By Peter Hudis, with Kevin B. Anderson, Heather A. Brown, Jens Johansson, Lyndon Porter, and S. D. Roy

The U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran, launched while Trump continues his relentless war at home against immigrants, women’s rights, Black lives, the labor movement trans rights, and what remains of liberal democracy, is plunging the world into its deepest crisis in decades. The Iran war has reorientated geopolitics, increased the risk of a global economic recession, and raised the specter of further U.S. military interventions, especially against Cuba. These wars at home and abroad are part and parcel of an effort to smother even the faintest opposition to decaying capitalism-imperialism.

However, things are not going as Trump and Netanyahu planned. The illusion that the despotic Iranian regime could be brought down by air power alone has been shattered, leaving Trump floundering for a way to tout his “victory” even as Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz and rains missiles and drones upon his allies in the Persian Gulf. And Trump’s illusion that the militarization of his war against immigrants would demoralize those standing in the way of his effort to obtain total control of U.S. society has run into large-scale opposition in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, and elsewhere, culminating in no less than eight million taking to the streets in protests on March 28.

Nevertheless, it is precisely when authoritarian regimes begin to lose hold of the narrative that they become more repressive and dangerous. There are still 34 months to go in Trump’s presidency, and he is not going to back down on his neofascist agenda without a bitter fight to the finish.

This situation poses enormous challenges to all freedom movements, and no less to our ourselves. Our group is the inheritor of an imposing body of thought that we have worked to further develop since our founding in 2009. We can surely claim to have produced some of the most impressive theoretical output of any leftwing tendency of our size. The challenge facing us now is to bring these contributions to bear on the problem of organization, by actively engaging in today’s struggles based on what Marxist-Humanism has to offer those aspiring for social transformation. Developing perspectives for working this out is the central theme and subject of our upcoming international Convention.

Part I: A New World Disorder Amidst the Ongoing Wars at Home

The Iran war, its impact on global capitalism, and the preceding uprising against Iran’s government embody all the contradictions facing us across the globe. In January, the aging theocratic regime crushed with unprecedented brutality a mass popular uprising amid a deep economic crisis. Within a few weeks, on February 28, the U.S. and Israel swooped down from the skies in a surprise attack, thinking they could quickly dislodge a weakened theocratic state for their imperialist, exploitative purposes. As Iranian philosopher Anoush Ganjipour wrote, “Their ultimate goal is the dismantling of Iran. Not liberating Iranians from the yoke of the Islamic Republic or ‘enabling democracy,’ but clearing away once and for all any obstacles to their domination of a vast territory in the region that, moreover, possesses access to strategic waterways and so many natural and human resources.”[i]

To be sure, Iran’s incredibly courageous internal opposition, which saw millions of protestors on the streets in January, is laying low. This is obviously due to ferocious repression by the government as well as the destructive impact of the U.S. and Israeli military strikes. But not wanting to play into imperialist designs on their country is also a factor. The more civilians are killed from attacks on hospitals, schools, power plants, steel mills, oil refineries, and other infrastructure, the harder it becomes to voice opposition to the regime. These raids, as so often before in such situations, have for now strengthened its repressive control of the populace, as the most hardline elements in Iran’s leadership take over. As Hossein Dabbagh and Patrick Hasan argue, “If emancipation arrives in the form of foreign dictates, it never escapes the shadow of subordination…the danger of externally induced regime change is not only that it may empower reactionary forces; it is that it may inhibit the possibility of genuine democratic authorship.”[ii]

There is no limit to the bile spewing from Trump, who has spoken of “bombing Iran back to the stone age.” But these threats belie a fundamental weakness. He has hit a wall, amid the resistance of a theocratic bureaucracy and military and their employment of asymmetric warfare, indicated in how the global economy is being thrown into disarray due to the cutoff of energy and other resources that for now can no longer pass out of the Strait of Hormuz. This has blocked access to the petroleum and natural gas regularly imported by major Asian powers like China and Japan, as well as smaller but growing powers like Vietnam or South Korea, not to speak of Europe’s dependency on Persian Gulf oil. Even more serious, the war has caused a shortage of chemical fertilizers, which are largely made from liquified natural gas. This will lead to serious food shortages afflicting tens of millions of people just as planting season is beginning in many parts of the world.

