When: Wednesday, January 4, 6:30 PM
Where: News and Letters Library, 228 S. Wabash Ave., Room 230, Chicago
News and Letters Committees invites you to a meeting on
Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy in Our Time
Part of a series of discussions on Liberation and organization: philosophy and revolution
Organization is crucial as we fight to change our oppressive reality of exploitation of labor, racism, sexism, hatred and discrimination against LGBTQ people, and outright wars on civilians, as in Syria, Yemen, and Congo.
From Black Lives Matter to Women’s Liberation and from Occupy Wall Street to the Fight for $15, movements for freedom have been looking for alternatives to discredited models of organization like the vanguard party of “Marxism-Leninism.” Yet organization of people from below and organization of liberatory thought have not yet united in such a way as to create the foundations of a new, human society.
Bring your ideas about revolutionary transformation to a series of discussions on the relationship of a philosophy of freedom to organization.
Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy in Our Time
After World War II, a new stage was reached. The spread of automation meant a new stage of production that was met by new revolts. At the same time, new movements arose from below making revolutionary challenges to capitalism in the “advanced” countries like the U.S. from the workers, youth, women, and Blacks within as well as from the peoples in colonized countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America; and revolutionary challenges to the state-capitalism of Russia and its satellites, especially in the revolts in East Germany and in Russian slave labor camps and the Hungarian Revolution. Marxist-Humanism saw this as a new stage of movements from practice that were themselves forms of theory. The new stage of cognition came both from these movements and from the new philosophy of Marxist-Humanism, which created a new kind of organization. This session explores the relationship of dialectics of organization and philosophy to this new stage.
Suggested readings:
“A 1980s View of the Two-Way Road between the U.S. and Africa” (1983 Introduction to American Civilization on Trial).
“Our Original Contribution to the Dialectic of the Absolute Idea as New Beginning” by Dunayevskaya. (Excerpted in May-June 2010 N&L, p. 4.)
“A Post-World War II View of Marx’s Humanism, 1843-83. Marxist Humanism, 1950s-1980s,” by Dunayevskaya. (Included in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Achilles Heel of Western ‘Civilization’.)
Speaker: Gerry Emmett, author of “World in View” column in News & Letters
Readings available via News & Letters Committees, arise@newsandletters.org / 312-431-8242 / 228 S. Wabash #230, Chicago, IL 60604.
You can find more information about the series at https://newsandletters.org/a-discussion-series-liberation-and-organization-philosophy-and-revolution/.