The Anti-Colonial Marxism of Mahdi Amel

The Lebanese Marxist thinker Mahdi Amel was assassinated on this day in 1987. Amel developed a version of Marxism that was grounded in the experience of colonized societies, showing how class struggle converges with the fight for national liberation.

Lebanese Marxist Mahdi Amel. (Archives of Assafir Newspaper)

BYHICHAM SAFIEDDINE
05.18.2024
JACOBIN

With rare exceptions, non-Western theorists of Marxism receive short intellectual shrift. When they register on the radar of ideological debates at all, such debates summarily present their work as proof of Marxism’s universalism rather than a means of transforming Marxism itself.

This has largely been the case with the Arab Marxist Mahdi Amel, who was assassinated on this day, May 18, in 1987. Born in 1936, Hassan Hamdan, who later adopted the pen name Mahdi Amel, was a member of the Lebanese Communist Party and had joined the party’s national leadership by the time he was killed.

Amel’s legacy did experience a revival during the Arab uprisings that broke out a decade ago. His work garnered further attention after a volume of his selected writings was translated into English in 2021. But interest in his philosophy of Marxism and its implications for how we understand colonialism in relation to capitalism remains rudimentary.

A historical materialist reading of Amel would integrate his conceptual contribution and praxis into the ideological canon of twentieth-century Marxism. This requires a sustained and critical analysis of his philosophy’s assumptions, arguments, and conclusions in comparison and contrast to European Marxism as well as heterodox or radical schools of Marxism that emerged after World War II, such as dependency theory and racial capitalism.

We can take a modest step in that direction by briefly examining his methodology and its application to major themes of post-WWII national liberation, including the ongoing struggle for a free Palestine.

Marxism, Colonialism, and Methodology

Amel called for a “methodological revolution” in Marxist philosophy in order to understand and overcome the historical reality of colonialism. He opposed the application of preformed Marxist thought to the colonial social structure, but not in the name of some supposedly authentic precapitalist thought. He equally rejected forms of postcolonial analysis that threw the historical materialist baby out with its Euro-centric bathwater. Instead, Amel labored in a dialectical fashion to construct a theory of Marxism born out of colonial social reality and employed for its socialist liberation, which he argued, is also the liberation of all humanity.

Amel laid out the logic of his methodology, first in brief and later in detail, across a series of essays and book-length treatises. He then applied it to a wide range of historical phenomena and forces including sectarianism, Islam, education, and revolutionary culture. These writings were engaged in direct conversation with ideological debates that emerged during his age and remain relevant to ours.Mahdi Amel called for a ‘methodological revolution’ in Marxist philosophy in order to understand and overcome the historical reality of colonialism.

While Amel’s texts may be dense and at times repetitive, his reasoning was straightforward. Karl Marx’s discussion of colonialism was incidental to his general analysis of capitalism. Given Marx’s own historical context in a capitalist Europe and his ignorance of the socioeconomic conditions of colonized countries, he was incapable of taking full stock of colonialism and incorporating it into his theory of capitalism.

The historical reality of colonized peoples is the inverse of that experienced by Marx. Their encounter with capitalism was incidental to, or mediated via, colonialism. Colonization, in the words of Amel, “cut the thread of continuity” in their history and “sent through it violent tremors.”

He believed these tremors reached all the way to the strata of the relations of production, as the material basis for precapitalist production was destroyed while the material basis for industrialization was denied. To put it another way, the difference between capitalist and colonial social formations does not merely concern the level or scale of production, but the entire structure of production.


For Amel, it follows from this point that the colonial relation, which is all-encompassing rather than purely economic, is the fundamental contradiction in colonized societies and that colonialism is the “objective basis for the colonized country’s social structure.” Consequently, colonialism does not end with the end of military occupation or by gaining political independence, but with the total severance of this relation in a process of violent and revolutionary transition to socialism.

Amel’s inquiry along these lines yielded the concept of the colonial mode of production (CMOP), which he defined as “the form of capitalism structurally dependent on imperialism in its historical formation and contemporary development.” Marx’s distilled observations on colonialism furnished Amel with a sound theoretical basis to develop his model. In each step, Amel drew on Marx’s relevant commentary and identified first principles.

For instance, Amel relied on Marx’s reference to the “fusion” of modes of production and on Vladimir Lenin’s description of different modes coexisting in a single social space to support the idea of a colonial mode of production as a fusion of capitalist and precapitalist modes of production under the rubric of colonial conquest, and thereby distinct from either. This methodology retained Marxian logic and concepts like class formation, class struggle, capitalization, and class consciousness, but tried to elucidate their specific historical form in a colonial setting.

Colonialism and Class Struggle

Amel’s theorization led him to conclude that the process of class formation under a CMOP is characterized by a lack of class differentiation. Thanks to the structural inhibition of large-scale industry, the colonial bourgeoisie is necessarily a mercantile rather than an industrial bourgeoisie.The instability of rule in colonized countries is a result of the stability of the colonial social structure, not a reflection of orientalist proclivities for military rule or dictatorship.

Small-scale manufacturers in this context are a faction of the petty bourgeoisie, whose members occasionally engage in finance on a similar scale. This apparent diversity in economic activity is not due to some “excess energy” of this social class, but rather stems from the limitations upon concentrating production.

These constrained economic relations of production had political implications. Tied in its own class existence to its colonialist or capitalist counterpart, the colonial bourgeoise is incapable of carrying out a political revolution and establishing a liberal democracy in its European bourgeois form. The instability of rule in colonized countries is therefore a result of the stability of the colonial social structure, not a reflection of orientalist proclivities for military rule or dictatorship.

An extreme case of the lack of class differentiation is the fusion of the two social factions, urban merchants tied to foreign trade and landowners who direct their agricultural production toward colonial trade. This fusion negates the existence of either a national bourgeoisie, usually associated with industrialists, or a feudal class, usually associated with a colonial alliance.

Similarly, the process of proletarianization of the colony’s toiling masses — prominently peasants — is never complete at the economic or social level. Given the centrality of land in colonial agricultural production, which is concentrated around cash crops and extractive labor, peasants are the overexploited class under the CMOP.

When peasants migrate to urban centers seeking employment relief, they rarely, according to Amel, experience a radical transformation in terms of class existence and consciousness. Although embedded in a new class position that involves small-scale consumer industry, they preserve their previous class connections and retain much of their past class consciousness, transitioning between the two positions with ease.

Amel described the pattern in Lebanon:


The worker returns to his village at every opportunity, for holidays, vacations, and funerals. In this way, his village becomes his centre of gravity and exerts a pull over him stronger than that of the city. Ultimately, he longs for the land he left and demands to be buried there, home to his ancestors.

Amel warned that the lack of class differentiation does not mean that class struggle is absent in the colonial setting, as nationalist forces would have it. Nor does it mean the national question is insignificant, as some anti-imperialist or internationalist Marxists would have it. Given the indirect relation of exploitation under a CMOP that is governed by the colonial relation, class struggle is directed against a structure of dependency and domination, not another social class. This means that socialist revolution in colonized societies is synonymous with national liberation:


The struggle for national liberation is the sole historical form that distinguishes class struggle in the colonial formation. Whoever misses this essential point in the movement of our modern history and attempts to substitute class struggle with “nationalist struggle” or reduces the national struggle to a purely economic struggle loses the ability to understand our historical reality and thus also to control its transformation.

