by Franklin Dmitryev

Editor’s Note: What follows is Part I of Dmitryev’s Organization Report, titled The Idea of Freedom Strikes Back, given to the Convention of News and Letters Committees on May 31, 2025. To see the entire presentation contact News and Letters Committees.

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“This [attack on radical ideas] is a confession!
—Richard Gilman-Opalsky

“Mao has raised the concept of “thought reform” both to a philosophic category and a veritable way of life.”
—Raya Dunayevskaya (Marxism and Freedom)

“What the two long decades of nearly ceaseless revolt should have proven, beyond any doubt, is that the masses not only cannot be brainwashed, but they think their own thoughts. The production process, the military might, all the means of communication, may be in the hands of the state, but the heads belong to the same bodies that are being exploited; and when the masses burst out in such sweeping actions as to shake up the whole totalitarian structure, the proletariat is not only ‘instinctively’ but theoretically creative.
—Raya Dunayevskaya (Philosophy and Revolution)

(Marxism and Freedom, Philosophy and Revolution and Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, the whole trilogy of revolution, is now available on our website as ebooks).

We all know that we are experiencing an attack against all freedom movements, against immigrants and Trans people, against women, against Black people and people of color, against workers and young people, against democracy and dissidents, even against opposition to ongoing genocide. Let’s tarry for a moment on the way that an attack on thought is integral to that blitzkrieg.

It is not just an attack on facts, although it is, and that is important. From economic statistics, including the cost of tariffs to consumers, to the impact of weather disasters; from the toll taken by gun violence, including suicides; to a report on missing Indigenous people that has itself now gone missing; to a totally invented gang affiliation of people they want to deport, the administration is trying to hide inconvenient facts.

But the ideological onslaught is about much more than negating facts. That can be seen in the attack’s spearhead, aimed at solidarity with Palestinian people. This was begun well before last year’s election, led by Republicans in Congress with support from many Democrats, including President Biden. This is consistent with Project Esther, run by Christian nationalists associated with the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025. They demonized the solidarity movement, calling us supporters of terrorism, and assimilated the word “antisemitism” into doublespeak, so that now actual antisemites, Nazis, and their friends and admirers hurl the term at Jews who say “Not in my name!” and at anyone who dares name genocide.

Most starkly, several international students have been abducted and threatened with deportation for acts of protest or even writing in the student newspaper. Institutions like universities, as well as the public high school here in Evanston, Ill., have fallen in line and censored or punished students and faculty for talking about Gaza. Free speech has been chilled in many places.

SUBVERTING IDEAS ON CLASS AND THE FAILURE OF CAPITALISM

Demonization of the solidarity movement goes hand in hand with demonization of immigrants, especially people of color. That is an attack on thought that aims not only to divide the working class but to turn people’s minds away from questioning this crumbling society, its exploitative class relations and oppressive hierarchies, technological structures, and ideology, and toward subordinating their thought to the ideological barrage dominated by the rulers.

Another line of attack is on science, first of all climate science. David Gelles of the New York Times summarized various aspects:[1] hiding climate data and undermining the accumulation of future data; slashing the workforce in climate science and weather data and forecasting; purging phrases about climate from websites and banning their use by federal employees; slashing the ability to respond to weather disasters such as tornados and cancelling a program to make communities more resilient; slashing and not enforcing environmental regulations; cutting or withholding funding for environmental justice and clean energy; declaring a fake “energy emergency” to justify lifting restrictions on fossil fuel production and use; and, of course, spewing climate denial propaganda. For example, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum managed to pack three lies into one half sentence May 20: “we will have plenty of time to solve any issues related to potential temperature change.” Again, what the administration does is key but is only one part of a whole network of climate obstruction, from podcasters like Joe Rogan to Elon Musk’s X and the abandonment of fact-checking on Facebook, and from the beef and dairy industry to the fossil fuel industry and its front groups like the Institute for Energy Research and Californians for Balanced Energy Solutions. The state of Louisiana even banned publication of certain information about air pollution.

