I’m certainly glad I live other than an academic life.
— Raya Dunayevskaya, ‘To Herbert Marcuse’, June 27, 1957.

On the Crisis of the Indian Left

In times of the rise of the Indian ethno-nationalists in Indian politics and when the Indian left is almost totally on the back foot in the political life-world because of its incapacity to understand the dynamics of ethno-nationalism, its mass appeal and its relation to international monopolist multinational neoliberal finance capital; a rejuvenation is necessary not merely as tinkering around with party programmes and policies, but a philosophical rejuvenation where Marxism speaks with its own voice—the voice of dialectical and historical-humanist materialism that is bent on the praxis of human emancipation.

One of the main reasons for the decline of the established Indian left (besides the abandonment of mass struggle and revolutionary internationalism and the acceptance of the Stalinist model of state capitalism as the political ideal to be strived for) is that they are suffering from a theoretical crisis, precisely because they lack the understanding of Marxist philosophy making then relapse into forms of social engineering and empiricism.

This empiricism is twofold: (1) economic reductionism where the Indian left sought once-upon-a-time the ideal subject of the Indian revolution in the industrial proletariat (as is the case of the CPI and CPM) or in the peasantry (as is the case with the far left Maoist parties), and (2) the post-Marxist transcendence of the analysis of political economy and the regime of class and class struggle for an idealized “people” in the populist sense to form the corpus of New Social Movements where we have what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe had called “subject positions”: gay rights, LGBT, minorities, etc. which for the Indian left is translated into: dalits, religious minorities, women, etc., all of course estranged from the social structure, where revolution is replaced with the discourse of “social justice” within the capitalist mode of production.[1] If the first error is economic reductionism, the second error is of identity politics, the negation of the critique of capitalist political economy and the acceptance of capitalism as the final mode of production that can never be transcended.

The first transcended Marxism into vulgar socialism while the second was transcended into post-Marxism, postmodernism and the political fashion industry where the Indian Communist Parties instead of talking of global capitalism and the formation of international fascism are seen with NGOS and bourgeois parties shouting at the top of their voices that they want to save the Indian Constitution, not to forget save Indian bourgeisdom. The political Indian left thus has two souls in its unfortunate breast: Stalinism and post-Marxism, now added with a third soul: the soul of liberal democracy where they now chose to resurrect Gandhi and Nehru in the contemporary struggle against right-wing ethno-nationalism in India.[2] And since social engineering has replaced Marxist philosophy, the question of human liberation is completely forgotten by them. They forget that for Marx, science and human emancipation are closely intertwined.[3]

The Need for Philosophical Marxism

It is in this sense that we ask the question: “What is Marxist philosophy as “philosophy proper”, what relevance has it for India and the world in the 21st century and how can one develop the strand of revolutionary Marxism that transcends both Stalinism and the political fashion industry?” And it is there that one recalls the philosophical strand in revolutionary Marxism in the works of Raya Dunayevskaya and the Marxist-Humanist school of thought where the dialectics of negativity forms the core of her thought. In this dialectics of negativity, revolution is not understood as a single utopian act, but a revolution in permanence. For Dunayevskaya, Hegel’s “Absolute” is most certainly not the end of history, a theme that Alexander Kojeve made famous in his lectures and which Francis Fukuyama manipulated to show that liberal democracy, Yankee type, is indeed this end of history. Nor is the Hegelian “Absolute” to be seen in Engels’ rendering where this Absolute is said to be “absolute in so far as he (Hegel) has nothing to say about it”.[4] Instead this Absolute is to be understood as “absolute negativity”.[5] The Absolute signifies “new impulses for liberation”.[6] Hegel’s revolution in thinking is the New Beginning that Marxism has to undergo. For Dunayevskaya, as was for Hegel, “the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative”[7] is the essence of both philosophy as well as revolution.

