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Official Call for Convention to work out Perspectives for 2006-2007June 1, 2006 To all members of News and Letters Committees and Marxist-Humanists internationally Dear Friends, Today we see signs that a renewal of the freedom movements may be underway in the U.S. and in the developed capitalist world-though we can neither underestimate the power of the Bush administration to repress them, nor overestimate the desire of the Democratic Party to aid them. Support for the U.S. occupation of Iraq has hit an all-time low, as many realize that the war has further destabilized Iraq, moved the U.S. toward economic bankruptcy, and provided religious fundamentalists in the Middle East with a cause to rally around. Dissatisfaction with the "growing economy" is mounting as it becomes clear that it is benefiting only those few with direct access to capital. Opposition is rising to Bush's attacks on women's rights and civil rights through his Supreme Court appointments. Things look very different from just a year ago, when Bush claimed that his reelection provided him with a "mandate" to impose total political and ideological control over U.S. society. No event of the past year was more defining than the outrage voiced by masses of people over the horrid response to Hurricane Katrina. The government's inaction exposed the racism that has defined this country from its birth. The disgust over the tens of thousands who were left destitute in New Orleans is what really killed Bush's plans to revamp Social Security and deeply gut social programs. Bush's disastrous conduct of the Iraq war and of hurricane relief is also producing splits in the ruling class, as seen in the controversy over the NSA's domestic spying operations. Bush's illegal spying on tens of millions of Americans can hardly be explained by an effort to "protect" us from overseas terrorists. It is part of the government's response to growing opposition by youth and war veterans to the Iraq war, women protesting the destruction of abortion rights, gays and lesbians protesting the drive to roll back the hard-won gains of the movement, and Blacks and Latinos raising! their voices against the racist character of American "civilization." There is no greater sign of the renewal of freedom movements in the U.S. than the marches for immigrant rights. The rapid emergence of this movement is a response to the globalization of capital, which has forced millions off the land in Latin America through free trade agreements. The separation of the laborers from the objective conditions of production has led growing numbers of people to migrate directly to the U.S. instead of first taking jobs in the cities and sweatshops of their native lands, since employment is drying up in them due to neo-liberal economic restructuring. The globalization of capital creates a reserve army of the unemployed in the form of immigrant labor, even as sections of the ruling class move to restrict immigration and/or discipline immigrant workers through "guest worker" programs that make use of their labor power while denying them all rights of residency. While the reserve army of labor is an important tool in capital's effort to keep down wages, the unemployed and super-exploited workers are also a subjective, potentially revolutionary force that can bring the system down-provided, that is, that the masses do not leave matters at the level of the massive but restrained rallies that are now going on. At a moment when workers around the country are being subjected to an intense effort by capital to further lower wages and gut benefits-as seen in the drive to deprive millions of workers in auto, airlines, and other industries of their health benefits and pensions-the new struggles of immigrants has the potential to reawaken the U.S. labor movement as a whole. No one six months ago predicted such an outpouring over immigration. Yet we must not underestimate the response to it on the part of the U.S. Right. Bush has weighed in on the immigration debate by calling for 6,000 National Guardsmen to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border and for a chain-link fence to be constructed along hundreds of miles of it. The Senate recently voted to make English the national language of the U.S. And Congress is considering restrictive laws that would define millions of immigrant workers as felons. The far Right, shaken by the power of this new movement, may well make anti-immigrant hysteria its battle cry in the coming period. This year's events show that no one can predict which forces will move and in what way. The question is will we be ready when masses of people move in a revolutionary direction by projecting a concept of a new society that can give their actions a direction? II. To probe into this question we need to confront the specific political-philosophic challenge facing Marxist-Humanists today, the challenge posed by freedom struggles in various parts of the world that are reaching for a revolutionary uprooting of society. The U.S. occupation of Iraq has neither brought democracy to the Middle East nor quelled the forces of fundamentalist terrorism. Iraq is riven by sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shi'a militias, which the belated formation of a new Iraqi government seems powerless to resolve. Deadly attacks continue to be launched by reactionary fundamentalists, who have killed more Iraqis-including trade unionists, feminists, and students who aspire for a multiethnic, secular Iraq-than they have U.S. troops. Yet neither the U.S. occupation nor the terrorist attacks in Iraq have put a stop to the continued development