Addressing the long-term processes at work, the economist Thomas Piketty notes that, even were Trumpist fascism to fade or be rolled back, the U.S. Republican Party has “drifted toward a nationalist-extractivist ideology,” something that, while part of Trumpism, could easily outlast it.[iii] With potential indebtedness toward other countries on the way toward record levels, Washington is brazenly seeking to reorder the global economy by military means. These developments are having a huge global impact, which include:

• Never has the decades-long alliance between Israel and the U.S. been more firmly entrenched than now, as Israel continues its genocidal attacks in Gaza (where almost 1,000 Palestinians have been killed since the so-called ceasefire) and intensifies its ethnic cleansing of the West Bank on a scale not seen in decades. At the same time, it has mounted a full-scale invasion of Lebanon in which it is expelling every Shi’a resident south of the Litani River. Over a million have been left homeless and 1,400 killed in a month in a country of six million, while the world stands by and does nothing—even as the Israeli government openly proclaims that it will turn southern Lebanon into another Gaza. This is no longer just about just taking down Iran—it is about creating a “Greater Israel” that exercises control over the entire region through permanent war.
• The schism between the U.S., Canada, and its European allies, who have refused to join in offensive operations against Iran, threatens to tear NATO apart. Europe’s leaders remain completely flummoxed as what to do: they cannot imagine not continuing to serve as handmaidens of U.S. imperialism, yet they realize Trump could care less about them—except when it comes to having them clean up the mess he started, as with the closing the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, their move to massively increase military spending is coming at the expense of drastic cutbacks in social services at home and foreign aid abroad; the UK has recently announced a 40% cut in medical and health assistance to the most impoverished countries in Africa.
• Few are benefitting more from this war than Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia, thanks to a windfall coming his way from the dramatic rise in the price of oil and natural gas—among its few major exports. Just a month ago its economy showed signs of sputtering; but that is less the case now. The increased revenue will not go to aiding the Russian people—most of it will go into further fueling his imperialist project of completely subduing Ukraine. And few things could please Putin more than having the U.S. walk away from NATO.
• Ukraine is facing a terribly grave situation: there is little chance of replenishing its stocks of anti-drone and anti-missile technology, now that the U.S. is throwing everything at Iran and European leaders are more interested in building up their own militaries. Ukraine has put up a heroic fight, despite the powerful forces arrayed against it: Russia was unable to make any substantial gains in its winter offensive while Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian refineries in 2025 reduced its oil exports by 40%. But this will now be harder to sustain.
• The war is also playing out well for China, despite its being dependent on the Persian Gulf for much of its oil. The Iranian regime has promised China, with which it maintains close relations, that it will allow its ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. And the longer the U.S. is bogged down in the Middle East, the more leeway China has to pursue its own imperialist interests in East Asia, Central Asia, and Africa.
• The war against Iran is crowding out any attention or consideration of massive humanitarian crises occurring elsewhere, especially in Sudan. The genocidal campaign led by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) against the non-Arab Fur, Masalit, and Zoghawa peoples of Darfur, armed and abetted by the United Arab Emirates, has killed 100,000 people and forced millions from their homes in the last year. Over 20 million face malnutrition or starvation in Sudan due to the conflict between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces.
• Most of all, it is crowding out the ongoing genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing on the West Bank by a fascist-tinged Israeli regime whose bloodthirsty hubris is giving orders to entire peoples, all the way to the borders of Pakistan. The liberal media—and political classes, and not only in the U.S.—continues to soft-pedal criticism, let alone actions, against the genocidal state. No issue separates the younger generation of progressives around the world from the liberal/social democratic “center.”

These and related development present us with many challenges. One is that they have reinforced the long-standing tendency in parts of the Left to oppose Western capitalism-imperialism while supporting—or at least remaining silent about the crimes of—various powers competing with it for global dominance.

It is seen in those who apologize for Putin’s war against Ukraine or refrain from supporting its fight for self-determination. It is seen in those who maintain illusions about China’s role even as it severely represses workers’ rights and national minorities while building close economic ties with reactionary regimes around the world. And it is seen in those who avoid open criticism of the Iranian regime while failing to solidarize with the protests inside the country on the grounds that doing so would compromise their anti-imperialist credentials. Why do so many who oppose domination in one form refrain from acts of solidarity with victims of a regime when that entity presents itself as “anti-imperialist”?

To be sure, the main enemy is at home, and nothing stops those with conflicting political agendas from working together to combat the common enemy. Standing apart from a protest or campaign because of its limitations—whether because they are dominated by liberals or by campists—is a luxury we cannot afford in an era of resurgent neo-fascism. But political and theoretic independence from both is an absolute necessity if the revolutionary Left is to communicate a positive vision of liberation that can point a path towards overcoming capitalism. This cannot be achieved by opposing one form of imperialism while supporting some other (“lesser evil”) form of social domination.

At the same time, one of the gravest dangers posed by the rise of the far-Right is that global capitalism is in such profound decay that its ruling elites are intent on holding onto their power and wealth at all costs by squashing even the most modest or incomplete effort to pose an alternative. This is clearly seen in the U.S.’s take-down of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and the stranglehold it has imposed on Cuba. While we have no illusions about the “socialist” character of either regime, the attack on them is aimed at erasing from the mind of humanity even the distant hope of a socialist alternative. This is what we as an organization are devoted to combatting. Before turning to how we can do so, let’s take a closer look at the challenges posed by today’s social movements.

Part II: Glimpses of the Future Inhering in the Present

The 14 months of the second Trump administration has produced an unprecedented level of havoc and destruction. It has dismantled dozens of government agencies, fired hundreds of thousands of civil servants, drastically cut funding for science, health, and education, targeted universities and law firms that do not bow to its will, and gutted policies to combat global warming and environmental destruction. It has done so while running roughshod over the Democratic Party, which with a few exceptions has been unable to mount even a feeble resistance to Trump’s onslaught. It has launched an attack on innumerable gains made by the movements of Blacks, Latinas, and other minorities while providing free rein for capital to wage a relentless assault on the working class.

Trump and his MAGA supporters are working from the fascist playbook which seeks to strip subjectivity from the masses. Because gender is so tied to modern conceptions of self and because family (however defined) is necessary for the socialization of the next generation of citizens, control over gender by the state is a necessity for fascists. Assertions of biological necessity for certain traits in men and women undermine possibilities for individual and collective subjectivity when behavior can be labelled “unnatural.” The state must then protect the subjected citizen from all threats to orthodoxy, both external and internal and any measures are warranted as the “unnatural” must be stopped at all costs. As we see on gender as well as many other issues, the state has been willing to commit atrocities in the name of a good, natural order. It is only through collective action of all progressive voices that we can hope to drive back this monstrosity.

Since the election of Trump in 2024, the U.S has seen a vast erosion of rights for women and the LGBTQ+ community. Starting with his executive order in January 2025, the administration has sought to elevate those that MAGA sees as embodying their normative vision of womanhood (and manhood), while at the same time working to marginalize and silence anyone who doesn’t fit into these categories. While the executive order may have put forward a minimalist definition for “biological” sex (production of ova or sperm),[iv] statements and policy from this administration have filled in the gaps.

Marginalized groups provide a negative example for Trumpists. Trans women are predators and brutes always ready to leer at and attack “true” women in bathrooms and locker rooms or will cause harm in sports because of their testosterone fueled musculature. “True” women are the innocent victims that need the protection of “real” men and the state. Victim, perpetrator and hero all become one-dimensional caricatures lacking any real subjectivity in this narrative. One is just to play their part without any improvising. Those both in the past and the present who refuse to play their part will be erased.

While the 2022 Dobbs Supreme Court ruling theoretically takes reproductive control out of the control of all women, in reality, some women have the power and status to take control of their bodies while many have far fewer options. Mothers in states that have banned abortion are nearly two times more likely to die than those that have access to legal abortion. Black women, who have already faced greater mortality from childbirth are hit particularly hard. While one in eight women in the U.S. are Black, one in four lived in states with abortion bans in 2023. Moreover, “The maternal mortality rate in banned states for Black women, 60.9 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, was significantly higher than the rate for White (18.2) or Latina (18.2) women.”[v]

Undocumented immigrants face similar issues. Particularly appalling is the ICE policy of sending pregnant women and girls as young as 13 to Texas where abortion is banned, a majority of which have become pregnant as a result of sexual assault, forcing them to give birth to their rapist’s child before shipping them off to whatever country will take them.[vi]

This is not to say that fascistic forces have unequivocally won. Women are asserting their basic right to bodily autonomy, for example, by seeking medication to end a pregnancy. These types of abortions have increased from 53% in 2020 to 63% in 2023, in part because of the expanded use of telehealth for prescribing these medications even to those in states with total bans.[vii] On transgender rights, a March 2026 decision by a New York federal judge stated that the federal government can’t threaten providers or limit transgender care.

