To All Members and Friends of News and Letters Committees

Dear Friends:

At no time since the plunge toward World War II have the rulers so recklessly inflamed one crisis after another, from ecological destruction to an AI arms race, from fostering fascism to multiplying wars. The reverberations of the U.S.-Israel war against Iran in particular are being felt across the world. The hollowness of the so-called peace deal in which Trump capitulated to Iran was confirmed on July 8 when he announced, “I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them anymore,” and intense attacks resumed. 

Even if a new truce emerges, the damage the war has done can never be fully undone. First of all, thousands of Iranians were killed and tens of thousands injured, while the massive liberation movement against the theocratic regime was stifled for now. After the slaughter the regime perpetrated in January was compounded by Trump-Netanyahu’s war, the regime emerged increasingly entrenched. Thousands more were killed in Lebanon, a swath of which Israel has occupied and voiced its intention to absorb it, while, at one and the same time, expanding its occupation of Syrian land. Under cover of the war, Israel has ramped up its violent ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Gaza. 

The world economy has been wounded so badly that Trump, in one of his conflicting explanations for his surrender, admitted, “I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have ​happened.” Connected to that is the worsening of the world food crisis, with no end in sight, whose causes include the climate crisis and the wars on Ukraine and Iran. 

In addition, the U.S.-Israel war on Iran aided Putin’s failing war against Ukraine, especially by helping Russia rake in far more money for its oil. The slaughter of Ukrainian civilians has accelerated in the absence of the missile defense that Trump vaguely promised to allow again after having cut off its supply, even as Ukraine has taken the war to Russia, damaging every refinery from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea to Siberia. From Western Europe to the U.S., mass sympathy for Ukrainians is not reflected in government maneuvers, even when they do help Ukraine, because they are driven by geopolitics. Too much of the Left also values geopolitics above solidarity. Trump’s enabling of Putin’s war outweighs the grudging tokens of support he has been forced to promise. But the many retreats that Putin and Trump have been forced into are important indications that their message of invincibility is a lie. The battle is on.

Oil companies are using their hundreds of billions of dollars in war profits to fuel the climate war, which Trump is leading—with plenty of help from key sectors of the ruling class both in the U.S. and in other countries. More precisely, it’s a war on climate science, on the climate justice movement, on everything that represents a decrease of dependence on fossil fuels, to the extent that he is even fighting the private capitalist market by forcing the maintenance or reopening of dying coal plants and paying off companies to step away from wind energy production. He is carrying on this war just at the time when the disastrous effects of the climate crisis are making themselves felt and solid majorities in every country surveyed are eager for serious action to save the planet and the conditions for human society. 

Totally connected to the war on climate is the way the Trump administration—and other governments like the UK, which also cut its international aid—opened the door for the ebola outbreak in Congo to become so much worse and spread so much further than it would otherwise have done. This echoes the disastrous mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which need not have been anywhere as painful as it was, and from which we are still suffering in various ways that are simply not in the public eye because that discourse has essentially been silenced. These crises are not just past or even ongoing but are portents of much worse pandemics that could hit the world soon and repeatedly into the future, while capitalism continues to destroy the environment and undermine emergency responses and preparations as well as the science underpinning them.

In the U.S., the reality is of an administration forced to make repeated retreats but determined not to give up its drive to hollow out democracy and smash all dissent and opposition. That is not limited to the preparations for sabotaging the November elections—now well underway. It continues, with some successes and many retreats, to attack the movements in solidarity with immigrants, as well as other movements. In June, anti-ICE protesters were sentenced to up to 100 years in prison, including one person who wasn’t even at the protest in question, who received 30 years for moving a box of zines. Just how deadly the state’s onslaught can be was underscored once again by ICE’s murder of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on July 7—followed as usual by lies about the victim—and the killings of Alfonso Ivy and Tyrin Johnson by federal agents in Memphis on July 6 and 8.

And yet the locally self-organized solidarity movements continue, as does the spreading resistance to the construction of migrant detention centers and data centers.

While Trump’s many defeats and retreats are justly celebrated, the vicious open attacks on women and Blacks, as well as Latin American, Jewish, Middle Eastern, Asian, Indigenous, and Trans people, continue. The retrogression is not alone on Trump’s direct orders but has widely diffused throughout state and local governments, businesses, universities, far right private organizations, and fanatical individuals.

The uprising in Albania was sparked by the Trump family’s depredations but is calling for much more far-reaching change. “What we want is a new Albania,” said one young woman there, speaking for thousands. This “flamingo revolution” is the latest example that revolt keeps renewing itself. At the same time, the long series of aborted revolts and revolutions that stopped short weigh on people’s minds, so that the cynicism that nothing can really change is ever-present. Whereupon much of the Left can be counted on to trot out the old standards: they will be the ones to teach the movement from practice how to organize—but with no thought of questioning the philosophical void on the Left that has been part of the problem for decades. In fact, the absence of a guiding philosophy beyond vulgar pragmatism is raised up to a principle of organization.

An example of how so much of the Left has leaned into its role as part of the problem is the open letter published in April by Counterpunch extolling Iran as a superior civilization. Signatories include a number of “big names” such as Norman Finkelstein, Richard Falk, Ajamu Baraka, Vijay Prashad, and Jodi Dean—along with some of the most notorious of the campist Left. Totally erasing that country’s movement for freedom, they see only “social unity” and a “doctrine of liberation” embodied in the theocratic state that keeps massacring its own rebellious population.

It is not just that these actually counterrevolutionary elements exist on the Left. It is that the majority of the U.S. Left (as in many other countries) bow to them because of their supposedly superior organizing skills, as if organizing that is not only separate from but effectively opposed to any philosophy of liberation can be considered a part of the revolutionary movement rather than its enemy. It is more than just lowest common denominator politics because the politically better parts of the Left generally share the hostility to philosophy having anything to do with organization.

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 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 Raya Dunayevskaya’s work on the dialectics of organization and philosophy. At the same time, we have found that 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 Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of both Marxist-Humanism and this organization, 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 a view of archives as well as of any discussion of the history of the organization, News and Letters Committees, centered on the self-development of the Idea. 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—including herself, including comrades, including movements and revolutions. That is the essential moment in practicing Marxist-Humanist organization. 

Keeping in mind the greatness and 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, how do we concretize this discussion of today’s objective-subjective situation and of philosophy as actuality in terms of organizational conclusions? How do we get to second negativity on that? That calls for a discussion, needing the voices of all and needing 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.

At the same time, let us try 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.

For that purpose we issue this Call for a national Convention. The outgoing National Editorial Board will meet online in Executive Session Friday, October 9. On Saturday, October 10, all sessions of the Convention aside from elections will be open to members and to invited friends, who are given the same privileges to the floor for discussion.

With this Call begins a full 90 days of pre-Convention discussion. A draft Perspectives Thesis will be published so that it can be discussed by members and friends, correspondents and critics, before the Convention. Articles for pre-Convention Discussion Bulletins must be submitted to the Center by Thursday, September 10. Any articles after that date must be distributed online or through the mail by the contributor or their local. Discussion within our local committees and with all those we can reach is vital to preparation for our Convention and all our activities throughout the pre-Convention period.

—The National Editorial Board of News and Letters Committees