We’re at a critical moment in history. What is unfolding before us is the neo-fascist regimes of Trump, Netanyahu, and Putin wreaking havoc in the world through their imperialistic wars, genocide, and assault on the labor movement, women, oppressed ethnicities/races, and LGBTQ people. While we’re witnesses, we’re not spectators because we’re here today to answer an important question: what is to be done?

When we witness the neo-fascist regime committing atrocities and repression, we should ask the question “What is to be done?” This isn’t an academic question, but a practical and existential question. Historically, there have been two competing answers: Vanguardism and Spontaneism. According to Vanguardism, a revolutionary vanguard should inject socialist consciousness into workers by introducing revolutionary theory so that workers can be organized by the vanguard party. In contrast, Spontaneism has argued that socialist consciousness develops spontaneously through the class struggle of the working class. Over a century later, our predecessors in the Johnson-Forest Tendency sided with Spontaneism, but Raya Dunayevskaya eventually saw its limitations.

While Raya praises the spontaneity of the working class since their self-activity is indispensable in their development, she also saw it as only the beginning. The self-activity of the working class during their class struggle facilitates the development of their class consciousness, but their self-activity alone can’t develop their revolutionary consciousness. Raya believes that there needs to be a dialogue (a “dialectic”) between workers and revolutionary intellectuals as equals. This dialogue is pedagogical or educational for both the working class and revolutionary intellectuals. The revolutionary intellectuals learn from the working class about their lived experience, struggles, and their spontaneously-generated organizations. The working class learns from the revolutionary intellectuals the philosophy of revolution. The dialogue is not only pedagogical, but also dialectical: it overcomes the false dualism between manual labor and intellectual labor. It’s through overcoming this false dualism that the opposites interpenetrate and transform into one another: practitioners become the philosophers and the philosophers become practitioners.

In the light of Raya’s insight, we should reformulate the general question “what is to be done” into the specific question: “what can we as revolutionary intellectuals and students do to participate in a dialogue with the working class and the oppressed?” The question being asked requires a multifaceted and complex answer. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but based on my experience on college campus, I believe I can provide an important piece of the puzzle to help answer the question.

I think Marx’s manuscript “Alienated Labor” has had the most impact on youth drawn to us of late. We learned that the essence of capitalism isn’t simply capitalist private property and the market because these things derive from something more fundamental: alienated labor. People often assume that private property and the market are quasi-natural phenomena that express our human nature, but Marx argues that these are consequences of alienated labor. What exactly is alienated labor? Marx begins by analyzing being alienated from the process of production and its products, but he argues that such alienation is possible when we’re alienated from the act of production. Alienated labor, for Marx, is an activity which doesn’t belong to workers, because it isn’t a self-developing and self-determining activity which develops our human capacities, but rather it is an activity for capital’s expansion at the expense of workers’ self-development. Alienated labor belongs to capital to create alienated products—commodities, including means of production for sale—for profit, which contribute to capital’s expansion. After Marx discusses being alienated from production and alienated labor, he derives from them a third kind of alienation: alienation from our species-being.

The term “species-being” is somewhat misleading since the German prefix “Gattung” in the German word “Gattungswesen” has a double meaning: genus and species. To explain the distinction, a dog is a species, but a dog belongs to mammals as a broader biological category. This broader biological category—mammal—is a genus that includes not only the dog, but a cat, a human, a cow, a whale, a deer, and so on. Compared to a species, a genus is far more universal. In other words, “Gattungswesen” can mean not only a species-being, but also a universal-being. To be clear, Marx isn’t claiming that humans are magical mammals who can morph into any kind of mammal. Rather, due to the influence of Hegel, Marx’s philosophical predecessor, the concept of universality has significance for Marx because, for him, it is synonymous with freedom.