Amel prevented his philosophy from lapsing into determinism or economism by placing his structural analysis in a historical perspective as he theorized class struggle.

He emphasized the nature of class consciousness as a historical force of class becoming and resistance. He argued that before World War II, sectoral and economic forms of struggle by different factions of the toiling masses independent of each other precluded their very formation as a class. The period after 1945 saw these struggles converging in a broader political struggle for liberation from colonialism.

At that moment, the colonial relation became mutually constitutive of colonizing and colonized societies. It is necessary to sever this relation in order to transcend, and thereby destroy, both capitalist and colonial social structures.The global ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1970s precipitated a conservative, culturalist turn across the Arab region.

The global ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1970s precipitated a conservative, culturalist turn across the Arab region. Amel’s intellectual labor focused on pertinent questions of culture and the growing role of religion, namely Islam, in politics.

In contrast with other Arab leftists or secularists such as Sadiq Jalal al-Azm and Adonis, Amel’s thought did not lapse into orientalist tropes. He countered the ideology of defeat that ascribed the Arab loss in the 1967 war with Israel to cultural rather than military factors and lambasted the Arab bourgeoisie for portraying their own political failings as universal failings of Arab civilization and cultural heritage.

For Amel, turath, or cultural heritage, was itself a problem of the interpretation of the past by a colonial present rather than a precolonial problem that persisted in the contemporary world. At the same time, Amel avoided absolutist perspectives toward Islam of the kind to be found in secular or communist polemics that saw Islam as being inherently reactionary.
Islam and Revolutionary Thought

By the 1980s, the culturalist turn led to the emergence of what Amel called “everyday” thought. He warned against this new discourse that depoliticized social struggle by ignoring the role of geopolitics, structural forces of history, and class interests as motivations in sectarian or regional conflicts.

Amel developed critiques of different manifestations of this new trend, some of which he categorized as nihilist, obscurantist, or Islamized bourgeois currents. His denunciation of the latter current did not lead him to dismiss Islam as an ontologically regressive force at all stages of history. Unlike many scholars of Islamic intellectual history who saw the primary contradiction in Islam — or any other religion — as being that between faith and atheism, or between religious and rational thought, Amel identified a dividing line between those who defer to power and those who defy it.

The traditional classification of precapitalist Islamic scholars is one example. Conventional scholarship associated progressive thought with reason, exemplified in the figure of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), while ascribing conservatism to philosophies that elevated religion or belief over reason, exemplified in the figure of al-Ghazali. Amel argued that such a classification was simplistic and rested on the assumption that reason was a monolith.The different manifestations of Islam demonstrate, according to Amel, that Islam was never a singular force.

He pointed out that one could find a single scholar, such as Ibn Khaldun, invoking scientific reasoning as well as Salafi legal reasoning. These contradictory forms of reason remained within a religious logic or paradigm, which meant that they were never fully antithetical to each other. As a result, subversive thought, as expressed in illuminationist Sufi Islam, took the form of rejecting reason in toto.

For Amel, the primary contradiction was not between religion and earthly life, but between two concepts of religion: spiritual (Sufi) and temporal (juridical). Spiritual Islam, however, was not atemporal in a metaphysical sense. Islam, by force of historical becoming, was temporal and by extension political. Sufism, or certain strands of it, negates the institutionalization of Islam, which turned it into an authoritarian apparatus.

The different manifestations of Islam demonstrate, according to Amel, that Islam was never a singular force. It was Islam’s material rather than otherworldly existence that determined its reactionary or revolutionary character, even if, in Amel’s estimation, it had mostly served the interests of the ruling classes.

He identified notable exceptions to this rule in precapitalist Islamic societies that included the revolt against the third “Rightly Guided” Caliph, ‘Uthman Ibn Affan, in the period following the death of Muhammed, as well as a certain phase of Qarmatian rule in Arabia. Modern examples that Amel cited of Islam forming part of a revolutionary struggle in the age of national liberation included the Algerian War of Independence and armed resistance against Israel.
Revolution, Liberation, and the Palestinian Cause

Amel’s treatment of the Algerian revolution and resistance to Israel shed light on the particularities of class struggle under colonialism, which included the role of noneconomic factors such as racism and cultural identity. In the case of Algeria, Amel noted that the overwhelming majority of European settlers, whether they were artisans, farmers, bourgeois, or workers, opposed the revolution for national liberation.

The politicized working class was no exception. The working-class Algiers district of Bab el-Oued had been nicknamed the “red neighbourhood” for serving as a popular base of the Algerian Communist Party. Yet it became “a haven of European racism” and “centre of fascist European terrorism against the revolution” after the outbreak of the war of independence.

The same anti-colonial logic applies to theorizing class struggle in Palestine. So-called labor Zionism was a racialized ideology complicit in the oppression of Palestinian workers and peasants and as such cannot be characterized as socialist. By contrast, Amel saw the Palestinian struggle for liberation from colonialism as a force of revolutionary class struggle.

The failure of Arab communist parties to recognize this distinction and their willingness to blindly follow Moscow’s directive led the leadership of these parties to support the 1948 partition of Palestine. They rationalized this decision by a simplistic depiction of the conflict as a struggle between workers, both Arab and Jew, and a mercantile and landed bourgeoise, both Arab and Jew. It caused the communist movement to suffer a loss of popular support in Arab societies.Amel saw the Palestinian struggle for liberation from colonialism as a force of revolutionary class struggle.

In the case of Lebanon, the Communist Party’s revision of its pro-partition stance in the late 1960s and its alliance with the Palestinian liberation movement was a radicalizing force that had an impact on class struggle in Lebanon itself. Following the Israeli invasion of 1982, Amel ridiculed left-wing pundits who minimized the significance of successful armed resistance against Israeli occupation in the name of focusing on strengthening the central Lebanese state at a time of right-wing Phalangist hegemony.

Israel’s own attitude toward Lebanese and Palestinian political factions was and remains determined in the last instance by the decision of those movements to adopt or reject national liberation strategies, including armed resistance, regardless of whether their ideology is secular or religious. For Amel, the significance of armed resistance to Israel and its allies derives from the objective centrality of the colonial relation in determining the character of class struggle in a colonial context.

Unlike many leftists of his time, Amel was careful to assess Islamist resistance forces in relation to this structural contradiction without ignoring the role of political (and therefore subjective) consciousness in swaying this struggle toward a socialist or progressive horizon. In 1984, when sectarian Islamist forces rebelled against pro-Israeli sectarian Christian forces in Beirut, Amel identified the objective revolutionary significance of the military victory, while stressing that it was uncertain whether this victory would point toward the end of sectarianism or its reproduction:

Either they go against the reactionary sectarian form of their ideological consciousness, i.e. in the direction of radically changing the sectarian political system of rule by the dominant bourgeoisie, or they align with this same reactionary sectarian consciousness — (but against the class interests of their toiling factions) — and lean towards sectarian reform of this system. In the latter case, the system would catch its breath in a movement that would renew its crisis, and subsequently the conditions for civil war.