Now it is well known that Marxism could rescue itself from the clutches of Stalinism at least theoretically since Georg Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness where Hegel was brought into the ambit of serious revolutionary discourse alongside Antonio Gramsci and Karl Korsch, followed by the Frankfurt School, the structuralist school of Louis Althusser, the British Marxists like E.P. Thomson, Terell Carver, Perry Anderson and Tariq Ali and the left-existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre to Fredric Jameson, Aijaz Ahmad and Slavoj Žižek where Marx and Engels were (and are) discussed threadbare along with Lenin, Trotsky, Freud, Lacan, etc., etc. The list is long, very, very long. But this school that we know as “Western Marxism” existed (and yet exists) in the realm of mere academia where Marxism becomes “academic socialism” totally alienated from real life struggles where the academic comrades live in the Hotel Abyss that exist over pure nothingness.[8]

In this sense Marxism—as “academic Marxism”—ceases to be real Marxism, revolutionary Marxism. Yet Marxism can never ever be in such a state. Marxism is always bent towards action, revolutionary action. It also has to cease to be “Western”. It has to be internationalist. It needs a comprehensive study of world history where Asia, Africa and Latin America had to be seen with Asian, African and Latin American revolutionary eyes. Most importantly it needs a recalling of indigenous theory and indigenous communism with the critique of white settler colonialism in particular along with the critique of capitalism and imperialism.

And with the contemporary crisis emanating in the form of deadly wars in Ukraine with the Russian invasion and from Gaza where the Zionist settler state is creating an unprecedented genocide which the Military Arms Complex wants to expand into a greater West Asian war, a response is necessary. How is this possible?

But most importantly with climate change creating havoc all over the world, a likewise response to this is also necessary. How can one relate the critique of the political economy of global capital accumulation with climate crisis and how can one relate the alienation of humanity in capitalist society with gender violence and racism not to forget authoritarianism that is now emerging globally in all societies? One needs a coherent answer, not empiricism, not social engineering of the established Communist Parties and most certainly not the post-Marxism that while claiming to create radical democratic politics from below, not only borrowed from Nazi thinkers but also actively supported the coming of the Ayatollahs in Iran in 1979. Now we know how post-Marxism borrowed from Carl Schmidt the Nazi ideologue and how Michel Foucault hailed the 1979 clerical counterrevolution in Iran.

On Raya Dunayevskaya

Marxism most certainly needs to be rethought, but rethought in a critical philosophical and scientific sense. Here one recalls Raya Dunayevskaya born in 1910 in imperial Russia coming from Ukrainian-Jewish descent who first emigrated to the USA at the time of the Civil War waged by the White Army against the Bolsheviks and then to Mexico where she worked as the Russian language secretary to Trotsky before breaking with him on the understanding of the nature of the Soviet Union which for her was nothing but state capitalism where all the categories of Marx’s Capital that defined capitalism—from the commodity principle to value, exchange value, money, etc. existed. For Trotsky, the Soviet Union was basically a degenerated workers’ state where the bureaucracy had substituted itself for the revolutionary proletariat. Further, though Trotsky was an outstanding thinker, he did not go into “philosophy proper” (the way for instance Lenin did on 1914), thus did not go into the details of Hegelian dialectics and relate this with the categories of Marx’s Capital.

Dunayevskaya while rooted in working class struggles, along with women’s struggles and the struggles against racism, refused to be part of the academic structure of capitalist society. Yet her intervention was philosophical. Like Lenin who sought to turn to the Hegelian method to understand the crisis of the Second International, so too Dunayevskaya’s intervention was philosophical. The return to Hegel was of prime importance for her.

Her following books are of great importance—Marxism and Freedom, Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao, Rosa Luxemburg Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution and Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution: Reaching for the Future while her selected writings have also appeared as The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism and the contemporary Marxist-Humanists have been editing her works in the form of The Power of Negativity. Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution in Permanence for Our Day.

Unlike the Marxists and neo-Marxists who saw the Soviet Union at the most as “totalitarian”, Dunayevskaya characterized Stalinism as a counterrevolutionary movement. Stalinism was not merely an aberration of Marxism, some sort of mere revisionism like that which Eduard Bernstein unleashed, but was a direct onslaught on the very basic principles of Marxism. It was a counterrevolution against Marx, speaking however in the name of Marx. It thus became a schizophrenic counterrevolution.

For Dunayevskaya, there was a deeper problem of which Stalinism was a symptom—that of post-Marx Marxism itself. One has to investigate this, philosophically. One had to go to the philosophical roots of Marxism itself.

Consequently, Dunayevskaya took to a critical analysis of Marx’s works in order to see what Marx himself was talking of, which for her was the deep intertwining of humanism and the world revolution, that in capitalism what Marx called “the human essence” (das menschliche Wesen) is lost and that one had to overthrow this entire regime of the world capitalist order for the human essence to speak for itself.