Now if you still believe that climate change is real, consider these eight basic truths:

1. The climate isn’t changing.
2. The climate has always been changing.
3. If the climate is changing, it’s natural and not due to human action. The sun winked or burped or something.
4. If it is due to human action, it’s good for you and worth it because of all the benefits we get, like all the plastic we enjoy, including inside our brains.
5. If it does harm some people, it’s over there in Africa or small island nations or something, and not hurting good people like you.
6. If it is hurting you, shut up, don’t you like having a job???
7. Also, it’s your fault if you haven’t spent thousands of dollars to stock up, build a bunker, and prep for apocalypse. So shut up.
8. Shut up.

As the Draft Perspectives argued, this is a rush to totalitarian thought control. It mentioned the many federal government web pages that were purged, and the lists of phrases and topics that were banned, as well as library purges, including at the Naval Academy library, where I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou was removed, but Hitler’s Mein Kampf is still available. This obviously continues a years-long effort to purge libraries, school curricula, and media, which drew on an on-and-off history in the U.S. since the witch hunts before its founding, or would you like to trace it all the way back to the trial of Socrates? But more apt comparisons to the turbocharged nature of what is going on today would be the rampages against freedom of thought carried on by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. This is why 218 alumni called on Northwestern University “to take a strong stance against the mind control that is spewing forth from the Trump administration like effluent.”

LIES AND REWRITTEN HISTORY ABOUND

It is not only the federal government trying to impose indoctrination. Oklahoma high schools were ordered not only to use the Trump Bible but to teach that the 2020 election was stolen. Mississippi ordered the elimination of race and gender databases in state libraries. Alabama defunded a public library for keeping LGBTQ+-friendly books in its teen section. Florida banned some Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, and the mayor of Miami Beach tried to evict a movie theater for showing the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land. Today’s onslaught is escalating the long campaign by reactionaries at all levels of government, as well as outside of government, to ban teaching of anything that they can call critical race theory or gender theory as well as banning books like The 1619 Project, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, The Bluest Eye and Beloved by Toni Morrison, Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit 451, Anne Frank’s diary, and The Handmaid’s Tale.

The point is that there is a multifaceted, determined, vicious, desperate attack on thought. It grows out of a fertile ground. On the side of the ruling class and those who aspire to rule, capitalism’s stagnation and the disintegration of society raise doubts about the stability of class hegemony. On the side of the exploited, the undercurrent of potential revolt is ever-present, while the Left that was supposed to meet the new impulses from below with a movement from theory based on them has not lived up to the task, and is in fact shot through with such contradictions that now many are rejecting the label “Left” or trying to radically redefine it.

But the large part of the Left that has succumbed to ideological pollution is NOT the major player here and must not be allowed to divert our attention from the movement from practice. Recall how Dunayevskaya argued in Marxism and Freedom that “The main difficulty in seeing the elements of the new society in the present is that workers repeat many of the ideas of the ruling class until the very day that an explosive break actually occurs.”

The Left’s philosophic void leaves room for what our Draft Perspectives pointed out is not just economic in the narrow sense:

“All of our bodies have been contaminated by toxic forever chemicals, microplastics, hormone disruptors, and more. Corporations exploited the science of addiction to push people into unhealthy diets and relationships with technology that have well-documented harmful effects on physical and mental health, especially to children. Isolation, atomization, and loss of community deeply infect our society. In a vicious cycle, they add to and draw from algorithmic manipulation by social media, which pushes people into propaganda echo chambers. Irrationalism and paranoia are normalized. A similar dynamic is at play in the rise of the far right across the world.”