There is no sectarian crisis in Palestine similar to that of Lebanon. But the leading armed resistance forces today in Palestine and across the region are Islamist in their ideology. Analyzing this resistance without centering the colonial relation, as Amel showed elsewhere, is a methodological error that mischaracterizes its revolutionary role as the latest stage in the war of national liberation.

The twentieth-century global conjuncture of national liberation may have passed in relation to other regions of the world. The colonial social reality of Palestinians, however, remains unchanged, as does their right to resist by all means necessary. A Marxist analysis that ignores this primary contradiction is bound to repeat the mistake of early Arab communists, and, in this case, contrary to Marxist tradition, the second version will be as tragic as the first.

CONTRIBUTOR
Hicham Safieddine is an associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Banking on the State: The Financial Foundations of Lebanon (2019) and the editor of Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings of Mahdi Amel (2021).

From the genocide in Palestine and Ukraine to the fascist threat: Working toward a revolutionary, Marxist-Humanist response

Peter Hudis
Kevin B. Anderson
Heather Brown
Lyndon Porter
Fernando Baleia
16 May, 2024


First published at The International Marxist-Humanist.

Part I: Does Today’s Objective Situation Represent the Midnight of the Twenty-First Century?

Today’s global capitalism is sinking into unimaginable levels of barbarism. It is exemplified by Israel’s genocidal war against Palestine; Russia’s escalating attacks on Ukraine; the violent suppression of mass movements in Peru, Iran, Sudan, Myanmar, and China; and in the growing threat posed by the neo-fascist far-Right in India, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Argentina, and the U.S., where the re-election of Donald Trump in November looms as a real possibility.

Nowhere is this barbarism more glaring than in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its intensifying attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. The 32,500 officially recorded killed in Gaza as of this writing is horrendous enough; but the dehumanization visited upon Palestinians extends even further. Almost 20,000 (mainly women and children) are missing and presumably buried under rubble, while well over a million-and-a-half are facing outright starvation and disease. The devastating impact of Israel dropping 30,000 air-to-ground munitions (not counting artillery shells and demolitions by its ground troops) on an area not much larger than Manhattan has birthed a new acronym—WCNSF, “Wounded Child with No Surviving Family.” According to reports from several human rights organizations, 17,000 Palestinian children fall under this category. Israel’s totally disproportionate response to the Hamas attack of October 7 has become one of the most horrendous catastrophe ever visited upon a people in our lifetime.

This is being done by an Israeli government that includes “moderates” as well as far-Rightists and which openly broadcasts and even boasts about its murderous onslaught. As Pankaj Mishra recently wrote,

We find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. Never before have so many witnessed an industrial-scale slaughter in real time. Yet the prevailing callousness, timidity and censorship disallows, even mocks, our shock and grief. Many of us who have seen some of the images and videos coming out of Gaza—those visions from hell of corpses twisted together and buried in mass graves, the smaller corpses held by grieving parents, or laid on the ground in neat rows—have been quietly going mad over the last few months. Every day is poisoned by the awareness that while we go about our lives hundreds of ordinary people like ourselves are being murdered, or being forced to witness the murder of their children.

All of this is made possible by continuous U.S. arms shipments and financial aid to a government whose ministers make no secret of its desire to “clear” Gaza of its populace. As the war continues, Israeli settlers, aided by the state, have also been murdering Palestinians and taking over land in the West Bank, which has received little publicity in the global media. From October 7 to the end of March, over 7,000 West Bank Palestinians have been arrested and 1,100 killed by Israeli forces or Jewish settlers, leading to what some Israeli officials privately call “a volcano” ready to erupt.1

Israel’s plunge into total depravity risks setting off an even-wider regional conflagration, as it extends its attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon while even contemplating taking on Iran.

These developments clearly represent a global political turning point. Mishra does not overstate the case: “Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945, which has been tottering since the catastrophic and still unpunished war on terror and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine.”2

Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu are united when it comes to at least one thing—both insist that the peoples they are violently suppressing (Ukraine in one case, Palestine in the other) have no right to exist as national entities. For years prior to Russia’s imperialist invasion (which actually started in 2014), Putin insisted, “Ukraine is a fiction, it has never been a real nation”—the same kind of verbiage employed for decades by leading Zionists about Palestine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov let the cat out of the bag in February in stating, “Israel’s declared goals in Gaza are similar to Russia’s in Ukraine.” Ramzy Baroud, an editor of Palestine Chronicle and who supports Ukraine’s right to defend itself from Russia and also condemns the West for opposing Russia while supporting Israel’s war against Palestine responded, “Lavrov’s position is bizarre and greatly offensive…because it resembles some kind of a political nod for Israel to continue with its lethal war on Palestinian civilians without worrying about a strong Russian response.”3

Lavrov’s comment may indicate that Putin is looking ahead to a Trump presidency, which would almost certainly pull the plug on U.S. military aid to Ukraine. Toning down criticism of Israel for the sake of cementing an alliance with Trump’s white nationalism is not a big step for Putin, since he is a white nationalist himself (as is Netanyahu, who has refrained from criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine).

While the Ukrainians fight on, they have clearly been set back their heels in recent months by declining military support from the West. Russia on the other hand is obtaining huge amounts of armaments from Iran and North Korea while evading the impact of U.S. and EU sanctions by expanding economic links to China. Last year, China’s exports to Russia increased 54% and half of Russia’s oil was exported to China. Overall trade between the two countries has increased 64% since the 2022 invasion. As a result, Russia’s economy is expected to grow 2.6% this year, outpacing each of the major industrial economies in the G7.

If Ukraine is defeated by Russia, it will embolden the far right everywhere—not only in Europe but also in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, where Putin is providing support to military regimes in Libya, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and the Central African Republic after having enabled Bashir Assad to crush the opposition in Syria.

The global far-Right includes forces allied with U.S. imperialism and it includes forces opposed to U.S. imperialism. It is a ubiquitous political phenomenon that has deep roots in the economic morass that increasingly characterizes contemporary capitalism.

Although the global economy has avoided for now the major recession that was widely feared only a year ago, it is expected to slow for the third straight year in 2024 and is headed for its weakest half-decade since the early 1990s. Rising levels of debt and lower than average rates of labor productivity are the main culprits. And the (relatively meager) economic growth that is occurring is accompanied by ever-growing levels of inequality, as millions of rural laborers are forced off the land, rising number of migrants cross international borders in response to the impact of climate change, and tens of millions of workers worldwide are displaced by labor-saving devices (such as robotics, AI, etc.). Economic distress and insecurity are not the only factors driving the growth of the far-Right, but they are clearly one of the determinants.

The growth of the far Right is being enabled by the pitiful effort of neoliberals and social democrats to counter it. Neoliberals have no solution to the economic morass afflicting global capitalism—and this has a lot to do with why the far-Right is on the rise.

This was demonstrated on a political level earlier this year when Biden proposed a bill on “immigration reform” (supported by most Democratic and some Republican senators) that adopted virtually word for word Trump’s anti-immigrant policies—even though these same Democrats denounced them as cruel, inhumane, and racist when he was in power. Senator Chris Murphy, who helped write the bill, confessed: “They—the Republican Party—told us what to do. We followed their instructions to the letter. And then they pulled the rug out from under us in 24 hours” when Trump chose to not let Biden get credit for his own policies.

This is typical of neoliberals and social democrats everywhere: They often seek to meet rightists “halfway” by attempting to steal their thunder only to have such weakness further embolden them. Given this, it is not a stretch to recall the fate of Germany’s Weimar Republic of the 1920s and early 1930s: the compromises and vacillation on the part of some claiming to support bourgeois democracy inadvertently paved the way for its destruction.

Trump and his supporters have made no secret of their plans if they win the November U.S. elections: the immediate deportation of millions of immigrants, the annulment of innumerable health and safety regulations, a push for a national ban on abortion, prohibiting discussions of race and racism in schools, gutting the NRLB to make it harder to unionize, unleashing the police against Black people, and restricting gender-affirming care for transexuals. And they have worked out detailed plans to make it harder for workers and minorities to vote—and to annul the results of any election that threatens their all-consuming drive for total state power.

Especially serious is the threat posed by climate change. Last year was officially the hottest one on record and temperatures in July broke the record as well, according to NASA.4 The Biden administration has touted its Inflation Reduction Act as key to solving the climate crisis, but its programs to develop clean energy and help workers transition to new jobs is too little and too late. It is too late because the effects of climate change are already apparent, and we may be at or very close to a tipping point of no return to “normal.” It is too little in the sense that the bill operates under a capitalist logic, providing subsidies to businesses to invest in clean energy, for example, while at the same time allowing fossil fuel production to continue.

The U.S. is now producing record amounts of fossil fuels for domestic and international markets. It has approved new drilling in Alaska, liquified natural gas production in the Gulf of Mexico, and greenlighted the Mountain Valley Pipeline in West Virginia,5 illustrating yet again how the needs of capital and its denizens for “cheap” oil and big profits eclipse the long-term survival of human beings.

Moreover, the Biden administration is touting the purchase of one million new electric vehicles in 2023 as a major ecological and economic success.6 Certainly, for purposes of future greenhouse gas emissions, electric cars are better than gas powered ones. However, the productivist logic remains in place. Electric cars produce less greenhouse gas in their lifetimes, but new vehicle production is still environmentally costly regardless of the type produced. More electric vehicle production is not in and of itself carbon neutral. Only by overcoming the productivist logic that greater output is inherently better for humanity and the environment will we begin to overcome this ecological crisis. That productivist logic will surely be further implemented if rightwing authoritarian nationalism consolidates its hold on state power.

Brazil offers a dramatic example the inability of neoliberalism and social democracy to counter such threats. After the coup d’état in 2016, Michel Temer and especially Jair Bolsonaro promoted a destruction of the environmental laws and institutions that have been helping to protect Brazilian forests. Bolsonaro’s administration (2016 to 2022) protected the criminals who followed his orders: the former Environmental Minister, Ricardo Salles, who was convicted of fraud against natural reserves;7 the secretary for agrarian questions, Luiz Antônio Nabhan Garcia, onetime leader of a militia that killed 21 militants of the Landless Workers Movement (MST)8. Then, with Bolsonaro’s help, a group of landlords in the 2022 elections won most of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies, even as Lula won the presidency.

Two of The Bolsonaro administration’s most iconic symbols were the “day of fire,” when a group of landlords managed to burn down large portions of the Amazon Rainforest,9 changing almost 50% of the Nature Reserves into a pasture,10 and an attempted genocide against the Yanomami people.11 After Lula of the Workers’ Party (PT) won the 2022 election, the federal government tried to help the Yanomamis by providing food, healthcare and police protection. However, the gold prospectors continued to attack and invade their lands; the efforts of the PT to end this environmental and human crisis ended up a huge failure.

The PT and Lula can try anything they want to improve environmental protections, but the landlords, many of whom are deputies in the Brazilian Congress, won’t approve any laws that don’t benefit them. It’s a kind of mafia-ization of politics. Ever since Dilma Rousseff’s administration (2011 to 2016), Brazil has witnessed a massive commodification of nature, such as with REDD+, which pays farmers to “protect” a small area of their lands. Bolsonaro further developed this law and institutionalized payment for environmental services. And now Lula is trying to approve the newest version of a Brazilian carbon market. Since most laws approved and developed by the PT to protect the environment are subsumed under the interests of capital, it becomes hard to fight back against the landlords and the far-Right trying to set fire to the Rainforest and invading the Yanomami’s land.

Massive threats also loom regarding gender and sexuality. After the Dobbs decision in the U.S., abortion is either greatly restricted or completely illegal in 23 states, making it difficult or sometimes impossible for women to get the procedure. But as was indicated by a ruling of the Alabama Supreme Court, the goal of Christian fundamentalists is much broader. Using a law that grants a fetus personhood at the moment of conception, the Court ruled that an IVF clinic was liable for the destruction of embryos stored at their facility, causing a number of clinics to close their doors until the law was clarified. After much backlash, legislators carved out an exception to fetal personhood for IVF providers. However, the concept of life originating at the moment of conception remains in place, all but eliminating women’s reproductive choice in the state. It is far from surprising that other rightwing-dominated states are looking to Alabama as a model.

Along with anti-LGBTQ legislation and violence in the U.S. we have witnessed an effort in many African nations to criminalize LGBTQ individuals. In fact, 30 of 54 countries in Africa criminalize homosexuality.12 Many of these laws date back to colonial times, yet a new wave of legislation is being enacted. Last year in Uganda, a law was passed that made “aggravated homosexuality” a capital offense. Included in this category is any sexual activity involving people with HIV,13 a policy that is not only egregious, but one that is likely to have a horrifying effect on containing the AIDS crisis as people will go without testing and treatment to avoid criminal prosecution.

In Ghana, a bill has been passed by parliament that would increase penalties for same sex acts, criminalize organizations that advocate for LGBTQ rights, and criminalize the “failure to report an LGBT person to the authorities and to report anyone who uses their social media platform to produce, publish, or disseminate content promoting activities prohibited by the bill.”14 This draconian law has been criticized by many prominent Ghanaians including Samia Nkrumah, a former member of parliament, chair of a prominent political party, and child of Kwame Nkrumah, who has called for the president to veto it.

Despite these human rights setbacks, we shouldn’t lose sight of the other side. Since 2015, six African nations have decriminalized same-sex acts.15 Moreover, despite the repression that they face, LGBTQ advocates are continuing to pressure governments to change the laws while at the same time showing their humanity to the world at large. For example, as the #Endsars protests took off in Nigeria against the brutal tactics of a special police unit, LGBTQ activists joined in, pointing out the ways in which this police unit targeted them as well. They continued to protest even as many in the #Endsars movement were openly hostile.

Also, the recent mass protests in Senegal show a democratic opening, albeit one fraught with opportunism and other dangers.16

In light of these and other crises, does the rapaciousness of today’s global capitalism-imperialism signify that we are entering the midnight of the twenty-first century—that is, a plunge into utter darkness? And what does our organization need to do and become given that question?

Part II: Subjective forces of resistance — Accomplishments and contradictions

The development that provides hope that we are not plunging into utter darkness are the massive protests worldwide against Israel’s ongoing war against Palestine. These protests, sometimes consisting of half a million at a time, have brought a new generation into the streets. Hundreds of thousands in the UK and U.S. alone, and many more worldwide, are becoming radicalized through these actions; the Israel-Palestine issue has for many become a baptism of fire for questioning existing society.