Globally, there have also been important wins for women and LGBTQ+ people. In 2024, Kazakhstan reinstituted a domestic violence law. In the Gambia, local and international women’s rights advocates worked to preserve a law banning female genital mutilation.[viii]  While there are some signs of progress globally, violence and discrimination against women remain significant problems. War has especially disproportionate effects on women: “The number of conflict-related sexual violence violations documented by the UN has increased by 87% in just two years.”[ix]

While liberal democratic rights in and of themselves do not promote the creation of a post-capitalist society, without such rights theorizing and organizing to build one becomes far more difficult. All of Trump’s policies are geared to destroy what is left of such rights. Nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to the attack on the lives of immigrants.

The expansion of deportations, detention centers, and large-scale raids has produced the most extensive immigration enforcement apparatus in U.S. history. Across the country, new waves of struggle have emerged in response to intensified immigration enforcement and continued racialized violence.

Cities with significant immigrant population became the focus of ICE raids with agents carrying out hundreds of arrests per day across the country. In places like California which relies heavily on immigrant labor from Latin America, especially in agriculture, logistics, and service industries, these raids triggered significant community mobilization. By late 2025, the number of people in detention centers reached about 66,000, the highest level ever recorded.[x] In cities such as Los Angeles, Pasadena, and San Francisco, thousands mobilized against raids and deportations. Activists organized rapid response networks that monitor ICE activity and helped prepare communities to resist raids. Tools like joint strike funds, community councils, and socialist youth networks took root.

Beginning in early 2026, the conflict between the expanding immigration enforcement apparatus and the anti-ICE movement entered a new stage. A series of events, particularly in Minnesota and California, demonstrated both the scale of federal repression and the capacity of local communities to organize resistance. Inspired by the deadly ICE shootings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti (Minneapolis), and Keith Porter Jr. (Los Angeles), protesters held over 60 largely peaceful rallies in California and many more across the country.

Thousands marched under slogans such as “No ICE, No KKK, No Fascist USA,” connecting immigration enforcement to broader histories of racialized repression in the United States. Students, teachers, union members, and activists from multiple social movements participated, reflecting the increasingly cross-sector character of the struggle. High school students organized student walkouts and protests, highlighting the ways in which younger generations are entering political life through struggles against repression directed at their families and communities.[xi] At the universities, campus protests and walkouts also occurred: one walkout at the University of California, Santa Barbara brought thousands of students out in an explicitly anti-ICE demonstration.[xii]

The experience of resistance in Minneapolis in January 2026 offered an especially powerful example. Under Operation Metro Surge, the federal government deployed thousands of immigration agents into the city, one of the largest immigration enforcement operations in recent U.S. history.[xiii] Residents were forced into hiding in fear of being harassed for proof of papers and met with militarized violence. Raids, detentions, and the militarization of everyday life produced not only fear, but also a rapid and widespread response. What emerged was not a single protest wave, but an escalating movement: mass demonstrations, neighborhood defense networks, student walkouts, and calls for economic disruption that spread across workplaces and communities.

The January 2026 mobilizations marked a turning point. It was ignited by the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, two 37-year-old U.S. citizens shot by federal agents within weeks of each other, transforming what began as outrage over individual acts of state violence into a sustained uprising against the broader system of immigration enforcement.

By late January, organizers were calling for what amounted to a general strike on January 23, with businesses closing and workers, students, and community organizations converging in a shared act of refusal. This was followed by solidarity actions nationwide, especially among students and educators, demonstrating how quickly a localized struggle could take on national significance. Even as federal authorities began to scale back the number of agents in Minneapolis, the material and psychological effects of the militarized racial terror remained, leaving behind a city reshaped by confrontation.

What made Minneapolis decisive was not simply the scale of protest, but the way resistance began to take on the character of collective self-activity. People did not remain at the level of denunciation; they organized. Mutual aid networks, rapid response systems, and coordinated disruptions of economic life pointed toward a form of struggle that exceeded symbolic protest and moved toward the reorganization of social relations from below. In this sense, the fight against ICE revealed itself as inseparable from broader working-class struggle. The defense of immigrant communities became a defense of the social fabric itself, raising, in practice, the question of who controls the city, state power or the people who live and labor within it.

