Draft Marxist-Humanist Perspectives for 2026-27

Part I. From war to war: Iran, Palestine, AI, climate
Part II. America 250: Counterrevolution mythologizes 1776 Revolution
Part III. Negating this world in crisis: the need to get to the negation of the negation

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Part III. Negating this world in crisis: the need to get to the negation of the negation

A. Movements from practice, movements from theory, and organizations of people in search of dialectical organization of thought

Contentious as democracy is, millions are not ready to give it up without a fight. They are defending what, in their minds, democracy and justice are supposed to mean. Defending democracy and fending off fascism are the marquee goals of the massive No Kings and Hands Off demonstrations. They are also often-discussed goals of more specifically focused movements, from local anti-ICE solidarity organizing, to women fighting for control over their own bodies, to Indigenous battles against oil pipelines, which demand that Free, Prior and Informed Consent by affected peoples be actually practiced. It is also true of the explosion of new struggles against building massive data centers and immigrant detention camps.

Often remarked in these struggles is the power of self-organizing communities, which sheds light on the feebleness of established democratic institutions that hardly allow self-determination for communities and the individuals who make them up. Mutual aid, decentralized organizations, and experiments in direct democracy, such as the daily assemblies that were prominent in the Occupy movement, have long been part of resistance movements, giving a glimpse of the possibility of a truly free association, even though these organizations are not necessarily the foundations of a new society, as some wish.

Increasing rejection of capitalism and openness to socialism, especially among young people, has also emerged from these movements, as polls and some recent primary elections confirm. Hysterical attacks on socialism from the right wing, joined by some of the centrist media like The New York Times and The Atlantic, testify to its importance. At the same time, it underscores the need for clarity about what capitalism and socialism actually are, lest movements’ energies get funneled into false alternatives that only extend capitalism’s life by helping it establish new forms of appearance.

WAS THE INTERNATIONAL ANTI-FASCIST CONFERENCE ANTI-FASCIST?

A cautionary tale is the First International Anti-Fascist Conference for the Sovereignty of Peoples, held March 26-29 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Its organizers viewed it as a success, with 7,000 people in its opening march, and participants from about 40 countries, including the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and prominent leftist parties such as La France Insoumise.

However, its ambition to be anti-fascist succumbed to the pro-Putin campism of its main organizers. Ukrainian and Russian socialists were not allowed to speak at the central plenary sessions, but Hossein Khaliloo, an Iranian state stooge, did, and slandered the 2025-26 uprising of Iranian youth and their allies as foreign intervention, while another speaker claimed that women there are not oppressed. Some insisted that the governments of Iran and pre-coup Venezuela must not be criticized.

A minority of participants spoke out strongly against campism, the ideology that subordinates all politics to an imagined division of the world into two camps, the imperialist U.S. and its allies vs. those thought to resist the U.S. They pointed out that Russian President Vladimir Putin is one of the centers of spreading fascism around the world and is adored by many fascists who are close to Donald Trump.

But the final conference declaration was silent about Putin and about the theocratic Iranian state’s repression. It abstractly denounced fascism and imperialism in terms that clearly would apply to Putin, but when it was time to get concrete it listed only the U.S. and its allies as perpetrators to be opposed. Tellingly, the declaration urged that all must “support the struggles of peoples and governments that resist.”

Some participants who do not subscribe to campism argued that this compromise was needed “to gather a large number of signatures from left-wing individuals and movements and to encourage broad participation in the Porto Alegre conference so that debates can take place there and so that everyone can hear different points of view.”

WHAT KIND OF UNITY?

This compromise stops at a bare first negation in the name of unity of the small and motley Left that is, or claims to be, anti-fascist. It ditches the actual masses that have been fighting against Putin’s fascism in Ukraine, and against theocratic fascism in Iran. The compromise also muddies ideas, especially considering that part of that Left is friendly with not only Putin but fascists in the U.S. such as Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, in the name of opposing war and imperialism. Indiscriminate unity of the Left deadens the battle of ideas and sidelines the role of a philosophy of revolution.

What is more important than unity of the small “revolutionary” Left is the unity of the movement from theory with the movement from practice.

The movement from theory must always strive to comprehend the movement from practice and the ways in which it acts as a form of theory itself, and at the same time the movement from theory has a crucial responsibility to work out how the full philosophy of revolution relates to that movement from practice and how to project it concretely—that is, to make sure that the power of the Idea and the power of the masses in motion are united, so that resistance does not stop at opposing what is, the first negation, but moves toward the negation of the negation: establishment of a totally new society on truly human foundations. Both the Idea and the masses in motion need organizations for their own self-determination.