It is already having a palpable effect—as in compelling many governments, including ones that have long uncritically defended the Israeli state, to distance themselves from it by providing at least verbal support for a ceasefire to end hostilities.

The protests are facing enormous push-back, especially from those claiming that any substantive criticism of Zionism constitutes antisemitism. The latter is on the rise today and it is hardly unknown among leftists. But its most predominant expression in the U.S. is coming from the far right, whose attacks on “East Coast elites” is a not-so-veiled version of stereotypical complaints about “Jewish cosmopolitans” who allegedly control the media, finance, and education. That nothing stops such reactionaries from fully embracing Israel for serving as the U.S.’s major military partner in the Middle East shows that support for it long ago ceased to have much to do with defending Jews.17

In the U.S., where this new McCarthyism is strongest (and has even toppled the president of Harvard University), opposition to it is being led by some courageous intellectuals, which owes a lot to the solidarity of Black intellectuals with the Palestinians and for democratic rights. Labor unions and Black churches have also spoken out courageously, in contrast to the shameful silence of the heads of universities, the cultural establishment, and the NGO sector, dependent as they are on corporate and state support. Also of note is the solidarity of two countries that have experienced forms of colonialism that blatantly touted ethno-racial domination, South Africa and Ireland.

Even more important has been the steely resilience of the people of Gaza. To date, there has been not one report of a Gazan turning in a Hamas hideout or hostage location, something Israel surely would have bragged about had it occurred. Many Gazans remain in or keep returning to the center and the north, despite the danger, in order to continue claiming their homes and land. This is rooted in a deep sense of national solidarity and the refusal of a people to be extinguished. The social formations involved at the village level deserve notice here. As Peter Linebaugh has shown, the Palestinian people have for centuries maintained a communal system of land tenure and village self-administration—similar to what Karl Marx described in his late writings on Russia—which they have retained, albeit in weakened form, through British and Israeli occupation.18

Even as we condemn Hamas’s indiscriminate violence on October 7, it is clear that it changed utterly the world situation, placing the decades-long resistance of the Palestinian people back on the agenda, not only as a factor the imperialist powers cannot count out, but also for the global mass movements for social justice and liberation.19 From the U.S. to France and from Germany to the UK, the new movements of and for the Palestinian people have exposed, in ways not seen in decades, the bankruptcy of so-called “liberal democracy” and especially what remains of reformist social democracy, whose leaders, from UK Labor Party leader Keir Starmer even to “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders, have refrained from a strong, unequivocal support for Palestine even in this hour of genocide, all the while trumpeting support for Ukraine.

Despite the enormous destruction Israel continues to wreak upon Gaza—the ramifications of which will be felt for years and even decades to come—one thing is clear: Israel has lost the battle of ideas. Once that happens to any regime, it is only a matter of time before it loses the battle in material terms.

In the Call for our 2022 Convention, we called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24 of that year a global turning point. It was a geopolitical turning point, since it initiated a new Cold War between Russia and the U.S., the solidification of a Russo-Chinese axis, and resulted in a refurbished and expanded NATO following Russia’s invasion. Israel’s response to Hamas’s brutal attack of Oct. 7 also marks a global turning point—but not only in terms of geopolitics. It also marks a potential subjective turning point, since Israel’s actions has been met with a mobilization of millions that is breathing new life into social movements around the world.

This is reflected in the support extended to Palestinians by many Indigneous people, Latinx and Blacks in the U.S. and elsewhere. The issues raised by the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement—especially the police murder of young people of color—may be less visible in 2024, but they are smoldering under the surface, especially given the fact that both Trumpist fascists and mainstream liberals have blocked the passage of laws that would in any meaningful way restrain the police or even limit their budget.

The counterattack against BLM got seriously underway by 2022, with vicious campaigns against the teaching of Critical Race Theory or the use of books like The 1619 Project in schools. Although these anti-racist efforts may have limitations, such as their tendency to downplay the significance of capital and class, it’s important to note that they are not being targeted by racist reactionaries for this reason. Instead, they are outraged that these educational tools, which dare to speak of “systemic racism,” are moving the public discourse toward a more historical and materialist interpretation. Black intellectuals have been at the forefront of this struggle and have paid the price. This was seen in how the rightwing was able to force the resignation of so highly placed a person as Harvard’s President Claudine Gay, the first Black woman to hold that post. This was accomplished by an unholy alliance of neoliberal cheerleaders for the State of Israel and reactionary racists complaining of alterations in the curriculum and affirmative action.

Outside the universities, a key development in the Black struggle in the U.S. has been the new Poor People’s Campaign, organized by Reverends William Barber and Liz Theoharis. Their call for a Third Reconstruction states, “We must simultaneously deal with the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation and the denial of health care, militarism and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism that blames the poor instead of the systems that cause poverty.”20 Similarly, Black legislators in California introduced a groundbreaking reparations bill aimed at providing compensation to the descendants of enslaved Black individuals. The proposed measures encompass affirmative action initiatives to combat poverty and enhance educational achievements, restitution for families affected by discriminatory policies leading to property loss, the prohibition of forced prison labor, and the allocation of resources to community-driven alternatives to traditional policing methods.21

The searing anger in impoverished communities of color burned its way to the surface in another bourgeois democracy, France, as seen in the June-July 2023 urban insurrection. In the wake of police killing Nahel Merzouk, an unarmed 17-year-old of North African descent, youth expressed their outrage toward both the police and the system, staging 240 attacks on police or gendarme stations and injuring 700 police officers. What France’s leading newspaper called “an unprecedented” level of destruction is a sign of the times, and not just in France.22

These and other ongoing struggles have the potential to develop into movements and campaigns that oppose occupation, repression, and racial exclusion wherever they occur. Potential, however, is not the same as actuality. We are still a long way from an anti-capitalist alternative which opposes all form of capitalism-imperialism—whether generated by the U.S. or its adversaries—on behalf of universal human emancipation.

One sign of this is that many leftists oppose Ukraine’s fight for its national existence because the U.S and EU have provided it with arms—at least until recently.23 It is of course completely hypocritical for the West to send weapons to aid Ukraine’s fight for self-determination while providing Israel with weapons to suppress Palestine’s fight for self-determination. But it is no less hypocritical to take their ground by supporting the national liberation of the struggle of Palestine but not Ukraine. It is surely possible to defend the right of those resisting imperialism to get arms from wherever they can without endorsing either its leaders (Zelensky in the case of Ukraine, Hamas in the case of Palestine) or the regime that supplies them (the U.S. with Ukraine, Iran and Qatar with Palestine).24

At issue here is not simply taking “the right political position” but the fate of a humanist alternative to capitalism. It cannot be advanced by opposing U.S. imperialism while writing a blank check for Russian imperialism; nor can it be advanced by doing the reverse. sSerious revolutionaries don’t get to pick and choose which forms of statist oppression are more agreeable than others. Refraining from targeting all forms of class society necessarily results in an impoverished vision of human emancipation.