But most importantly one had to read Marx’s works in terms of a coherent whole and not in terms of what Althusser had called an “epistemological break” which divided a young Marx from a mature or scientific Marx studying not humanity, but the “laws of history” that exists allegedly “independent” of humanity.[9] Marxism is philosophical humanism and not the “theoretical anti-humanism” that Althusser argued for.[10] A revolution was indeed needed not “against Marx’s Capital” (to use the young Gramsci’s term),[11] but a revolution which read Capital humanistically.

Consequently, the most important thing that Dunayevskaya did was that she took Marx’s theory of alienation from his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the text that was discovered only in the 1920s and published in full in 1932 by the outstanding Marxologist David Ryzanov (he would disappear in Stalin’s infamous purges) and linked it directly with both everyday life and with the possibilities and necessities of creating revolutionary action. The dialectics of the alienation of the human essence (das menschliche Wesen) and its re-appropriation which Marx outlined in 1844 and linked this with private property and class society became central to the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism. The dehumanization of society is concretely linked to private property and class society. Its contradictory response in the form of the humanization is directly related to the critique and transcendence of private property, class society, patriarchy, racism, colonialism and imperialism. It is this dialectic that forms the core of the mechanisms of what we now know as “intersectionality”.

Now it is important to note that though she uses the terms “humanism” and “Marxist-Humanism”, the term “intersectionality” is not prominent in her works. This idea is theorized by the contemporary Marxist-Humanist school and appears in the book edited by Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin and Heather A. Brown titled Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism. Race, Class, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2021.

A study of this book and the themes that Dunayevskaya consistently brought out is important. For one it is able to construct a theoretical problematic of understanding the intersections of race, class and gender and how liberation is to brought out, not by action devoid of thought, but action that is guided by rigorous philosophical reasoning. It is imperative to point this out since the same theme was present in Lenin in 1914 when he found his own comrades in the Second International betraying proletarian internationalism and supporting their respective governments in the First Imperialist World War.

Lenin knew this to be a betrayal, but he dealt this theoretically, and philosophically. He went to the Berne Library where he did an extensive study of philosophy, especially the philosophy of Hegel. What we get is what we know as the “Philosophical Notebooks” also called “Lenin’s Notebooks” which appears in the volume number 38 of Lenin’s Collected Works. To deal with the imperialist war, Lenin went to “philosophy proper”. Muttering angry statements against his comrades would be utterly useless.

1914 signified a theoretical crisis which had to be dealt with a philosophical mind. In fact Lenin’s programmatic action since 1914 that includes the understanding of imperialism, state and revolution, the rights of nations to self-determination and the art of insurrection emerges from this delving into “philosophy proper”, especially the philosophy of Hegel. What we get is Lenin’s remarks that “it is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially the first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic”.[12] Lenin’s conclusion is important: “Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!”[13]

An important aspect of revolutionary Marxism is to understand the importance of not only philosophy, but the history of philosophy and that earlier pre-Hegelian, pre-dialectical philosophies were not to be abstractly rejected, but that one has to correct them, deepening, generalizing and extending them by “showing the connection and transitions of each and every concept”.[14] The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution did not take place as an accident or contingency in the grand scheme of history, but happened because reason (Vernunft) and freedom, both central categories in Hegel, were realized through well thought-out praxis.

The revolution stagnated after Lenin’s death in 1924 because dialectics and philosophical reasoning were put in the backburner by the post-Lenin Bolsheviks. Remember what Lenin said of Bukharin that though he is the “most valuable and major theorist of the Party…his theoretical views can only be classified as fully Marxist only with great reserve, for there is something scholastic about him (he has never made a study of dialectics, and, I think, never fully understood it)”.[15]

Lenin however never had the occasion to study Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State both published after his death. Dunayevskaya had the occasion. But she did not merely bring this in the form of academic Marxism, but as one for whom revolution as real revolution was always on the agenda. But not only was Hegel and the then undiscovered Marx’s works (not only the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State but also The Ethnological Notebooks) put centre stage to her repertoire, so too was Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind and the Science of Logic.