of independent worker and student struggles as well as a growing Iraqi feminist movement in that country. Few places in the world are witnessing more intense social unrest than China, where the government admits that there have been 80,000 protests and demonstrations in the past year alone. The social dislocation and unrest that accompanies China's rapid modernization is also having an important impact in the realm of ideas. As we learned from our participation in an international conference on Rosa Luxemburg in China in March, there is a quest on the part of independent activists and thinkers there for an alternative to both the capitalist free market and authoritarian statism. New struggles have also arisen in the West, especially in France. This year's ghetto revolts against police abuse by Arab and African minority youth have been followed by massive student-worker protests-the largest mobilization of the Left in over two decades. In response to the French government's effort to enable employers to fire young workers without notice, three mass protests of a million people, plus the occupation of 1,200 high schools and 69 universities, forced the government to back down. Latin America is seething with growing mass unrest. It can be seen from Mexico, where the May Day rally in Mexico City was the largest in many years, to new labor, peasant, student and indigenous struggles in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina. Many of today's movements in Latin America have adopted nonhierarchical organizational forms that oppose the old left model of "first we seize state power, then we figure out how to reorganize social relations." The women's liberation movement helped give birth to this focus on decentralized forms of organization. The feminist movement became an important force in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. From its inception women chose to organize themselves in decentralized, nonhierarchical collectives and formations in direct opposition to the vanguardism and elitism of most of the Left. In Mexico the feminist movement initiated a series of gatherings, called encuentros, which were open-ended spaces for women to develop perspectives for liberation. The Zapatistas in Chiapas directly copied the encuentro form from the women's movement after their revolt in 1994. This in turn provided the inspiration for the nonhierarchical formation represented by the World Social Forum, which ! has been meeting yearly since 2000. The feminist movement's insistence on anticipating the forms of new human relations in the course of social struggles against existing society has deeply impacted movements in Latin America as well as elsewhere. One expression of these new forms is Argentina, where 193 factories, employing 10,000, have been taken over by workers. There are also many unemployed workers' organizations. These factory cooperatives and unemployed organizations have adopted nonhierarchical forms based on democratic decision-making. Yet some of these cooperatives have recently gravitated toward supporting the government, which provides financial aid to some cooperatives. The autonomist assertion of nonhierarchical organizational forms does not necessarily prevent many who defend them from making use of or even supporting statist forms as well. Massive opposition to draconian neo-liberal policies swept Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia into power. This has led to resurgence of interest in the state as a vehicle for challenging neo-liberal economic policies, with Morales recently nationalizing the country's oil and gas reserves. Today we are witnessing a return to traditional approaches that focus on nationalized property and the statification of natural resources as the solution to the ravages of contemporary capitalism-not just on the part of statist vanguardists, but on the part of many who oppose them in the name of grassroots initiatives. One reason for this is that the movements remain without a comprehensive concept of what constitutes the transcendence of capitalist value production. Many recognize the need for free association, workers' control, and self-determination. But the question of how such forms can enable masses of people to uproot value production itself has been largely left aside. Politics, like nature, does not like a void. When the anti-vanguardist left fails to articulate how people can create a liberating alternative to capitalism, then other tendencies can be expected to rush in to provide false answers instead. III. We surely cannot resolve this problem by ourselves. But we do have a role to play in helping to resolve it. To see how we can do so, we need to reexamine the Perspectives Thesis of News and Letters Committees of 1977-78, written as part of an effort to concretize Dunayevskaya's unique contributions contained in her Philosophy and Revolution (1973). Entitled "It's Later, Always Later-Except When Spontaneity Upsurges and You Realize It is Here and Now, and You Aren't There and Ready," the Perspectives Thesis of 1977-78 took up the difference between "totally new, epochal beginnings" and "only new stages of revolt." She wrote: "Not all great events which mark new stages of revolt are also epochal new beginnings, initiating a historic new in thought as well as in fact." The East German workers revolt of 1953 marked an epochal new beginning as it "not only achieved the first revolt from under totalitarian Communism, but also raised the question of the Humanism of Marxism." This led, by 1956, to the birth of a new epoch when the Hungarian Revolution pried Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 from the Archives. This new