These forms of resistance provide a glimpse, no matter how implicit, of the kind of human relations that can pose an alternative to the impersonal forms of domination that define the logic of capitalism.

Parallel to the anti-ICE movement, the Black freedom struggle continues to play a central role in shaping political consciousness in the U.S. In California especially, organizing around police violence has continued to evolve while increasingly intersecting with other movements, including the growing resistance to immigration enforcement. Organizations such as the Inland Empire Black Worker Center have formed to provide support for workers seeking to resist wage theft and secure union recognition.[xiv]

At the same time, the struggle for reparations has emerged as one of the most significant developments in the Black movement in California. Following the work of the California Reparations Task Force, which produced a comprehensive report on the historical and contemporary effects of slavery and racial discrimination, activists and community organizations have continued to pressure the state government to implement meaningful reparations policies.[xv] Grassroots organizations have framed the reparations struggle not simply as a matter of financial compensation but as part of a broader project of confronting the historical foundations of racial capitalism in the United States.

The west coast hosts a burgeoning movement that has not only kept pressure on Trump’s immigration police but also forged working-class solidarity across different lines (teachers with students, Black with Latinx, old and young organizers etc.). Neighborhood defense networks, student walkouts, community mutual aid initiatives, and multiracial labor coalitions all represent forms of self-organization that challenge the passivity encouraged by existing political institutions. In this sense, the movements against ICE repression and racial injustice represent more than immediate responses to particular abuses.

On a different but still significant level, the election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York City marks an important development in building on a coalition of renters, younger voters, first-time participants in electoral politics, and activists aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). He aligned himself with a more openly critical stance toward U.S. foreign policy than most mainstream politicians, particularly in expressing solidarity with Palestinians. He also took clear positions on immigration and policing, advocating for non-cooperation with federal immigration enforcement during a moment of intensified ICE repression nationally.

At the same time, Mamdani’s tenure has already revealed the constraints of governing within existing institutions. Some initiatives have been scaled down or implemented in limited form, reflecting the pressure exerted by entrenched political and economic forces.

Mamdani’s mayoralty will ultimately be judged not by the extent to which it administers the city more efficiently, but by whether it helps expand the horizon of what people believe is possible and strengthens struggles outside the state. If it becomes a substitute for mass activity, it risks reinforcing the very limits it initially appeared to challenge.

Part III: Organizational-Philosophic-Political Perspectives

Any discussion of the objective and subjective situation would be incomplete without taking note of the series of Generation Z revolts around the world in recent years.

The current wave of GenZ movements can be traced to the 2022 Sri Lankan uprising known as the “Aragalaya.” It led to the overthrow of the Rajapaksa government and the election of Anura Dissanayake from the JVP—a Stalinist-Maoist oriented and historically anti-Tamil political formation. Following this, student protests in Bangladesh led a successful GenZ uprising in July-August 2024. It began with objections to restoring a 30% reservation of government jobs for the children of veterans of the 1971 war, which many saw as disproportionately favoring those close to the ruling elite. The Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, fled the country and is now in India. Protests also broke out in Nepal in 2025 against a ban on major social media platforms by the Stalinist regime then in power. Elections have resulted in 35-year-old Balendra Shah becoming Prime Minister.

The Bangladesh uprising was also successful in inspiring protests in other Asian countries such as Indonesia, Timor-Leste, Maldives and the Philippines. In Indonesia the movement began in June 2025 with opposition to a 250% property tax hike and was further triggered by the death of a 21-year-old worker during political protests.

In June 2024 Kenya had the first GenZ revolt in Africa, triggered by a finance bill that placed higher taxes on basic commodities. The protests quickly escalated into a movement demanding the resignation of William Ruto, the Kenyan President, and other systemic changes. Madagascar saw a wave of student protests in 2025 at the University of Antananarivo campus against the rising cost of living, corruption, and inequality, resulting in the dissolution of the Andry Rajoelina government. In Mozambique and Tanzania, youth and worker-led protests against electoral irregularities and internet blackouts took place against the authoritarian regimes. Protests against poor infrastructure and administrative incompetence arose in Morocco, where in September 2025 youth launched the largest mobilization against inequities in health care and education since the Arab Spring of 2011.

In Europe, high school and university students in Georgia took to the streets since October 2024 against the “Georgian Dream” government’s tilt towards the Kremlin. The movement opposed a law that mandates organizations receiving over 20% of their funding from abroad need to register as “foreign agents.” which mimics Putin-style repression. Students and young people have also been highly active in Serbia against the institutional negligence and systemic corruption of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party.