Like Hegel, Marx understands human beings as a “universal-being” in the sense that we are free, self-determining beings. Just as Hegel maintains that our labor—the creative source of our self-creation—develops us into self-determining beings by affirming and shaping our own existence, Marx also claims that humans are self-determining beings because our labor can transform our social existence by creating new practical and theoretical needs. Whereas animals perform labor that merely sustains and reproduces their physical existence, our labor, for Marx, is self-developing and self-determining: we create not only food, clothes, shelter, and basic tools, but we also create new needs—both practical and theoretical needs—by creating new forms of production which shape who we are. Our production of new needs involves our metabolic relation with Nature in which we convert Nature’s materials into new human needs and capacities. As we create these new human needs and capacities, we create them not simply for ourselves personally, but also for each other. In this way, we create social relations. But when we create new human needs and capacities, we transform our social relations with one another into new social relations. These new human needs, capacities, and relations make up our social world, and creating them is to create our world. The world we create becomes our reflection in which we grasp ourselves in theory and in practice. The subject and object become one. This is our universality.

Given Marx’s understanding of species-being, it begins to make sense why Marx derives or deduces the alienation of our species-being from alienated labor and alienation from the products of our labor. In particular, Marx claims that when we are alienated from our species-being, we would become alienated from our own labor, from each other, the products of our labor, and nature. What this indicates, for Marx, is that our species-being is a concrete universal which unites different human determinants—our own labor activity, our social relation with others, the products of our labor, and our metabolic relation with Nature—into one organic totality. These different human determinants are different moments—or aspects—of our concrete totality, our species-being. It is through alienation from our species-being that these human determinants of species-being appear fragmented and isolated from each other.

Reading “Alienated Labor” with other youth has inspired a discussion about our experience at our workplace. People are also drawn to Marx’s next manuscript, “Private Property and Communism.” This was just as important as our previous reading because it helped us connect Marx’s theory of alienated labor to state capitalism. While Marx doesn’t develop an explicit theory of state capitalism, his concept of “crude communism” prefigures it. For Marx, crude communism is a community in which all members are wage workers who collectively own the means of production as capital to produce commodities and sell them in the market for profit. Notice how there is no private property under crude communism. However, Marx argues that even if there is no capitalist private property in form, the essence of capitalist private property as alienated labor is preserved in a universal form. Instead of private capitalists owning private capital, an entire community of wage workers owns capital as their public property. But even capital as a public property has the same essence as its private counterpart: alienated labor.

Marx analogizes this to abolishing private marriage for communal prostitution in which each woman is a property of an entire community. Even if we abolish the patriarchal institution of marriage such that no woman is subordinate to an individual husband, the essence of the patriarchal institution of marriage is preserved and elevated to a universal form: each woman is still subordinate to an entire community as though it were an impersonal husband. Similarly, each worker is subordinate to an entire community as though it were an abstract capitalist. Marx’s critique of crude communism can naturally extend into a critique of state capitalism. Even if we abolish private property, but if the essence of private property as alienated labor is preserved, workers are subordinate to the state as an abstract capitalist.

After reading Marx’s “Alienated Labor” and “Private Property and Communism,” it became apparent to me that a weekly reading group is invaluable for learning theory. What’s missing in our younger generations of socialists is the lack of foundational readings for learning revolutionary theory.

This brings me to my answer to the question “what can we as revolutionary intellectuals do to participate in dialogue with the working class and the oppressed?” I think part of the answer is that we have to enter into a dialogue with future revolutionary intellectuals on campus. These future revolutionary intellectuals who are on campus will graduate from college and enter into the labor market. Our dialogue with the young revolutionary intellectuals can help initiate and generate the momentum needed for the working class to develop revolutionary consciousness. This is my partial answer to the question “What is to be done.”

As we’re entering into a dialogue with young revolutionary intellectuals, we’re entering into the battle of ideas. Young revolutionary intellectuals are being pulled in many different directions, and we need to be there to point them in the right direction. And it isn’t enough that we’re simply there to point them in the right direction, but that our presence becomes noticeable and conspicuous to young revolutionary intellectuals. If we’re at the periphery of attention, young revolutionary intellectuals will learn Marxism from neo-Stalinist Campists like the PSL or the “Democratic Socialists” such as DSA. Many people probably know the Neo-Stalinist and the Democratic Socialist perspectives on socialism, but they don’t know about Marxist Humanism. This is the reason why many of these people asked me, “What is Marxist Humanism?” It’s important that we can answer their questions in such a way that is clear to them.

I want to emphasize that the answer I provided is only a partial answer or a piece of a larger jigsaw puzzle. But that doesn’t make it any less important.

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Adapted from a presentation to the July 2026 Convention of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization.