’s conflict with the West, unlike the U.S.-China rivalry, is rooted less in structural, particularly economic, causes and more in ideological (mis)perceptions.[11]

That the U.S.’s conflict with Russia is not structurally rooted in the dynamics of global capital accumulation does not make it less dangerous. But it does suggest that a change of government in the U.S., Europe, or elsewhere in the coming months can easily lead to a rapprochement between Western imperialism and Putin’s Russia.

Matters are very different when it comes to the U.S.’s increasingly aggressive stance toward China (which for now many EU countries are reluctant to sign onto). China’s effort to become a great power depends on gaining control of global value chains which the U.S. and its allies have long dominated. It is energetically exporting its surplus capital to the rest of the world through the trillion-dollar Belt and Road initiative, buying up mineral rights on a massive scale, and providing trillions in loans to countries once dominated by the U.S., especially in Latin America and Africa. Most of all, China and the U.S. are engaged in an intense competitive struggle over who will dominant the world market in robotics, AI, and advanced microchip technology. As the center of global capitalism shifts from North America and Western Europe to East Asia, a whole new stage of intra-imperialist conflict looms before us. Matveev neatly sums it up:

China’s relentless search for markets and investment opportunities abroad, driven by domestic overcapacity and capital overaccumulation, almost mechanically leads it to expand its global military presence as well, creating both the economic and the security tensions with the United States. Facing the threat of expanding Chinese capital (which is tightly interwoven with the state), factions of the U.S. capitalist class have embraced a more confrontational stance toward China despite the economic interdependence between the two countries and the importance of the vast Chinese market for American businesses. The stage is set for the inter-imperialist rivalry that will define the twenty-first century.[12]

This explains why virtually all wings of the political establishment support efforts to counter China’s power and influence, be they far-right Republicans or leftwing Democrats. This is in contrast to the profound divisions in both parties over whether to provide arms to Ukraine. Trump and his allies on the neo-fascist Right may adore Putin, but they do not extend that privilege to China’s Xi Jinping—however much they may admire his authoritarian rule that brooks no dissent. No surprise here: the political positions assumed by the agents of capital always follow the dictates of capital accumulation.

No less serious, and not unrelated to the above, is the threat posed by the rising power of the far Right. But the far Right is far from a unified entity. It includes tendencies that favor an enhanced welfare state that can provide benefits to traditional male-dominated households, as well as unbridled neoliberals out to end social welfare programs and free the market from all constraints; it includes Evangelical Christians who embrace the gospel of unlimited wealth acquisition as well as rightwing Catholics who reject such crass materialism. Most of the far Right is thoroughly racist—as clearly expressed in its anti-immigrant hysteria—but some, like the Islamic fundamentalists, are not: they accept anyone committed to ridding the world of those they view as infidels. The forms assumed by today’s far Right—fascist, neo-fascist, or otherwise—are multifaceted.

Nevertheless, two major determinants characterize the far Right.

First, they all react against what they perceive as the hollowness of modern life, its atomization, insecurity, and sense of anomie, by seeking a return to a pristine past that re-establishes solidity, substantiality, and tradition. If classical liberalism, with its ethos that each person is free to pursue their own meaning in an untethered world, posits subjectivity without substance, the authoritarian anti-liberals embrace substance without subjectivity. Abstract “freedom” gives way to a concrete hierarchy. In sum, the far Right is a modern iteration of the counter-Enlightenment. One reason a lot of academic leftwing discourse has had a hard time understanding the attraction of the far Right is that it spent so much time critiquing Enlightenment rationalism that it forgot that the driving force of all fascist movements has been anti-Enlightenment irrationalism.

Second, the increasingly hollow, atomized, and alienated nature of modern life that the far Right both reacts against and reflects is a direct product of the logic of capital. As Marx shows in Capital, the law of value not only homogenizes human activity by subjecting it to an abstract time determination—socially necessary labor time. In doing so, it also generates profound social differentiation and separation—between classes, between individuals, and between individuals and society. As commodification and the drive for profit colonize ever more dimensions of the lifeworld, the bounds that connect humans become pulled apart. This dialectic of dissolution applies to conditions inside as well as outside of the labor process. There is a reason the Communist Manifesto proclaims that nothing does more to undermine the family than bourgeois society. “All that is solid melts into air.”[13] Everyday life becomes increasingly abstracted from nature and our human nature—the capacity for intersubjective purposeful activity. Reactionary movements—from authoritarian rightists to fascists seeking to renew the “volk” through blood and soil—reach for an immediate resolution of the crisis of modernity (in terms of its tendency toward greater homogenization and differentiation) by forcefully imposing traditional hierarchies based on tribe, race, and male domination.