It therefore bears noting that the parts of the organized Left that is presently growing most rapidly are Marxist-Leninists and other vanguardist tendencies. In a way this is understandable: the move of many leftists into social democracy has become highly problematic given political developments in recent years. But that does not mean it isn’t a problem.

In this context, as many are returning to the writings of V.I. Lenin, it is important to note what his real contribution was: Though he is known for his many contributions as a revolutionary leader, his deep study of Hegel from 1914-1915 marked a turning point in his intellectual development. Through this study, Lenin moved beyond the confines of mechanical materialism, embracing dialectical principles like “transformation into opposite” that would inform his theory of imperialism. Lenin’s dialectical understanding enabled him to grasp the contradictions inherent in imperialism, particularly the emergence of new forms of oppression and resistance from outside the European working classes. Imperialism had created an internal differentiation of the proletariat in oppressor and oppressed nations and the need to connect their struggles for a successful social revolution. Through his analysis, Lenin illuminated the interconnectedness of class struggle and national liberation, laying the groundwork for a revolutionary praxis that transcended the Marxist orthodoxy of the Second International. His writings provide unique insight into the aspirations of oppressed groups striving for an alternative to capitalism. For Marxist-Humanists in an era marked by resurgent imperialism and colonialism, Lenin’s original contributions to dialectics and analysis of imperialism remain as relevant as ever. Nevertheless, while Lenin, as well as Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, deserve to be studied anew, their limitations as “post-Marx Marxists, as pejorative,” also needs to be discussed in depth.

What also bears noting is the reactionary character of Middle Eastern states and militias that trumpet their support of the Palestinian resistance, as does the kind of conservative nationalism represented by Hamas, which originated as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.25 These forces, which are key components of what Iran calls the Axis of Resistance, are reactionary and fundamentalist in their internal politics: the Houthi regime in northern Yemen that is attacking Red Sea shipping, the counter-revolutionary Syrian regime, and Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Iranian regime, both of which played major roles in repressing the Syrian revolution.

It should not be forgotten that the Islamic Republic of Iran experienced a near revolution in fall 2022. Young women and members of the Kurdish and Baluchi oppressed minorities spearheaded this movement, which was touched off by the police murder of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa (Jina) Amini, for not covering her hair to their satisfaction (improper hijab). Despite massive repression, women have carved out hijab-free public spaces in the cities that they and youth continue to defend over a year later. In an interview smuggled out from prison on the occasion of International Women’s Day, leading feminist and Nobel Laureate Narges Mohammadi declared, “The Iranian people have turned the page on this regime,” adding that “women constitute the most radical, the most powerful, and the most widely engaged force opposing the authoritarian theocracy.”26 Along with oppressed minorities and the working class, they may yet give the regime another jolt, even as it attempts to identify itself with the Palestinian resistance. Again, this shows that there are two worlds in every country, that of the dominant classes and that of the working classes and oppressed groups.

If the global left and Palestinian support movement fail to take note of reactionary character of the regimes in Syria, Yemen, Iran and elsewhere, this will muddy the waters about what kind of resistance can actually lead toward genuine liberation, toward a humanist alternative to capitalism.

Since our founding in 2009, we have argued that the central problem facing today’s struggles is the absence of a viable alternative to all forms of capitalism—whether statist or “free market.” Much of our theoretical work has been devoted to this issue, such as the publication of a revised translation with an extensive commentary of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program. But how do we promote such an alternative in the face of the growing power of the far-Right, the ongoing genocides in Palestine, Ukraine, Myanmar, etc., and the likelihood that the ecological crisis may soon (if it has not already) reach the point of no return? Speculating about “what happens after the revolution” when revolution seems nowhere in sight can readily fall on deaf ears. So, what exactly must we do as an organization in response?

Central to this is showing that a viable concept of the transcendence of capitalist alienation is not a matter of speculating about some distant utopia but is urgently needed to adequately respond to the most pressing political realities. When an alternative to capitalist value production, patriarchy, racism, and class domination recedes from view, what results in the long run is an accommodation to the limits of the given.

To be sure, it is part of our “organizational DNA” to support grassroots movements and stress the importance of horizontal, grassroots forms of organization. But that by itself does not address the problem of how to fill the void in articulating an alternative to capitalist value production, patriarchy, racism, and class domination.

This is why our founder, Raya Dunayevskaya, stressed, “Yes, the party and the forms of organization born from spontaneity are opposites, but they are not absolute opposites…the absolute opposite is philosophy, and that we have not yet worked out organizationally.”27

This was part and parcel of her insistence, “Without such a vision of new revolutions, new individual, a new universal, a new society, new human relations, we would be forced to tailend one or another form of reformism.”28 Today we might add, and/or forced to tailend one or another form of abstract revolutionism. Radicals that cannot find room in their hearts and minds for opposing dehumanized conditions of life wherever they exist are abstract revolutionists. Needed is a concrete universalism that is rooted in all forces of revolution and their reason.

Part III: Organizational tasks and challenges facing the IMHO

Despite these contradictions, there are signs of a growing recognition of the need for a humanist alternative to capitalism. This is reflected in several new works discussing the work of Dunayevskaya and Marxist-Humanist philosophy.29 One recent essay in a major leftwing journal states,

Marxist and socialist humanism have had a lasting impact on how we think about autonomy, social transformation, and radical democracy … Today, the influence of Marxist humanism, particularly as developed by Dunayevskaya’s merging of philosophy and practice, as well as her intersectional analysis of race, class, and gender formulated long before intersectionality came into vogue, are to be traced in such organizations as the International Marxist-Humanist Organization.30

Such discussions testify to the impact, admittedly still modest, that the publication of the collection Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism is beginning to have.31 Of course, these reconsiderations of Marx’s humanism hardly predominate. And for a basic reason: the radical intellectual horizon for the last 40 years, inside and outside of academia, has been defined by the disparagement of any form of humanism. The tendency to conflate bourgeois or Enlightenment humanism with Marxist Humanism is ubiquitous, as are claims that Marx left behind any “residual” humanism when he turned his attention to the critique of political economy, that humanism reeks of “speciesism,” or that a universalist perspective focusing on the transformation of human relations is necessarily hierarchical and oppressive.32 It goes without saying that such conceptions have direct political ramifications, as noted (in part) above.

Hence, our foremost goal as an organization is to work out how we can raise a revolutionary humanist banner within today’s movements—and do so in a way that will convince those drawn to such a perspective to join and help build our organization.

As of now the IMHO publishes a web journal, The International Marxist-Humanist, and at times holds public or zoom meetings on political and theoretical topics. Far rarer do its members come together at rallies and other events to distribute our flyers and literature and invite people to our upcoming events. As a result, many do not view us as an actual organization…because in some ways we have yet to become one.

This doesn’t mean members of the IMHO aren’t involved in important work. Vital activity has been done promoting our ideas at conferences, publications, and podcasts; the same is true when it comes to activity in Palestine and/or Ukraine solidarity, prisoner support, labor solidarity, and care work. But we are largely doing so as individuals rather than presenting ourselves as an organized tendency that poses an alternative to other variants of Marxism.

The operational goal of our 2024 convention is to work out how to move from individuals grouped around a website to becoming a real organization that can continue Marxist-Humanism. The latter is by no means assured. Ideas don’t live and develop on their own. They need living people to embody them, to commit their lives to, otherwise, they become mere footnotes to history.