Recall a point by Hannah Arendt (in The Origins of Totalitarianism):

“The preparation [for totalitarianism] has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow-men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

What is completely connected to that point is that the suppression of the thoughts and stories of freedom movements, from slave rebellions to Women’s Liberation, is also an attempt by the oppressors to project the false idea of their omnipotence and the false, inhuman idea that resistance is futile, and you are powerless. And that, at the same time, is what Gilman-Opalsky calls a confession. He says “these fascists are telling us they’re afraid of what we think and say about race, class, gender, sexuality, Palestine… This is exactly their confession. We scare them, and they are telling us that they are afraid.”

It is a confession that the radical ideas they are trying to suppress are dangerous. And that implies a recognition that the ideas and imagination and philosophy are consequential. Whereas we are still arguing with some leftists who dismiss imagination and ideas seen as too radical as not practical.

THE NECESSITY OF THE ACTIVITY OF PHILOSOPHY

A vision of a new society is one crucial part of the needed Idea, the philosophy of revolution constantly concretizing itself in dialogue with the movement from practice. And yet it cannot be reduced to a vision of an alternative. Still needed is the activity of philosophy, as Absolute Method, as Absolute Idea, as Absolute Negativity, constantly grappling with the unexpected transformations into opposite in the objective and subjective situation, working out the meaning of events so as to intervene, and to enable the new relationship of theory and practice needed to release new sensibilities, new passions, new forces, the Subject’s self-development in founding a new human society.

Marxist-Humanism has always stressed that the masses think their own thoughts, as the quote from Philosophy and Revolution that I began with shows. Whatever power is in the hands of the state, “the heads belong to the same bodies that are being exploited; and when the masses burst out in such sweeping actions as to shake up the whole totalitarian structure, the proletariat is not only ‘instinctively’ but theoretically creative.”[2]

Integral to what is being called the resistance is a many-sided battle of ideas, intertwined with protests, strikes, boycotts, noncooperation, and sabotage. It includes most of the Left, but also many people still tied to the Democratic Party and even some Republicans, and a whole lot of people who have never been politically active before. And many will be looking for something that goes beyond anti-Trump. The resistance has to confront not only the fact that fascism has grown a mass base but the fact that a lot of people are in denial about the seriousness of the situation.

That is not helped by the way some of the media are normalizing the transformation into opposite of democratic republican institutions. The purported independence of press organizations owned by conglomerates is being dismantled under pressure from corporate masters who are under pressure from the administration, from the Bezos-owned Washington Post to CBS News with its 60 Minutes whose corporate overlord, National Amusements, wants government approval of its merger with Skydance, and consequently tried to shut down stories critical of Trump.

Denial is only aided by the kind of dead-brained leftists who dogmatically see only complete continuity and repeat like a mantra that there is no difference between the two bourgeois parties. And denial is aided by RT-fueled campism that ultimately erases subjects of revolt, whether they are in the U.S. or Russia, Ukraine or China, and even in Palestine the masses become merely props for the “real” resistance, Hamas. Unfortunately, we see Palestine supporters who condemn Ukraine, and Ukraine supporters who support Israel. I won’t go over it again here, but comprehending the concrete shape of continuity and discontinuity of this moment is crucial.

PANICKED UNITY SUBMERGES THOUGHT

We also see some, not only on the Left, who are so overwhelmed by the glaring discontinuity of Trump’s drive to transform the institutions of bourgeois democracy into opposite that they panic and desperately seek some kind of unity in order to resist fascism. Certainly there is no need for sectarian refusal to engage in any kind of common actions to resist this onslaught. But panicked unity inevitably submerges any thought of what happens after revolution, if indeed any thought of it existed to begin with, and risks submerging any thought of revolution whatsoever under the rush to unite with bourgeois opponents of Trump, in some cases even reactionaries like Liz Cheney, and/or to unite with pseudo-revolutionaries or pseudo-leftists. Why disarm ourselves just when the attack on thought proves what a powerful weapon it can be? We may recall Marx’s March 1850 Address to the Communist League, which, in Dunayevskaya’s words, concluded

“that never again will a workers’ movement be tied to the bourgeois democratic movement, even when they fight together against feudalism: ‘The relation of the revolutionary workers’ party to the petty-bourgeois democrats is this: it marches together with them against the faction which it aims at overthrowing, it opposes them in everything whereby they seek to consolidate their position in their own interest.’ ”

Marx’s Address concluded:

“But they themselves must do the utmost for their final victory by clarifying their minds as to what their class interests are, by taking up their position as an independent party as soon as possible and by not allowing themselves to be seduced for a single moment by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeois into refraining from the independent organization of the party of the proletariat. Their battle cry must be: The Revolution in Permanence.”