But her most important contribution was to note that there was no single axis of oppression and that one had to relate class, race and gender and that all these intersect and form parts of the dialectical whole of society. For her, dialectics implies the dictum: “the truth is the whole”.[16] Reductionism, the soul and the heart of Stalinism would now be both understood and dispelled. And with these two ideas one understands contemporary happenings in the world from the global financial crisis, the Arab Spring, the mass protest movement in Iran against clerical fascism, the Black Lives Matter movement in the USA to the Taliban gender apartheid state, the rise of the neo-right in the USA, Europe and Asia culminating in the genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza by the Zionist settler state. There is no one-dimensionality to global oppressions. The multiple axes of oppression are evident in this setting, just as it is in the intersectionality of race, class, gender, colonialism and imperialism.

It is in this context that we read Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism. The book is in four parts: ‘Hegel and Dialectics’, ‘Gender, Race, and Revolution’, ‘Connections and Debates’ and ‘Freedom and Liberation’. As noted before, two ideas are central to this book, intersectionality and humanism, not only this or that humanism, but Marxist-Humanism where communism is not to be confused with the ugly totalitarian states created by Stalin and Mao, but is to be understood as the realization of the human essence, not to forget the unity of humanism and naturalism.[17] Without this idea of humanism (and naturalism), so Marx had said in 1844, communism would turn out to be only “crude communism” where the “vileness of private property” demonstrates itself.[18] In this crude communism “the abolition of the state (Aufhebung des Staat)” is “yet still incomplete”, “being afflicted by private property, i.e. by the estrangement of human beings”.[19]

For Dunayevskaya (as she quotes the Yugoslavian philosopher Mihailo Markovic), “the Marxist dialectic is inseparable from its humanism”.[20] One must note that for Marxist-Humanism, Marx’s humanism is not the abstract humanitarianism that liberal societies boast of, or the Promethean humanism that is completely misunderstood where humanity is seen as the crowning glory of Nature and thus free to plunder her. Instead Marx’s humanism is at the same time naturalism. The first birth of private property is seen as the emerging signs of the decay of humanism and naturalism.[21]

Communism as authentic communism ceases to be a mere political project (mere politics sans philosophy)—as a project that corrects the wrongs of capitalist society—but a global humanist one where the idea of human alienation is related to the question of private property and the feeling of the power of possession, control and domination, not only of human beings but of nature as Nature that is leading to the climate apocalypse. As Marx says in his Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State: humanity does not possess private property; private property possesses humanity. Thus: “My will does not possess, it is possessed”.[22] Translate this into the language of global capitalism and one finds that one is possessed by not only the reality of private property, but also by the ghosts of consumerism, liberalism, ethno-nationalism and fascism.

Communism has to be an act of emancipation from both the reality of capitalism and its accompanying ghosts. It is thus a philosophical act of liberation accomplished with what Marx calls “thinking consciousness”.[23] This theme the Marxist-Humanists has always championed.

A Brief Outline of the Book Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism 

There are many intertwining themes in this recent book authored by leading Marxist-Humanists scholars. While Dunayevskays’ thought is central to it (as shown by Peter Hudis, Kevin B. Anderson, Adrienne Rich, Heather A Brown, Ndindi Kitonga, Lilia D. Monzó and Rudolofo Mondolfo’s contributions), there are many other allied important themes explored by Paul Mason, Karel Ludenhoff, David Black, Fredric Monferrand and Kieran Durkin ranging from why the 2st century must be humanist, crisis theory and Marx on the theory of the falling rate of profit and on alienation and anti-humanism.

The introduction by Anderson, Durkin and Brown sets the tone to this book which talks of the difference between the “timid social democracy of Jürgen Habermas or the ultimately disempowering post-structuralism of Michel Foucault”[24] on the one hand and “the “battle of ideas”—(where) Marxist thought has also seen a resurgence, especially in the English-speaking world, putting postmodernism and the politics of difference on the defensive”.[25]

Now it is well known that one of the most important issues in Marxism is the question of gender and how one theorizes the “women’s question” (especially on unpaid labour under the pretext of rearing the family) as also feminist responses to this. In this book we have Adrienne Rich’s essay ‘Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marx’ where the women’s question along with race and class is understood as dialectical intersectionality where women are said to be “if not a class, a caste; if not a caste, an oppressed group as women—within oppressed groups and within the middle and ruling classes”.[26]

Now for Marxist-Humanism, the questions of race, class and gender are understood within the matrix of Hegelian philosophy which clearly and consistently demarcates the zones of what Hegel calls the understanding (Verstand) and reason (Vernunft), the former which lies in the zone of the analytics of formal logic where social interconnections are not disclosed, while reason lies in the ambit of dialectics of connections and interconnections. It is thus that we understand the intersection of gender, class and race. Gender and race are not mere appendages of class.

Thus as Rich says, “Dunayevskaya recognized women not just as a revolutionary “Force” (contributing courage, support, strength) but as “Reason”—as initiators, thinkers, strategists, creators of the new”[27] where “new forces and new passions sprang up in the bosom of society”.[28] One could also recall Lenin’s method of intersectionality (he of course did not use this term) when he talks of the intersections of German philosophy, English political economy and French Socialism that form the “three sources and three components” of Marxism.[29]

But the most important question for the Marxist-Humanists is: “What happens after the revolution?”[30] Now while Marx laid bare the general workings of the world revolution in the sense of the transcendence of commodity production and the complete regime of class society, not to forget the transcendence of the political state itself; the experience of the so-called “communist” movements of the 20th century not only did not reflect on these transcendences, but affirmed all of them, thus relapsing the communist theoretical and revolutionary-praxical problematic into the state capitalist one. In fact, Marxist-Humanism insists that not only was the Soviet Union state capitalist (along with Maoist and post-Maoist China), but even those movements of “resistance” against imperialism, like Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, Brazil, etc. are state capitalist responses and not communist ones. This is what separates Dunayevskaya and the Marxist-Humanists from a large part of the international left yet caught up in the fallacies of the 20th century experiences and experiments. The Old Left talks of “resistance”, but completely forgets “emancipation”, the core of Marxist thinking.

Theorizing on Spontaneity

Another important aspect of Marxist-Humanism is the philosophical reflection of spontaneity—hailed by the anti-Leninists and anarchists who show disdain for all forms of organizations including communist ones and decried by the Stalinists for whom it is the “iron laws” of history that are considered as the chief actors of history thus suspending the necessity of revolutionary action.

One recalls Lenin’s What is to be Done? as the text which articulates the philosophy of spontaneity where Lenin had laid primacy for understanding theory saying that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”[31] and that unthinking spontaneity, spontaneity sans philosophical thinking leads to the triumph of the bourgeoisie. In fact, for Lenin there is a difference between spontaneity and spontaneity and that “spontaneous working-class movement…by itself (is) able to create only trade-unionism”.[32] This is because this form of spontaneity is spontaneity devoid of thinking, thus rash spontaneity that can be taken over by not only the bourgeoisie, but by right-wing fascist forces. This form of unthinking spontaneity is what Lenin calls the “lowering of the theoretical level” which recreates “theoretical disorder”.[33] Lenin in the beginning of the last century classified that age as the “period of theoretical disorder”.[34]

The problem is that in this era of theoretical disorder, the proponents of unthinking spontaneity seem to be celebrating this death of theory and seem to be “wishing mourners at a funeral many happy returns of the day”.[35] What is needed is what Marxist-Humanism calls the “movement from practice to theory”.[36] One has to return to Marx, to understand the beginnings to create a New Beginning. This “turn to Marx” is however not a “turning backward but a rescuing for the present a legacy she saw as still unclaimed, having being diminished, distorted, and betrayed by post-Marx Marxists and the emerging “Communist” states”.[37] And this turning to Marx was simultaneously a turning to Hegel whose philosophy is not to be understood in a distant Germanic past, but as “living, still uncomprehended, presence in Marx’s own thought”.[38] The idea of the labour of the negative, that negation and the negation of the negation is the soul-force of life is found in Hegel’s doctrine of eternal becoming (Werden) which for Marx was revolution in permanence. It is thus that we are able to differentiate two forms of spontaneity—the one infused with the dialectics of becoming and the revolution in permanence or the spontaneity of the trade unionists and anarchists who shun all forms of theoretical reflection as well as capacity to form an authentic post-class community of free people as an alternative to the capitalist one.