There are objective barriers standing in the way of assuming such organizational responsibility. We were determined to form an international organization when we moved to create the IMHO in 2009. That we achieved this is our greatest strength, but it also means we are dispersed and rarely get together. That is why attendance at our bi-annual Conventions is vital for every member.

There are also the barriers of everyday life, where we face many obligations and responsibilities that means we must choose what commitments to prioritize and emphasize. This is important given that bourgeois society overburdens some communities more than others, such as workers, women, Trans, and BIPOC communities. This is why we strive to create a space where we can continue to challenge any and all manifestations of racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism and classism inside as well as outside the organization.

Are we willing take the responsibility to maintain and build such an organization? The major barrier facing us is one that afflicts all revolutionary groups that reject the model of a vanguard party. Vanguardists have no problem explaining why others need to join their group—after all, a revolutionary seizure of power “needs leadership” and they are there to provide it. It is harder to get across the necessity for an organized revolutionary group to exist that rejects such an elitist view. This is one reason why anti-vanguardist currents (whether Marxist or anarchist) either do not last long or become insular sects (as News and Letters Committees has become).

A clear example is C.L.R James: though he was surely a serious theoretician, after breaking from vanguardism he failed to explain why an organization of Marxists needs to exist apart from the spontaneous struggles. And the reason he failed to do so is that he recoiled from making the transition from state-capitalist theory to Marxist Humanist philosophy.33 Hence, though he had a small organization following his and Grace Lee Boggs’s break with Dunayevskaya in 1955, it dissolved in the late 1960s just as the mass movements were reaching their peak and a new generation of activists were joining Marxist organizations en masse. In a way, the dissolution of James’s group makes perfect sense: what basis is there in the end to have an organization if it lacks a philosophy of its own and sees its goal simply celebrating the movements and their revolutionary creativity?

In many respects, James’ failure to sustain an alternative form of organization was anticipated in his most important theoretical work—Notes on Dialectics (written in 1948). In rejecting the concept of the vanguard party, he held, “The task today is to call for, to teach, to illustrate, to develop, spontaneity—the free creative activity of the proletariat.” He went so far as to envision “the abolition of the party.”34 So, what kind of organization would replace it? He envisions a mass party along the lines of decentralized formations like the soviets during the Russian Revolution—one created by the spontaneous actions of the masses. No role was specified for an organization of Marxist theoreticians and activists even though he was a member of one.

This lack of specificity was not just James’s problem. It is ours. Marxist-Humanism has made great theoretical strides; having them become embodied and developed organizationally remains our most unfinished task.

History does have a way of repeating itself, but we surely do not want to repeat the history of what happened to James’ organization—any more than we want to repeat the history of News and Letters Committees after Dunayevskaya’s death, when it turned Marxist-Humanist philosophy into a stale ideology.35 This is why we say that the greatest gift we can offer to those joining the IMHO is to take part in the development of a philosophy of liberation—which means working out, consciously and critically, one’s own conception of the world, and in connection with the labor of others, taking an active part in the creation of the history of a new world.1

Jean-Philippe Rémy, “Cisjordanie: l’autre guerre menée par Israel,” Le Monde, Jan. 31, 2024.
2

“The Shoah After Gaza,” by Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books, March 7, 2024.
3

See “Sergey Lavrov and Vulgar Anti-Imperialism,” by Howie Hawkins, Against the Current, March 2, 2024 https://againstthecurrent.org/atc229/sergey-lavrov-and-vulgar-anti-imperialism/
4

Bardan, Roxana. “NASA Analysis Confirms 2023 as Warmest Year on Record,” January 12, 2024. https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-analysis-confirms-2023-as-warmest-year-on-record/
5

Hu, Akielly. “What it might look like if President Biden really declared a climate emergency,” August 14, 2023. https://grist.org/climate-energy/what-it-might-look-like-if-president-biden-really-declared-a-climate-emergency/
6

“FACT SHEET: Biden-⁠Harris Administration Takes Action to Accelerate America’s Clean Transportation Future,” December 14, 2023. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/12/14/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-takes-action-to-accelerate-americas-clean-transportation-future/
7

“Ricardo Salles foi condenado por fraude em plano de manejo,” by Sabrina Rodrigues, Oeco, Dec. 20, 2018, https://oeco.org.br/noticias/ricardo-salles-foi-condenado-por-fraude-em-plano-de-manejo
8

See https://mst.org.br/2018/10/26/o-que-e-a-udr-e-quem-e-nabhan-garcia-cotado-para-ser-ministro-de-bolsonaro/ and also https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2018/11/26/entidades-ligadas-ao-campo-denunciam-influencia-da-udr-no-governo-bolsonaro-entenda
9

“O que se sabe sobre o ‘Dia do Fogo’, momento-chave das queimadas na Amazônia,” by Leandro Machado, BBC News Brasil, Aug. 27, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-49453037
10

“Dia do Fogo, “Tres anos depois: mais de metade da florista queimada na Amazonia viour pasto,” by B.A. Garridoi, Infoamazonia, April 24, 2023, https://infoamazonia.org/2023/08/04/dia-do-fogo-tres-anos-depois-mais-da-metade-da-floresta-queimada-na-amazonia-virou-pasto/.
11

“Sob Bolsonaro, mortes de yanomami por desnutrição cresceram 331%” by João Fellet e Leandro Prazeres, BBC News Brasil, Feb. 17, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/articles/cw011x9rpldo
12

Muhumuza, Rodney. “Uganda’s new anti-gay legislation includes death sentence in some cases,” May 29, 2023. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/ugandas-new-anti-gay-legislation-includes-death-sentence-for-in-some-cases
13

Ibid.
14

Nantulya, Carine Kaneza. “Ghana’s Leaders Push Back on Anti-LGBT Bill,” March 12, 2024. https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/03/12/ghanas-leaders-push-back-anti-lgbt-bill
15

Ferragamo, Mariel and Kali Robinson. “Where African countries stand in their struggle toward more inclusive LGBTQ+ laws,” June 18, 2023. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/where-african-countries-stand-in-their-struggle-toward-more-inclusive-lgbtq-laws
16

See “Standing in Solidarity With Senegal,” by Ba Karang, The International Marxist-Humanist, March 17, 2024, https://imhojournal.org/articles/standing-in-solidarity-with-senegal/
17

For more on this, see “Challenging the New McCarthyism: Charges of Antisemitism Weaponized,” by Peter Hudis, Against the Current, March-April 2024, https://againstthecurrent.org/atc229/charges-of-antisemitism-weaponized/
18

Peter Linebaugh, “Palestine and the Commons: Or, Marx & the Musha’a,” Counterpunch, March 1, 2024 https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/01/palestine-the-commons-or-marx-the-mushaa/
19

See the statement issued by the International Marxist-Humanist Organization within days of the Oct. 7 attack, “The Middle East and the World After October 7, and Israel’s War on Palestine, by Kevin Anderson, https://imhojournal.org/articles/the-middle-east-and-the-world-after-october-7-and-israels-war-on-palestine/
20

See https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/join-us-as-we-build-the-third-reconstruction/
21