These GenZ revolts indicate that a significant proportion of youth today do not see a future for themselves within the prevailing political and economic forms that define global capitalism. However, there is a long road from there to posing an alternative to capitalism. And the lack of clarity—and in some cases even the lack of discussion—of what that alternative might be, helps explain why the old order so often steps into the breach and re-establishes its control once the protests subside.

This is a problem that confronts all movements for social change—whether of workers, women, LGBTQ+, or national minorities. It isn’t that the idea of socialism has gone away; on the contrary, there is now more interest in various parts of the world in socialism than in the last few decades, when neoliberalism was ascendant. The problem is that there is no consensus as to what socialism means. For many, socialism means a “fair” redistribution of the products of labor through an enhanced welfare state. For some, it means the abolition of the state through municipal forms of self-governing associations. For others, it means state ownership of the means of production under the control of a single party that claims to speak for the working class. These differences are not new; they have existed since the idea of socialism emerged in the nineteenth century. The problem is that going beyond these standpoints by addressing not just the redistribution of surplus value but the abolition of the very existence of value production remains to be done. The failure to achieve its abolition led social democratic-reformist as well as revolutionary-statist versions of “socialism” to end up creating societies that were in fact state-capitalist.

In other words, the problem is a lot deeper than a “crisis of revolutionary leadership.” It is instead a conceptual one of articulating a viable alternative of what we are for that avoids the wrong turns taken by socialist movements in the past. That we are not free of that past is shown by the re-emergence of campism and neo-Stalinism in parts of the Left today. Why a resurgence of such dogmatic tendencies that promote an authoritarian vision of statist socialism that was long ago shown to be non-viable? Part of the reason may be a reaction against leftists being drawn into the Democratic Party and social democracy in recent years, which often led them to take compromised positions, especially on Palestine, Black liberation, the abolition of police, and the defense of trans rights. But campism hardly poses an alternative.

History shows that opposition to the status quo does not necessarily lead to embracing a viable alternative to all forms of capitalism-imperialism, whether “free market” or statist. A lot depends on the work of small groups like us, who know that no forward movement is possible without mass struggles, but who also work to help develop what does not arise spontaneously—a vision of freedom from all forms of racism, sexism, imperialism, and class domination. That is surely needed now, when opposition to Trump’s war against Iran cannot be separated from opposing its theocratic regime that has murdered thousands of its citizens. To do otherwise is to narrow one’s own conception of socialism. Rethinking what socialism means for today depends in large part on how we respond to such events.

Since the founding of the IMHO in 2009 we have defined its purpose as helping to develop a philosophically grounded alternative to capitalism. We know we cannot do this by ourselves; it takes a collective efforts with many others. But we have made significant contributions along these lines, as seen in our work on Marx’s last writings on the non-Westen world, the socialist humanist tradition, Marx on gender and the family, the legacies of Rosa Luxemburg and Frantz Fanon, trans rights, and Marx’s concept of the alternative to capitalism. The task now is how to more closely engage today’s movements with these and other ongoing theoretical work as an organization.

The relationship of a small, revolutionary organization to the wider mass struggles has been posed for over 200 years. We might want to start with the young Marx and Engels, whose Communist Manifesto of 1848 was the public expression of a relatively small association of workers and intellectuals. It defined in brief but comprehensive terms both capitalism and the forces arrayed against it, but it also attacked wrong-headed notions of socialism at even greater length. It states, “The communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims” of the class, but “they also represent the future of that movement.”[xvi] In this sense, we point to the larger issues behind what we are fighting for in immediate struggles, above all the need to uproot the capitalist system. But while we put forward the general, using what Marx once called “the power of abstraction,”[xvii] we are not abstract revolutionists.

Nearly three decades later, after Grundrisse, after Capital, after the experience of the First International (International Workingmen’s Association) and the Paris Commune,[xviii] Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program devoted most of its space to clarifying the exact nature of capital’s domination of labor, which includes the capitalist state. Spurious Lassallean notions like the “iron law of wages” and statist forms of socialism are sharply critiqued. But at another level, the Lassalleans fall into the type of abstract revolutionism that led Marx to call them a “sect.” The most prominent example here is when they referred to all classes besides the proletariat as “one reactionary mass,” thus excluding from “real” revolutionary consciousness the vast peasantry of the time and the petty bourgeoisie. Where would such a sectarian attitude leave us in Minneapolis in 2026 when the “general strike” involved not only wageworkers, but also “petty bourgeois” immigrant shop owners, self-employed artisanal workers, high school students, and large sectors of the “middle classes”?