Trade union activist Sergio Bellavita pointed out the conference’s lack of “rigorous analysis and a self-critical reckoning with the role played by the left over recent decades,” adding, “No speaker at the conference chose to interrogate the meaning of terms such as antifascism and anti-imperialism. What is fascism today?”

Ecosocialist Christian Zeller identified an uncritical attitude to

the populist, so-called progressive governments in Latin America,” as well as a failure to take up the links between the fossil fuel industry and fascism. Zeller pointed out that Brazil’s “socialist” government “is itself closely linked to the fossil capital of the Petrobras corporation….Nor does the final declaration say a word about the fact that repressive strategies of unequal, selective adaptation to global heating are a central feature of the new fascism. The denial of the consequences of global heating is a central feature of the new authoritarianism and fascism….the fossil fuel backlash is also eating away through the left.

Whether it is manifested in an uncritical attraction to the now receding “pink tide” of leftist governments in Latin America or in the descent into campism, too much of the Left desperately latched onto state powers as the “anti-capitalist”—or at least anti-U.S.—force. Behind settling for being against the U.S. is lost confidence in the self-activity of the masses reorganizing society, which is unseparated from their lack of confidence in the power of the Idea, that is, of a philosophy of revolution. Picturing the world’s state powers divided into camps is easier than trying to hear the two worlds of rulers and ruled that clash within every country. This is anti-dialectics. Bad actors within the global capitalist system are substituted for the system itself, circumscribing one’s thought within the bounds of the system. It is a diversion from a revolutionary perspective. Missing is a banner of full human liberation on the ground of the dialectics of revolution.

ELECTORAL POLITICS IN THE USA

The DSA’s apparent success in electoral politics offers another shortcut to socialism. Thousands of New Yorkers breathed a sigh of relief when Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor, with plans to make rent, public transit, and childcare more affordable in a time when prices are rising past wages. That victory helped more DSA-supported candidates win elections, mostly Democratic primaries.

DSA’s growth to 120,000 members reflects how fed up the youth are with capitalism—together with disgust at Democratic moderates’ weak resistance to Trump’s reach for fascism. A smaller part of that growth is due to the implosion of much of the organized left, with former members of defunct groups flocking to the DSA, which positions itself as a big tent for the Left, so that the absence of a guiding philosophy beyond crude pragmatism is raised up to a principle of organization.

Consequently, campists are a significant enough fraction of the membership to control its international policy, while DSA also has attracted quite a few people intoxicated by electoral politics.

OPPORTUNISM ABANDONS BLACK MASSES

DSA member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) made the opportunism public, first when she lied at the 2024 Democratic Party Convention, portraying Kamala Harris as fighting for a ceasefire in Gaza, then most recently with her declaration that “Woke 1 was crazy!” in response to a question about defunding the police, which she supported in 2020 under the impact of the George Floyd uprisings. She appears to be distancing herself from the police/prison abolition movement, and from Black liberation in general, in preparation for a presidential run in 2028. Mayor Mamdani also signaled his abandonment of abolition. While national DSA refused to endorse AOC this year because of her failure to defend Palestinians from genocide, the New York City chapter endorsed her, and if she runs for president, plenty of DSAers will campaign for her.

It is not just a question of reluctantly supporting Democratic Party candidates as a defense from a complete fascist takeover. It is a question of being sucked into a narrow focus on electoral politics, as reflected in euphoric accounts of the “new period” DSA has entered, entirely defined by this year’s primary elections.

Inevitably, opinion polls and anxiety about “electability” corrode such groups ideologically. Bhaskar Sunkara, president of The Nation and editorial director of the DSA-adjacent Jacobin, made this clear in his July 16 interview in The New York Times. He attacked the idea of police abolition as something that came from NGOs, argued against talking about racial disparity and being too strongly supportive of abortion rights, and attacked the idea of systemic racism (like right-wingers, he slyly conflated it with the view of the U.S. as “irredeemably racist”), claiming instead that “This is a good country filled with, by and large, good people.”

Sunkara is not alone in his left “anti-woke” politics that downplays anything having to do with subjects of revolution other than the working class, which itself is understood not as a subject of revolution but as an interest group. The advice to not talk about climate, Black liberation, women’s liberation, or queer liberation, and focus instead on “affordability,” is everywhere.