The need thus is to transcend both the passivity that conceives reality only in what Marx called the “form of the object” negating “human sensuous activity, praxis” thus negating subjectivity and the abstract activity of idealism where “real sensuous activity” is totally negated.[39] It is in this sense that Marxist-Humanism claims that “emancipatory change cannot be left to spontaneity”.[40]

Now while it is known that in response to Lenin’s above mentioned critique of unthinking spontaneity, Rosa Luxemburg responded with her theory of spontaneity, which effectively was “European proletarian spontaneity” sans the question of national liberation. Her views against the rights of nations to self-determination sprang from the similar type of reductionism that was the hallmark of Marxism of the Second International. Here “revolutionary cognition is completely reduced to class-consciousness”.[41]While the “indispensability of philosophy” is denied by Luxemburg because of the “abdication of responsibility for providing spontaneous revolts with a vision of the future”, even Dunayevskaya’s former comrades like C.L.R. James argued that socialism exists in-itself in “the self-activity of the masses” thus breaking up with her.[42]

Conclusion

With capitalism grown out of control where it has shown its wrath on Nature itself leading to the climate apocalypse, besides showing wrath on humanity, the alternative that Marxist-Humanism presents is of utmost importance. The alternative, to be precise, is the alternative to capitalism.[43]

It is the time for a New Beginning, where what Lenin calls “all the classes”[44] in a mass humanist way get together to create a post-commodity society where humanity could really live in a human and natural way. This Leninist idea of all the classes humanizes society; it intersects the zones of capital accumulation that is now in permanent crisis with that of gender, race and the rights of all people to self-determination.

This book is a timely one where besides the intersectionality of race, class and gender, also highlights Marx’s original idea of multilinear historicism and the critique of Eurocentric thinking where one understands Marx’s idea that “different historical surroundings”[45] give rise to different results and that there is no monistic model of history that we have been taught by both the capitalist and the Stalinist worlds. Nor is capitalism to be seen as the only mode of production that can usher in a communist society. The Marxist-Humanists have been championing not only the intersection of gender, class and race, but also have been championing the case of Indigenous communities living on the peripheries of capitalism as sources of revolutionary movements.

The teleological mechanistic rendering of communism as emerging from solely and wholly capitalism as done by the Stalinists worked ironically with a colonial logic. Marx in his draft letter to Vera Zasulich, castigated Henry Maine for claiming that the Indian village communes were compelled to die out by the force of history.[46] Marx instead saw “vitality” of these non-Western societies that laid the possibilities of direct communism. And this vitality of non-capitalist, non-Western societies “was incomparably greater than that of Semitic, Greek and Roman, etc. societies, and a fortiori that of modern capitalist societies”.[47]

It was Dunayevskaya along with Adrienne Rich, Heather Brown and Kevin B. Anderson who explicated Marx’s study of non-European, pre-capitalist societies freed from Engel’s positivist teleology in his Origin of Family, Private Property and the State. Marx’s observations in his Draft letter to Zasulich are alive even today as we see the struggles against indigenous non-capitalist people resisting the invasion of capitalism. It is time that one writes the history of liberal democracy and capitalism as not only the history of settler colonialism, but also of genocide. The USA and Canada, leading voices of liberal democracy, have been built on genocide of the indigenous people. Capitalism is essentially barbaric, anti-humanist and genocidal in nature.

Marxist-Humanism from time to time has been warning that the “developmentalist”, “productionist” and “scientistic” model wrongly ascribed to Marx is indeed wrong. The most important issue is now the destructive elements of capitalism demonstrating itself in the climate apocalypse and the challenges that it is now bringing. Marx has talked of the “theoretical possibility” of transcending capitalism[48] and that capitalist abundance is not joy, but what Engels after Fourier called “the source of distress and want”.[49]

In this sense, we have not only the intersection of race, class and gender, but also the intersection of the rotting “developed” capitalist world of the Global North and the non-capitalist world, not to forget the intersection of capitalist society and Nature. Earlier we thought that humanity had to be emancipated from capitalism. Now we know that Nature has to be emancipated too. And the faster we learn the better, or the liberal democratic idea of the “end of history” would be realized as the “end of the world” itself.

Notes

[1] It is not the case that the struggles of dalits, religious minorities and women are not to be seen as the essential core of Marxist praxis. The problem is that post-Marxism takes these struggles as independent of the dialectical whole of capitalist society and most certainly independent of the social structure of society and the critique of global capital accumulation. Post-Marxism thus creates a phantasmagoria of the struggle of oppressed groups within the horizons of capitalism. The question of the transcendence of capitalism is never ever posed.