For C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Lee Boggs of the Johnson-Forest Tendency in the 1940s and 50s, the alternative to the Leninist notion of a “vanguard party to lead” meant breaking down the barriers between leaders and led, between philosophers and ordinary workers or activists. It would need to incorporate as leaders and thinkers what they termed the “third layer,” the rank-and-file workers and the most oppressed parts of the working people who were often left out of categories like “advanced workers” that the Trotskyists favored. The third layer represented what Lenin once called the “non-party masses” who spurred on the October revolution over the hesitations of even some top Bolshevik leaders. So far, so good. But what was the JFT’s new type of organization “to do”?

As Dunayevskaya wrote pointedly in her 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes: “I am not concerned with spontaneity versus organization, nor with Stalinism which the workers will overcome. I am concerned only with the dialectic of the vanguard party [or] of that type of grouping like ours, be it large or small, and its relationship to the mass.”[xix] In other words, we are not a vanguard party, but we are also a small revolutionary organization that seeks to influence the movement by upholding and renewing the heritage of Marx and the best contributions of his heirs.

Over the next three decades and more, Dunayevskaya sought to address this problem. Within News and Letters Committees, she engaged in a tug-of-war with comrades who had not gone beyond the JFT’s emphasis on spontaneous forms of organization as the “solution” to what James had called, “the dialectic of the party.” This led her to write, “There is a further challenge to the form of organization which we have worked out as the committee form rather than the ‘party-to-lead.’. But, though committee-form and ‘party-to-lead’ are opposites, they are not absolute opposites.”[xx]

In nearly two decades of our existence, the IMHO has adapted the organizational forms Dunayevskaya developed, making them more international and more in tune with the digital age of remote interaction.  We have made progress in developing Marxist-Humanist theory, as seen in our extensive writings on Marx and Marxism in relation to race, colonialism, gender, and dialectics. We have also issued a new translation of the Critique of the Gotha Program and a volume of writings on Dunayevskaya’s intersectional Marxism. These writings and translations have gained wide currency in a number of countries.

These achievements are important. Yet at the same time, we have not succeeded in matching our theoretical output with the development of our organization.  We have established groups in southern California, in the Chicago area, and remotely in Europe that have involved members of the new generation of revolutionaries in our project. We also have found comrades in Latin America, the Middle East, and the Chinese diaspora.  Still, this growth and development have too often stopped at the level of reading groups or of articles from the new generation for our increasingly well-received website.  Our Convention will be devoted to discussing how to take our work as an organization further.

This also involves working with other groups in the revolutionary Left. Last summer, the IMHO, along with five other independent socialist groups, formed the United Left Platform with the aim of developing mutual defense work and coordinated political action. No sooner was it formed than Tom Alter, a member of one of its participating groups, was fired by Texas State University for his outspoken advocacy of socialism.[xxi] The ULP responded by helping form The Committee to Defend Tom Alter to support him and others victimized for their activism. The ULP has sponsored a national tour featuring Tom in defense of civil liberties, as well as forums on the invasion of Venezuela and the attack on Iran.

As a revolutionary Left organization, we must challenge the Right wing’s growing ideological dominance. We hope to reach, influence, unite, and mobilize the others with our theoretical work on a humanist alternative to capitalism. However, recent technological and economic developments have shifted the landscape, making it difficult to engage the younger generation today with complex theoretical analyses of society and alternatives to capitalism. Much of the young generation now faces an overwhelming flood of information and a worse economic situation than their parents, which greatly reduces their so-called attention span. The right wing has exploited this situation extensively.

This is where our emphasis on a philosophically grounded alternative to capitalism takes on new importance. The damage wrought by Trump and the MAGA Republicans has been massive—and if they have it their way, the worst is yet to come. But their ability to control so much of the political narrative did not begin in 2020 with his election to a second term, nor even in 2016 with his first term. It began years earlier, not solely on a political or programmatic level, but an ideological one, by making it increasingly fashionable to ignore facts, disregard empirical and scientific evidence, and deny any objective standard for determining what is or is not true. In this sense, Trumpism represents, in ideological terms, a radical subjectivism, embodied in the notion that the truth is whatever one happens to proclaim based on personal viewpoints or motives. He did not invent this ideological pollution—it has been around a long time, including in parts of the Left which have also denied an objective basis of truth. But Trump and his MAGA allies have succeeded in melding it with the virtuality created by our digitally connected world, in which the line between what is real and what is fabricated becomes harder than ever to decipher.