TAKING MARX’S PHILOSOPHY FOR GRANTED

Boiling class struggle down to affordability goes hand in hand with taking for granted what capitalism and socialism are, instead of going through proof and process. That taking for granted is, in Hegel’s terms, “a barbarous procedure.”[1]

Consider The ABCs of Socialism, edited by Sunkara and published by Verso with Jacobin. Nowhere does it explain what capitalism is and how it functions, beyond “Capitalism is anchored in the private accumulation of wealth and the pursuit of income through the market….Capitalism is an economic system based on the exploitation of the many by the few.”

Sunkara explained his

vision of a just society, of a socialist society, that private property would be controlled by ordinary workers who would get their financing from public banks, who would still operate with hard budgets….But you don’t have a class of people who, as individuals, control investment decisions….My vision of a good society might take centuries to enact, and I’m perfectly comfortable to sit by and wait in my hyperbolic chamber.

The history of socialism is littered with the consequences of such superficialities that scoff at the profound theoretical understanding of capitalism developed by Marx,[2] such as the Second International’s collapse when World War I broke out and most of the socialist parties backed their governments in the imperialist war. Even more calamitously, when Stalin succeeded in transforming the Russian Revolution into its opposite, totalitarian state-capitalism, much of the “Marxist” Left descended into apologias for Stalinism—which is only the Russian name for state-capitalism masquerading as socialism. That trend has evolved into campism.[3]

The pact between Stalin and Hitler that gave the green light to World War II sent shock waves through the Marxist movement, but all too many clung to the belief that the USSR was either socialist or a workers’ state, perhaps degenerate, and must still be defended against the capitalist imperialists. That raised the question of what socialism really is, and whether a return to Marx to gain a deeper understanding of capitalism would show that Russia had returned to it in a new form. Marxists today who dismiss that analysis as irrelevant are heading toward new failures, helplessness before yet another counterrevolution coming from within the revolution.

This is seen in a theory that has some popularity among post-Marx Marxists now. Like a zombie, defense of Stalinist Russia and Mao’s China has risen from the grave, embodied in Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, which insinuates that criticism—even by Marxists—of the state-capitalist formations and their crude ideology is an operation paid for by the CIA and other agencies. This kind of ideological Marxism is an expression of the abandonment of the prospect of social revolution, settling instead for a bare first negation by clinging onto some state powers that oscillate between competing and collaborating with the designated main enemy, U.S. imperialism—as Hegel put it, “like a wanderer in the desert craving for the merest mouthful of water. By the little which can thus satisfy the needs of the human spirit we can measure the extent of its loss.” By identifying revolutionary Marxism with its transformation into opposite in the state-capitalist Stalinist social formations, this ideology unwittingly aligns with Trumpists, who are undertaking a purge of Marxist and other radical theory.

When Stalin consolidated the new form of capitalism pretending to be socialism in the 1930s, Raya Dunayevskaya returned to Marx. She highlighted the relations within the labor process in Russia that remained alienated and exploitative, studying the new Humanism of Marx’s 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts, eventually leading to the birth of Marxist-Humanism. Soon, she explained the meaning of Stalin’s order that the dialectical structure of Capital should not be followed, and chapter 1 should not be taught. That is where Marx explains the fetishism of commodities, which underlies his theory of the perversity of relations between machine and worker in capitalism, where dead labor dominates living labor.[4] It was the official theoretical accommodation to economic reality. Dunayevskaya’s seriousness about theory and philosophy is sorely needed today.

Instead we have a whole set of movements and theoreticians who do see the need for a fresh look at concepts of organization but in the absence of any real rethinking end up resurrecting old ideas that once again separate organization from philosophy. Understandably, the vanguard party is no longer popular on the Left, but the principle of subordinating principles to unity leaves the door open for both vanguardism in other forms and opportunism to fester.

B. Philosophy and organizational tasks

I want to stress the word, “the whole” [organization], not in the sense that each one is going to write a chapter, but rather that the context of each person’s activity and special point of concentration–be it labor, Women’s Liberation, youth, Black, etc.–will be inseparable from the meaning of that activity, and that meaning, whether of an objective event or the subjective activity, will be projected to those not-yet Marxist-Humanists, because in meaning, i.e., philosophy, is both ground and roof of all we do, survey, strive for, as we prepare for that “revolution in permanence.”
– Raya Dunayevskaya

In the context of the profound crisis on the radical Left, which is one key factor in a world reeling from multiple interlinked crises, our organization must maintain a critical attitude toward the world, the Left, and social movements that includes an objective view of our own activity and thought. We have always rejected the separation between organization and philosophy, and base ourselves on developing Dunayevskaya’s work on the dialectics of organization and philosophy within the totality of her Marxist-Humanist body of ideas. It is no easy task to project philosophy concretely, and unseparated from organization.

We strive to have a clear-eyed recognition about the distance between what Marxist-Humanist organization is supposed to be and our current reality, while patiently trying to get to second negativity in working out ways to address that gap.

None of this can be treated as an “internal” matter since it is always embedded in—and opens out to—the overall objective and subjective situation. As Dunayevskaya, the founder of both Marxist-Humanism and the organization News and Letters Committees, frequently stressed, what is most crucial for liberation struggles is the way one prepares, theoretically/philosophically, for revolution.

Our current work on preparing more documents for the archives in the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, far from being merely recording the past, is part of the quest to break down divisions between philosophy, organization, revolt, and confrontation with the objective world. A key part is Dunayevskaya’s correspondence with more than 600 people. It reveals how consistently she put philosophy first—that is, philosophy of revolution: Marx’s Marxism and how it was developed as Marxist-Humanism, and how it must be concretely worked out at each step. At the same time, it shows how crucial organization was to her, as an expression of the life of that philosophy, and how concretely she worked out organizational relations and tasks in terms of Marxist-Humanist philosophy. Her letters show how the self-development of the Idea pervaded her view of archives as well as of any discussion of the history of the organization. As she wrote to a comrade,

I thought there needs to be further stress on Thought, on our Contribution after we have elicited from both worker and intellectual. That is to say, we must neither think the new will come only from experience and the dialogue with other, nor even from all we knew before from history, including our own, but first then let thought undergo its self-development.…‘from below’ means also in thought there will be a self-development of Marxist-Humanism, its concretization on two levels: Battle of Ideas; Battle of Activities or participation in other movements.

Again and again, she stressed in these letters the need for everyone to get to second negativity—the negation of the first negation, with the positive emerging from the negative in a process of self-development through contradiction. That is for everyone including herself, including comrades, including movements and revolutions. That is the essential moment in practicing Marxist-Humanist organization.

Keeping in mind the indispensability of Marxist-Humanism and its historic demand for commensurate organizational expression, and our determination to narrow the gap between that and the reality of where our organization is at the moment, we call for an intensive pre-Convention and Convention discussion of how to concretize this view of today’s objective-subjective situation and of philosophy as actuality in terms of organizational conclusions—how to get to second negativity on that. That needs the voices of all and it needs the labor, patience, and seriousness of each, and of all collectively.

In order to allow the Convention to be a place for getting to second negativity, we should make the pre-Convention discussion bulletin meaningful. We need as many comrades as possible to write, not off the tops of their heads, not complaints or assertions, but seriously thought-out journeys into concretizing the body of ideas of Marxist-Humanism. That is, each one is no doubt engaged in trying to work out aspects of the objective-subjective situation, contradictions in social movements, inwardizing and projection of the Marxist-Humanist body of ideas; a discussion bulletin article aims to be a continuation and development of the ongoing work of thought that that individual is doing. It is crucial to be aware of one’s own uneasiness at the contradictions in movements in which one participates, to tarry with that negativity, and to make it the basis of critical thought concretely relating the particular to the universal. After the Convention, continuing development of this labor of thought may form the basis for new theoretical-philosophical essay articles.

At the same time, let us work out new approaches to our public meetings that recognize they are part of our pre-Convention discussion period, and let us communicate with each other more regularly about our journeys into archives, our projection to others, the battles of ideas we engage in, our serious efforts at inwardization of the body of ideas, and concrete analyses of the objective-subjective situation.

We have a responsibility to help the movement set its direction by working at the concrete projection of a liberatory banner to act as a polarizing force for opponents of the turn toward fascism and war—at a time when there is a desperate pull for unity based on the lowest common denominator. This points to the need for the philosophy of revolution that can become the unifying force and is the reason for being and driving force of our organization.

–The National Editorial Board of News and Letters Committees, Sept. 2, 2026

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1 See “Parts for June 1 presentation” by Raya Dunayevskaya, p. 2; also her Philosophy and Revolution, p. 19. Her reference is to Hegel’s Science of Logic, Vol. I, trans. by W.H. Johnston and L.G. Struthers (Macmillan, 1951), p. 49. There is a different translation online at marxists.org, para. 29.