epoch was anticipated by the philosophic moment of Marxist-Humanism- the breakthrough achieved by Dunayevskaya in her 1953 Letters on Hegel's Absolutes. It became the basis for the entire development of Marxist-Humanism, beginning with Marxism and Freedom (1958). A philosophic moment is a very rare creation. It represents a new stage of cognition. It doesn't just come out of the head of an intellectual. It involves an historic leap in the actions of masses of people. In the 1960s a new stage of revolt was reached with the protests against the Vietnam War, the Black revolution in the U.S., and the near-revolution in France in 1968. Yet while 1968 was "a dramatic highpoint as a near-revolution," it "did not initiate a new epoch in thought" because it did not lead to a deeper conceptual appropriation or development of Marx's Humanism. This didn't mean that creative mass revolts came to an end. "The 1960s signaled the birth of a new generation of revolutionaries on every subject, from anti-Vietnam War to Women's Liberation, with the Black Dimension making it global both in Africa and in the U.S. Nevertheless, once the near-revolution in Paris in 1968 aborted, it became necessary to draw a balance sheet between what was a truly new, epochal beginning and what were only new stages of revolt." An epochal new beginning does not arise only from a new stage of revolt; it arises from a new stage of revolt that is accompanied by a new stage of cognition. Not only did that not arise in the 1960s; no epochal new beginning has arisen since then-despite Poland's Solidarnosc of 1980, the East Europe revolts of 1989 which brought down Communism, the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992, and the 1994 Chiapas rebellion and 1999 Seattle protests which initiated a new movement against globalized capitalism. Dunayevskaya concluded from the unfinished revolts of the 1960s that the time had come to take "revolutionary responsibility for picking up the link" of continuity with Marx's Humanism through a renewed engagement with Hegel's dialectic of absolute negativity. It led to Philosophy and Revolution, which explored the dialectic "in and of itself" and concretized it through a critique of revolutionary alternatives and an analysis of objective world realities. As she wrote in "Not by Practice Alone" (1984): "With Philosophy and Revolution we had a new situation. It is not alone all the new passions and forces of the 1960s with which the book ends but the fact that the philosophic predominates over the history, the theory over the practice...not the movement from practice, but the movement from theory-gave the whole question of Hegelian dialectics 'in and for itself' a totally new meaning, in the sense that it demanded detailing not only the movement from practice but that from theory." Our task today is not to try to rewrite the philosophic breakthrough contained in Philosophy and Revolution. We instead need to absorb, internalize, and develop the ramifications of its central category, "Absolute Negativity as New Beginning," in light of the problems of our times. Only then will we be prepared for new revolts to come. What specific challenge for today flows from Dunayevskaya's "unchaining of the dialectic" with the concept of "Absolute Negativity as New Beginning"? In 1987 she wrote: "The burning question of the day remains: What happens the day after [the revolution]? Can we continue Marx's unchaining of the dialectic organizationally, with the principles he outlined in his Critique of the Gotha Program?" Today's world is full of crises and revolts. Yet there isn't a clear way out of today's crises largely because radical theorists have failed to develop the new stage of cognition that emerged from as early as the 1950s on the basis of Marx and Hegel by spelling out a vision of a non-capitalist world in relation to the specific revolts and world realities of our times. The prevailing tendency of radical thought today is to stop dead at the political form of decision making as the determinate to creating a new society-as if the question of "what happens after" the revolution can be answered without grappling with the difficult problem of how a revolution can transcend the capitalist law of value. As our Perspectives for 2005-2006 stated: "The radical movement has virtually dropped any discussion of transforming the mode of production, focusing instead on civil society, democracy, culture, 'self-expression,' etc. These issues are important, but what's been left aside is any discussion of how to transform the economic structure of capitalism....The failure by post-Marx Marxists to transform production relations because they fetishized property forms has led many to now act as if the most we can reach for is to transform the political and cultural superstructure of capitalism. In both cases transforming alienated labor and the capitalist mode of production is left untheorized." To be prepared for new spontaneous revolts that may well arise in the future, we must move beyond such a stopping point. No new society can arise without freely associated relations of production and in society. But masses of people want to know what specific relations of production and society need to be transformed through free association in a way that can enable humanity to fundamentally break from value production. We must address that question, instead of stopping dead before it IV. This question was integral to Dunayevskaya's work in the 1980s on a planned book on "Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy: 'The Party' and Forms of Organization Born from Spontaneity." Much of her work on it centered on a paragraph added to Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (1981) after it went to press. The paragraph reads: "Though committee-form and 'party to lead' are opposites, they are not absolute absolutes. At the point when the theoretic form reaches philosophy, the challenge demands that we synthesize not only the new relations of theory to practice, and all the forces of revolution, but philosophy's 'suffering, patience and labor of the negative.' Then and only then will we succeed in a revolution that will achieve a classless, non-racist, nonsexist, truly human, truly new society." Soon after Dunayevskaya's death in 1987, when we confronted the changed world brought about by the collapse of the state-capitalist regimes that called themselves "Communist" in East Europe and Russia in 1989 and 1991, we addressed the significance of this added paragraph in our Perspectives Thesis of 1992-93 in a way that has important ramifications for today. The 1992-93 Perspectives stated that Dunayevskaya's perspective of working out "the absolute opposite to the elitist party- philosophy's 'labor, patience, seriousness, and suffering of the negative, that is, experiencing absolute negativity'...was a challenge she kept issuing from [1981] to the end of her life in June 1987. Where we have had trouble in meeting this challenge is that in correctly opposing the elitist 'party to lead' we have too often acted as if the working out of its organizational alternative would come by itself. The problem with such skipping over of organization is that it cuts away the compulsion! to experience philosophy. The Idea thereby gets reduced to an abstract universal that is bowed to but never concretized. That is when we confront 'two worlds' of philosophy and reality opposed to one another instead of their interpenetration....Today's objective-subjective situation provides ample proof of how the effort to work out a new beginning cannot be realized when the concretization of the philosophy of revolution is skipped over. The time is long past when one could just repeat the generalization that spontaneity and party are not absolute opposites. The time has come to act on it." The 1992-93 Perspectives concluded that this "involves further developing Marxist-Humanism philosophically so that an aim, a goal, an end can become the ground for a new beginning [which] can be projected to those hungering for a vision of the future." To what extent have we lived up to this? We have no illusions about what a small group like ours can do. We have limited numbers and resources. However, we have a body of ideas and a perspectives that points the way to developing it. As the founder of Marxist-Humanism noted, becoming a "thought-diver" requires digging away at one spot to develop anew the ideas that answer the problems of our age. The one spot that we must keep digging away at is "what happens after the revolution"-instead of either spreading ourselves so thin that we fail to seriously engage the issue or reduce the body of ideas to an abstraction. One way that we seek to meet this challenge in the coming year is by working out a new collection of Dunayevskaya's writings on Marx. The task is not to treat the writings as some icon that we bow to but never concretize. We instead seek to absorb and share with others her writings on Marx as part of the effort to work out the unfinished and unresolved task that confronts this generation-working out a comprehensive understanding of what is required to surmount value production. We cannot leave that for later, nor can we leave it on the backs of spontaneous struggles. History shows that once a revolution breaks out events move far too fast to first begin thinking out the content of a liberatory alternative. To work out such an alternative theoretically means neither imposing a program on the masses nor indulging in abstract blueprints about the future. It is how we can achieve continuity with Marxist-Humanism on the level of the discontinuities of our time. This year we had many experiences that provide the opportunity for concretizing this. We were invited to China and Latin America, where we participated in conferences and debates on radical theory, the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, and the meaning of Marx's thought for today. We engaged in important dialogue with thinkers and activists within the women's liberation, anti-war, and immigrant rights movements. We held a nationwide series of open discussions on "Developing a Philosophically Grounded Alternative to Capitalism," in which we probed deeper into the question of "what happens after" the revolution. This work gives us the confidence that we can build our organization on the basis of the challenges facing us. The REB will issue a Draft for Perspectives, to be published in the August-September issue of News & Letters. Pre-Convention discussion opens with the issuance of this Call. The NEB will meet to work out an agenda and chairs on Friday evening, Sept. 1. The Convention will open on Saturday morning, Sept. 2, and will continue through Sunday, Sept. 3. All sessions will be open to members and invited friends approved by the locals, who are given the same privileges to the floor for discussion. We are asking the Chicago Local to host the Convention. Pre-Convention discussion bulletins will be issued through the summer; the deadline for the first bulletin will be July 7. Those who wish to submit material for pre-Convention bulletins are asked to have them in the Center by Aug. 7. Material for discussion after that must be brought to Convention. -The Resident Editorial Board, News and Letters Committees |
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