We cannot win the battle against capitalism by politics alone, though politics is critical. We must also fight it on a conceptual level by taking issue with prevailing ideas that keep so many chained within the confines of the fetishistic forms of capital. The foundation of neo-fascism today, as in the past, is the denial that truth is accessible and that reason matters.

Footnotes

[i] Anoush Ganjipour, “Le people iranienne demeure le premier et dernier perdant de la guerre au Moyen-Orient,” Le Monde, March 12, 2026.

[ii] Hossein Dabbagh and Patrick Hasan, “When Liberation Becomes Subjugation: The Moral Paradox of Regime Change in Iran,” The Philosopher (2025).

[iii] Thomas Piketty, “Dérive militariste, aveu de faiblesse,” Le Monde, March 9, 2026.

[iv] ACLU, “Trump’s EO’s Promoting Sex Discrimination,” https://wp.api.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/trumps-executive-orders-promoting-sex-discrimination-explained

[v] “Maternal Mortality in the United States After Abortion Bans: Mothers Living in Abortion Ban States at Significantly Higher Risk of Death During Pregnancy and Childbirth.” https://thegepi.org/maternal-mortality-abortion-bans/

[vi] Schreiber, Melody. “US moving pregnant immigrant girls to Texas to avoid providing abortions, critics say: Ex-official calls transfer of unaccompanied girls as young as13, many pregnant due to rape, a human rights violation.” The Guardian, March 1, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/01/pregnant-immigrant-children-texas-abortion

[vii] Jones, Rachel K. and Amy Friedrich-Karnik. “Medication Abortion Accounted for 63% of All US Abortions in 2023—An Increase from 53% in 2020,” https://www.guttmacher.org/2024/03/medication-abortion-accounted-63-all-us-abortions-2023-increase-53-2020#:~:text=New%20Guttmacher%20Institute%20research%20from,is%20highly%20safe%20and%20effective.

[viii] https://www.unwomen.org/en/annual-report/2025

[ix] Cullinan, Kerry. “As Women’s Rights Falter Globally, US Moves to Weaken UN Support for Gender Equality,” https://healthpolicy-watch.news/as-womens-rights-falter-globally-us-moves-to-weaken-un-support-for-gender-equality/

[x] Montoya-Galvez, Camilo. “ICE’s detainee population reaches 66,000, a new record high, statistics show,” CBS News, November 6, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ices-detainee-population-reaches-66000-a-new-record-high-statistics-show/

[xi] Blume, Howard. “Student anti-ICE walkouts: Some officials praise activism, others dole out detention,” Los Angeles Times, February 16, 2026. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-02-16/redlands-students-stage-ice-walkouts-officially-theyre-truant

[xii] See “Walk Out Protests at UCSB Push Back Against ICE Terrorism,” by Tim Casement, The International Marxist-Humanist, February 8, 2026, https://imhojournal.org/articles/walk-out-protests-at-ucsb-push-back-against-ice-terrorism/

[xiii] Nichols, John. “ICE Melts in the Minneapolis Winter,” The Nation, February 13, 2026. https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/ice-leaving-minnesota/

[xiv] “The Inland Empire Black Worker Center (IEBWC),” https://www.iebwc.org/about

[xv] “The California Reparations Report,” https://cablackcaucus.org/ca-reparations-report/

[xvi] Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 516.

[xvii] Capital, Vol. 1, trans., Ben Fowkes, p. 90

[xviii] See “The Late Marx of the Gotha Program, Bakunin, and Zasulich,” International Marxist-Humanist, Feb. 8, 2026 https://imhojournal.org/articles/the-late-marx-of-the-gotha-program-bakunin-and-zasulich/

[xix] The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx, by Raya Dunayevskaya, p. 16.

[xx] The Power of Negativity, p. 8.

[xxi] The United Left Platform consists of the IMHO, Socialist Horizon, Solidarity, Speak Out Socialists, Tempest Collective, and Workers Voice.