All of us, of course, are subjected to the atomized and alienated nature of modern life. So why do some turn to the Right in response, while others turn to the Left—such as by embracing others instead of demonizing them, extending mutual aid and care to others instead of repressing them, seeking to build a new world free from alienation instead of seeking a return to an old one that was never free? I don’t have an answer to that question, and I won’t venture to offer one here. What I can say is that while the specific forms and fortunes of the far Right are bound to shift with new circumstances and events it is a force that is bound to become increasingly powerful so long as the logic of capital continues on course of self-destruction.

Which means we desperately need a viable alternative to capitalism. Without it, we will not be able to extricate ourselves from the descent of so much of modern society into utter madness.

Part II: Organizational Responsibility for Marxist-Humanism: The Unfinished Task

Given the objective situation, it may seem utopian—if not pointless—to speculate about an alternative to capitalism when we face such urgent tasks as stopping the genocide against Palestine, aiding those in Ukraine, Georgia, and Sudan, and countering the Trumpist Right at home and abroad that plans to utterly obliterate liberal democracy. Moreover, the planet is on a collision course with nature as more fossil fuels are burned than ever before and even the UN’s modest goals for reducing greenhouse emissions are not being met. To focus on developing a socialist alternative that goes beyond Social-Democratic and neo-Stalinist calls to “fairly” redistribute surplus value may seem so out of reach that one might wonder why even try to do so.

Since our founding in 2009, we have reiterated that the main problem facing today’s struggles is the lack of a vision of an alternative to all forms of capitalism—whether statist or “free market.” Much of our work has been devoted to responding to this, such as issuing a revised translation with commentary on Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program. But today’s crises are so overwhelming that it may be hard for many to see why they should commit to a group defining itself by envisioning an alternative to capitalism.

To address this, I wish to elaborate on this statement in the Call for Convention: “A viable concept of the transcendence of capitalist alienation is not a matter of speculating about some distant utopia but is urgently needed to adequately respond to the most pressing political realities. When an alternative to capitalist value production, patriarchy, racism, and class domination recedes from view, what results in the long run is an accommodation to the limits of the given.” I wish to pursue this by briefly discussing Marxist-Humanism’s unique philosophic contribution—the concept of “Absolute Negativity as New Beginning.”

What does “the Absolute” refer to in Hegel, and what has it got to do with us? The short answer is everything. And what does it mean to begin from the Absolute—which Raya Dunayevskaya considered to be her most important theoretical insight? These are big questions, so I’ll offer a few brief observations.

The central point in Hegel is that the Absolute—the transcendence of the separation of subject and object—is immanent in us. It is not “out there” like some theistic God. It is the fullest expression of what is involved in the simple act of thinking. As he shows in his Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic, even the most elementary act of consciousness—sense-certainty, grasping objects outside of us—involves an implicit quest to overcome the separation between ourselves and the objective world. Frantz Fanon captured this with his phrase, “Humanity is a ‘yes’ resonating with cosmic harmonies.”[14] But although the Absolute is intimated in even the most basic acts of reflection, it takes a long, hard journey to reach its actualization. Life, Hegel says, is a “highway of despair” in which we implicitly reach for the Absolute, for the “cosmic harmony,” but realize again and again that it has not yet been reached. Hegel says that enduring this journey requires “the labor, patience, seriousness, and suffering of the negative.”

The journey of consciousness is therefore teleological insofar as the basic constituents of thinking, central to any human, contains an impulse to overcome the gap between subject and object. But this has nothing to do with a historical teleology of the “progress” of civilization from “lower” to “higher” phases, which is found in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History—a work marred by Eurocentric and racist assumptions. Marx did not take the work seriously (he makes only a few passing references to it). What he took from Hegel was his logical theory found in the Phenomenology and Science of Logic.

The young Marx took careful note of Hegel’s discussion of the journey from immediate sense certainty to “Absolute Knowledge.” According to Martin Hägglund, “For Marx Absolute Knowing cannot be limited to a theoretical achievement of the philosopher. Rather, Absolute Knowing must be a practical achievement that in principle can be taken up and sustained by everyone.”[15] This is the meaning of Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach—not that we forgo the effort to think the Absolute, let alone thinking philosophically, but that we change the world by creating conditions that allow the Absolute to be known—and so that we can be known since it is immanent in us.

Dunayevskaya spelled this out more concretely, stating “In Hegel’s Absolutes there is embedded, though in abstract form, the fully developed ‘social individual,’ to use Marx’s phrase, and what Hegel called individuality ‘purified of all that interferes with its universalism, i.e., freedom itself.”[16] In other words, the Absolute, when viewed through a Marxist lens, is the new society.