[2] This contemporary liberal democratic “turn” in the Indian communist parties where they eulogize Gandhi is quite tragic since for the established Indian left at least since the days of struggle against British colonialism and till the advent of globalization in India in the early 1990s, Gandhi was seen as a reactionary feudal leader, not of the Indian masses, but of the Hindus and Nehru and after him the Indian National Congress party under Indira Gandhi were seen as leaders of the Indian capitalist class. In fact the communists had to face the onslaught of the Indian state right from 1947 when India gained formal “independence” from British rule which culminated in the 1960s state repression which compelled a split in the CPM which gave birth to the ultra left. The hegemony of the right-wing ethno-nationalists has forced the Indian left to retreat to Gandhi and Nehru instead of having a coherent anti-fascist understanding of Indian politics and society.

[3] See Karl Marx, ‘To J.B. Schweitzer’, London, January 24, 1865, in Marx. Engels. Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), p. 143.

[4] Frederick Engels, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy’, in Marx. Engels. Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 569.

[5] Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin and Heather A. Brown, ‘Introduction’ in Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin and Heather A. Brown (ed.), Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism. Race, Class, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), p. 8. This theme of absolute negativity runs throughout Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism. See for example, Peter Hudis, ‘The Indispensability of Philosophy in the Struggle to Develop an Alternative to Capitalism’, in Ibid., p. 82.

[6] Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, ‘Raya Dunayevskaya’s Concept of the Dialectic’, in Ibid., p. 37.

[7] This phrase is Hegel’s. See G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1966), p. 81.

[8] This is how Georg Lukács characterized Theodor Adorno in his introduction to The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994), p. 22.

[9] See Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Allen Lane, 1969), pp. 13, 28, 32-4, 37-9, 47, 168, 185, 192n., 244, 249, 257.

[10] Ibid., p. 229.

[11] Antonio Gramsci, ‘The Revolution against Capital’, in The Antonio Gramsci Reader. Selected Writings. 1916-1935, ed. David Forgacs (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2014), p. 32-6.

[12] V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38. Philosophical Notebooks (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1981), p. 180.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid., p. 179.

[15] V.I. Lenin, ‘Letter to the Congress’ (1922), in Lenin. Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 676.

[16] G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, p, 81.

[17] See Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982), pp. 90, 94, 109.

[18] Ibid., p. 90.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Raya Dunayevskaya, Philosophy and Revolution (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1982), p. 259.

[21] While this theme is found in Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, it is a theme that is prominent in the works of Erich Fromm another practitioner of Marx’s humanism.

[22] Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State’, in Karl Marx. Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingston and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 169.

[23] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 90.

[24] Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin and Heather Brown, ‘Introduction’, in Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin and Heather A. Brown (ed.),Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism. Race, Class, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), p. 6.

[25] Ibid., p. 3.

[26] Adrienne Rich, ‘Raya’s Dunayevskaya’s Marx’, in Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin and Heather A. Brown (ed.),Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism, p. 94.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid., pp. 96-7.

[29] V.I. Lenin, ‘The Three Sources and Three Components of Marxism’, in Lenin. Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), pp. 20-4.

[30] Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, ‘Raya Dunayevskaya’s Concept of Dialectics’, in Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism, pp. 26, 27, 41.

[31] V.I. Lenin, What is to be Done? (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), p. 25.

[32] Ibid., p. 94.

[33] Ibid., p. 25.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Adrienne Rich, ‘Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marx’, in Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism, p. 95. This idea is theorized by Dunayevskaya in her Philosophy and Revolution, pp. 250-4.

[37] Adrienne Rich, op. cit., p. 93.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Marx. Engels. Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 28.

[40] Peter Hudis, op. cit., p. 79.

[41] Ibid., p. 78.

[42] Ibid.

[43] Here one also needs to recall Peter Hudis’ Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2016).

[44] V.I. Lenin, op. cit., pp. 69,78,-82, 86, 89, 125.

[45] Karl Marx, ‘Drafts of the Letter to Vera Zasulich. First Draft’, in Marx. Engels. Collected Works, Vol. 24 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1989), p. 352.

[46] Ibid., p. 359.

[47] Ibid., p. 358.

[48] Ibid., p. 349

[49] Frederic Engels, ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’, in Marx. Engels. Collected Works, Vol. 24, p. 316.