Of course, Marx was talking about the class, not about some party that claimed or aimed to represent it. In any case, for Marx, the question of how to work with other organizations and movements opens up to the need for revolution in permanence, and Dunayevskaya shows that opens up into the philosophy of permanent revolution.

Since the smell of popular frontism is in the air, consider a couple of other passages from Dunayevskaya that may help clarify this. From “Not by Practice Alone” (The Power of Negativity, p. 276):

“In a word, principles of revolution do not change, be it directly against the enemy at home—U.S. capitalism—or in critical solidarity work with Left groups.

“These political principles of revolution must under no circumstances be separated from the philosophical principles. That is the whole significance of our expression of the whole body of Marxist-Humanist philosophy contained in ‘the trilogy of revolution’—Marxism and Freedom; Philosophy and Revolution; and Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution. These must never be reduced either to a mere abstraction or to the so-immediate concrete that we hardly become distinguishable from some sort of ‘popular front’ in the solidarity committees. We are, after all, indigenous to the Latino world and have used precisely Marx’s theory of the philosophy of revolution in permanence, not as an abstraction but as the actual concrete needed in order both to be armed against being pulled into the world market of the whirlpool of capitalism, state as well as private, and as requiring a decentralized organization whose ground is that continuing ‘revolution in permanence.’ ”

And from the 1985-86 Draft Perspectives, Part III, keeping in mind the dialectical reality of counter-revolution coming from within revolution (Aug.-Sept. 1985 News & Letters, p. 12):

“This year’s Perspectives cannot stop with the question ‘What to Do?’ as if all those who are against Pax Americana can unite as a single force, especially if they do consider themselves ‘Left.’ Ask any Spaniard who survived fascism and who, while fighting it before it came to power, had to survive Communists (Stalinists) killing all revolutionaries who did not follow their line, from Socialists to Trotskyists to Anarchists—all of whom were in the Popular Front.”

I’m not saying we should simply dismiss out of hand the calls for unity of the Left, but it raises a question that must not be evaded: what is the Left? As the Draft Perspectives took it up, what kind of break is needed to establish a meaningful unity, and what sort of unity in action can allow the maintenance and projection of principles? To revisit the Draft Perspectives:

“There is a need for a network of resistance, and in fact one is already loosely forming. But the bulk of it comes from below, from the movement from practice, and can neither be limited to nor defined by ‘the Left.’

“More important than the unity of the Left is the unity of the movement from theory and 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 but moves toward the establishment of a totally new society on truly human foundations. And to make that happen, both the Idea and the masses in motion need organizations for their own self-determination.

“Marx touched on this point when he issued his Critique of the Gotha Program. He wrote to Wilhelm Bracke that his German party should not compromise its principles in the name of unity. Marx felt that a ‘period of common activity’ was all that the party should agree to, and that activity should not be separate from the battle of ideas but precisely what would prepare for development of ‘principles.’ ”

Our principles do include recognizing the polarizing force of the Idea of freedom, the power of a philosophy of revolution as the only true basis for principled and lasting unity; as well as recognizing that spontaneity seeks organization, including organization of thought; and the recognition of our responsibility to help the movement from practice find its revolutionary direction through self-activity of masses in motion and the self-determination of the Idea.

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[1] “The U.S. Under Trump: Alone in Its Climate Denial,” by David Gelles, May 19, 2025, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/climate/trump-climate-denial.html.

[2] Philosophy and Revolution, p. 264.