Gillian Rose once wrote that “Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the Absolute cannot be thought.”[17] It can likewise be said that Marx’s philosophy has no social import if the new society cannot be thought of. For if the Absolute is immanent in our mundane everyday existence, and the Absolute is a new society, how can it not be thought? However, as Rose notes, it is very easy to misrepresent the Absolute (think of how many have misrepresented socialism as the abolition of private property and market anarchy). This means, Rose argues, that “If the Absolute is misrepresented, we are misrepresenting ourselves, and are correspondingly unfree. But the Absolute has always been misrepresented by societies and peoples, for these societies have not been free, and they have re-presented their lack of freedom to themselves in the form of religion.”[18] We have here an intimation of why so many today refrain from reaching for a new society and instead regress into various forms of religious fundamentalism.

Nevertheless, new passions and new forces constantly arise. We are living through such a moment today. The “Absolute” is immanent in these new struggles as well. This provides a different way of thinking about intersectionality, including Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism (an entire book is devoted to it). It is a great book, but I think we have yet to get the bottom of exactly how she arrived at an intersectional perspective. I believe it is addressed in her chapter on Hegel in Philosophy and Revolution, which discusses how the workers’ councils in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution pried Marx’s Humanism from the archives: “Both in life and in cognition, ‘Subjectivity’—live men and women—tried shaping history via a totally new relationship of practice to theory. It was as if the ‘Absolute Universal,” instead of being a beyond, an abstraction, was concrete and everywhere.”[19] Dunayevskaya discerned a similar quest for universality in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, workers’ wildcats against automation, and the emergence of second-wave feminism that arose from opposing male chauvinism within the Left. They “intersected” insofar as each, in different ways, reached for “the Absolute.”

So, what would begin with the Absolute mean when it comes to our political praxis today? To proceed from Marx’s vision of a de-commodified society would entail opposing treating people as things—as mere pawns on a geopolitical chessboard. We would therefore reject the politics of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” which is so common in the Left today, and instead pursue what Barbara Smith recently called a politics of “solidarity without exception—listening to the people impacted, in this case, the Palestinians and Ukrainians, and taking a lead from them, their experiences, and their analysis.”[20] If we proceed from Marx’s vision of ending the split between mental and manual labor as the hallmark of communism, we would not countenance individuals being treated as mere foot soldiers by leftist groups organized on hierarchical lines. And if we proceed from Marx’s conception of the state as an expression of oppressive social relations that will be annulled with the end of class society, we would brook no compromise when it comes to opposing all existing state powers, even as we accept the right of those fighting for freedom to take aid from them.

These examples are hardly exhaustive. My point is that the relevance of Marx’s vision of the transcendence of capitalism does not hinge on whether such a society ever comes into being. The days are long gone when leftists could proclaim the “inevitability of socialism.” Today we know how correct Rosa Luxemburg was in 1915 in proclaiming “socialism or barbarism.” And that is a choice. We can fight today’s battles with the aim of moving toward socialism only if the consciousness of what constitutes it informs our political practice. A revolutionary Marxist organization is the place where the theory that can inform that consciousness is generated and (hopefully) conveyed to a new generation.

The IMHO publishes a web journal, The International Marxist-Humanist, and holds public or Zoom meetings on political and theoretical topics. But much more is needed to present ourselves as an organized tendency that poses an alternative to other variants of Marxism.

Most of all, we need to transform the way we operate given the rising power of the neo-fascist far Right. The threat was recently clearly stated by Stephen Miller, Trump’s top advisor, when he said after the election, “every facet of politics and power has to be used to go toe to toe with Marxism and beat these Communists.”[21] Left groups that are loosely organized can get by when they face little external threat, but the days when “membership” in them was akin to hitting a “like” button are coming to an end. We must become more self-disciplined when it comes to communicating with each other, meeting deadlines, attending meetings, and taking on organizational responsibilities. For if we do not hang together, as the old adage says, we will surely all hang separately.

I imagine that members of organizations of a Leninist persuasion would take much of what I mention here for granted. The one thing that can be said for vanguardists is that they have no trouble explaining the need for their organization: the masses need leadership, and they are there to provide it. It is much harder to convey the reason for the existence of a revolutionary grouping that rejects vanguardism. This is one reason why anti-vanguardist currents either do not last long or become insular sects (as did News and Letters Committees).

This is an objective problem that has long concerned Marxist-Humanism. It is the issue that led to the breakup of the Johnson-Forest Tendency. It rejected the concept of a vanguard party by 1950, but what was left unresolved was what would take its place. C.L.R. James thought he found the answer in his book Notes on Dialectics (1948). Taking off from the Marxist conception that the concentration and centralization of capital creates its own gravediggers by socializing workers through the labor process, James contended that the logic of capital had reached the point wherein the working class would immediately move to the seizure of power without a party of professional revolutionaries. Through a curious application of Hegel’s Logic to what he called “the dialectic of the party,” he concluded that a mass party that does not represent but is of the working class would inexorably arise from the ever-growing concentration and centralization of capital. James never departed from this conception: in 1980 he declared that the formation of Poland’s Solidarnosc, a spontaneous mass organization that grew to ten million workers, confirmed the prediction he had made thirty years earlier.

But there was a problem: Solidarnosc did not embrace a socialist perspective (though some socialists were active in it). By the 1980s the idea of Marxism and communism had become so discredited in the minds of Polish workers that they turned to the capitalist free market. The form of organization was correct, but missing was the consciousness of an alternative to both state-capitalism that called itself communism and free market (or neoliberal) capitalism.

Ironically, to the end of his life, James insisted that Notes on Dialectics was his most important book. I contend it was his weakest work since the theory of organization that was central to it was shown to be completely hollow by the 1980s.

It’s not that the Polish workers lacked class consciousness. It’s that they lacked access to genuine Marxism, Marx’s philosophy of revolution, because no grouping was on the scene at the time that could provide it to them. Class consciousness emerges spontaneously, but that is not the case when it comes to a philosophy that specifies the transcendence of the law of value. As Dunayevskaya argued in 1981 in her book on Rosa Luxemburg, “class consciousness does not exhaust the question of cognition, of Marx’s philosophy of revolution.”[22]

As it turned out, James lacked an organization that could provide such a philosophic alternative since a decade earlier his own group, Facing Reality, went out of existence. It dissolved in 1970 just as a new generation of activists were joining Marxist organizations en masse. The dissolution of his group makes perfect sense, since what is the point of having an organization if it lacks a philosophy to offer the masses and sees its goal as just telling them how great they are?

The reason I am taking up James is not to score some sectarian debating points. It is because his failure to provide an alternative to the vanguard party is precisely what we have been afflicted with—and still are. Celebrating the creativity of the masses without specifying the role that philosophy can play in giving action its direction negates the very reason for the existence of an anti-vanguardist organization. That is not James’ problem—it is ours, and ours today.

—August 25, 2024

Notes

[1] “U.S. Protests on Campuses Giving ‘Hope’ in Gaza Strip,” by Hiba Yazbek, The New York Times, May 2, 2024.

[2] “Israel’s Descent,” by Adam Shatz, The London Review of Books, June 20, 2024, p. 8.

[3] “Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism Today,” by Ashley Smith, Tempest, May 24, 2024.

[4] “Against Apartheid and Tyranny,” by Roja, CrimethInc, June 3, 2024.

[5] “Ukraine: A People’s Peace, Not an Imperial Peace,” Links, June 6, 2024.

[6] “I Stand on the Side of the Oppressed, Whoever They Are,” by Adib Shaheed, Commons, June 16, 2024.

[7] “Why Genocide?” by Neil A. Abrams, The Detox, April 28, 2024.

[8] “There’s More at Stake in the Fight Against the Foreign Agents Law Than liberal NGOs: Why the Left Should Show Solidarity with the Protests in Georgia,” by Lela Rekhviashvili, Luka Nakhutsrishvili, Konstantine Eristavi, and Alexandra Aroshvili, LeftEast, May 28, 2024

[9] “In Former States of the Soviet Union, a Tug of War Between East and West,” by Andrew Higgins, The New York Times, June 3, 2024.

[10] “Civil War Pushes Ravaged Sudan Toward Abyss,” by Declan Walsh, The New York Times, June 8, 2024.

[11] “We Live in a World of Growing Imperialist Rivalries,” by Illy Matveev, Jacobin Online, May 28. 2024.

[12] Ibid.

[13] The Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 487.

[14] Black Skin, White Masks, by Frantz Fanon (New York: Grove Press, 2008), p. xvii.

[15] “Marx, Hegel, and the Critique of Religion: A Response,” by Martin Hägglund, Los Angeles Review of Books, March 15, 2021.

[16] Philosophy and Revolution, from Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao (Lanham: Lexington Books, 1989), p. 43.

[17] Hegel Contra Sociology, by Gillian Rose (London and New York: Verso Books, 2009), p. 98.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Philosophy and Revolution, from Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao (Lanham: Lexington Books, 1989), p. 42.

[20] “Answering the Call to Fight Injustice,” Interview with Barbara Smith, Tempest, June 11, 2024.

[21] Quoted in “Republicans Have a New Way of Looking at Crime,” by Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times, June 9, 2024.

[22] Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution,” by Raya Dunayevskaya (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 60.