Austin, Sophie. “California lawmakers say reparations bills, which exclude widespread payments, are a starting point,” February 21, 2024. https://apnews.com/article/california-reparations-compensation-slavery-c3b8d7a4de973adf218b93e396af8fe1
22

Antoine Albertini and Luc Bronner, “Violences: Un bilan sans précédent,” Le Monde, July 4, 2023.
23

For example, the “March on the DNC” group organizing protests at the Democratic Party Convention in August lists opposing aid to Ukraine among its demands. See https://www.marchondnc2024.org/our-demands
24

See the statement by the Ukraine Solidarity Network (U.S.) of February 24, 2024, “From Ukraine to Palestine: Occupation is a Crime!” https://linktr.ee/ukrainesolidaritynetwork
25

On this, see Joseph Daher, “On the Origins and Development of Hamas,” Tempest, December 27, 2023 https://www.tempestmag.org/2023/12/on-the-origins-and-development-of-hamas/ and more generally Gilbert Achcar, Israel’s War on Gaza (London: Resistance Books, 2023).
26

Ghazal Golshiri, “Voix des dissidents jaillies de prisons d’Iran,” Le Monde, March 1, 2024
27

“Presentation on the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy” in The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel, by Raya Dunayevskaya (Lexington Books, 2002), p. 9.
28

Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, by Raya Dunayevskaya (University of Illinois Press, [1982] 1991), p. 194.
29

See especially “The Self-Education of Rae Speigel (Raya Dunayevskaya): Child Radicalism and Abolitionist Pedagogies at the Crossroads of Great Migrations,” by W. Chris Johnson, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Vol. 17 (1) 2024, pp. 127-54; “She-Marxist Raya Dunayevskaya: Forgotten Comrade of Left-Wing Intellectuals,” by Sofya Nikiforova and Yekaterina Mikheyeva, Journal of the Higher School of Mathematics, Vol. 6 (4), 2023, pp. 84-104; and “’A Way of Knowing: Adrienne Rich’s Marxism and the Poetics of Revolution,” by Megan Behrent, Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 78 (2), 2022, pp. 13-42.
30

“Humanism and Post-Humanism,” by Sunyoung Ayn, Historical Materialism, 31.1, 2023, pp. 68-9.
31

See Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Class, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation, edited by Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin, and Heather A. Brown (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
32

For a fine critique of the latter two claims, see “Humanism: A Defense,” by Karen Ng, Philosophical Topics, Vol. 49 (1) Spring 2021, pp. 145-63.
33

See Dunayevskaya’s Introduction to the 1988 edition of Marxism and Freedom, from 1775 Until Today (Columbia University Press) entitled “Dialectics of Revolution: American Roots and Marx’s World Humanist Concepts”: “When, in the 1950’s Miners’ General Strike, I again used Marx’s Humanist Essays—and my own activity showed the beginning of Marxist-Humanism—C.L.R James also recoiled from Marx’s Humanism” (p. 2) [emphasis in original 1985 speech].
34

Notes on Dialectics, by C.L.R. James (Lawrence Hill, 1980), pp. 117, 141.
35

See “Towards an Organizational History of the Philosophy of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S.,” by Peter Hudis, The International Marxist-Humanist, September 8, 2009, https://imhojournal.org/articles/towards-an-organizational-history-of-the-philosophy-of-marxist-humanism-in-the-u-s/

Palestinian BDS National Committee: Supporting the student-led solidarity mobilizations in their demands for boycott and divestment and against repression

Palestinian BDS National Committee
18 May, 2024


First published at BDS Movement.

Palestinians in Palestine and in exile, as represented in the undersigned grassroots networks, coalitions and organizations, are deeply grateful to the thousands of students who are building an unprecedented mass movement on US, European, Latin American, Australian and other campuses in solidarity with Palestinian liberation. We are inspired by this movement’s boldness, creativity, inclusiveness and diversity. Signs hand-painted on the tents of displaced Palestinians in Rafah thanking the student-led uprising speak volumes in this regard.

Trust and care for each other and for the broader solidarity movement, as well as maintaining the focus on the oppressed and their genuine demands have been central to this mobilization. This has also been crucial to ensure that it can continue to grow in a sustainable way in order to eventually achieve its goals: ending the complicity of universities in Israel’s #GazaGenocide, including scholasticide, and in its underlying 76-year-old regime of settler-colonial apartheid. To this end, and recognizing the comprehensive rights of the Indigenous Palestinian people, especially the right of our refugees to return, this student-led uprising is upholding the most important and effective BDS measures Palestinians have called on universities to heed:

Divestment from complicit companies and


The academic boycott of Israel and all its complicit institutions.

Ending state, corporate and institutional complicity in Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism, apartheid and genocide is the most important form of solidarity that Palestinians are calling for. In campus settings, this demand is rightfully grounded in recognition of Israel’s scholasticide and the moral, and arguably legal, responsibility of universities in the colonial West, that is a partner in Israel’s genocide, to disengage from institutions and corporations that are implicated in these crimes.
Threats to the movement

As movements grow and their impact expands, threats and attacks on them increase. Hegemonic powers understand how impactful student movements have been in struggles for justice, and do everything they can to quell them. Columbia University Palestine solidarity activists, among others, have recently raised the alarm about attempts to sabotage their inspiring protests. Indeed, Israel and its agents – as well as the anti-Palestinian racist and deeply complicit mainstream Western media and some influential donors and politicians – are all working overtime to pressure co-opted university administrations to crush the protest encampments and other peaceful protests. They are the true “outside agitators” that are spreading propaganda and engendering insecurity and repression. Media in particular is zooming in on individuals who raise racist, inflammatory, or dangerous slogans to imply that they represent the principled student protest while deliberately ignoring the overwhelming evidence of the inclusive, progressive, and anti-racist student mobilizations against Israel’s genocide and their institutions’ complicity.

It has also been revealed lately that groups supporting Israel’s genocide and apartheid are offering payment to individuals who can blend into Palestine solidarity protests, specifically seeking to recruit those with “Middle Eastern appearance” for “deeper infiltration.” Cori Bush, a leading progressive member of the US Congress, has reacted saying, “As a Ferguson activist, I know what it’s like to have agitators infiltrate our movement, manipulate the press, & fuel the suppression of dissent by public officials & law enforcement. We must reject these tactics to silence anti-war activists demanding divestment from genocide.”

Columbia University Students for Justice in Palestine activists have warned of this serious threat in an important recent statement: “We are frustrated by media distractions focusing on inflammatory individuals who do not represent us…Our members have been misidentified by a politically motivated mob. … We firmly reject any form of hate or bigotry….”

Other than trying to incriminate Palestine solidarity activists, especially Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), saboteurs of different ethnicities and faiths in effect help the repressive authorities and the racist mainstream Western media in diverting attention from Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and the demands of the movement for universities to divest to end their complicity.

This further attests to the campus mobilizations’ impact. Israel and its lobby groups cannot tolerate the massive and unprecedented shift in US public opinion whereby a majority now opposes Israel’s assault on Gaza and, crucially, supports halting US military funding and weapons shipments that enable its savagery against Indigenous Palestinians.
What are Palestinians asking for from the solidarity movement?

We support solidarity activists who rightly affirm that we cannot dismiss the growing threats against the solidarity movement nor overreact by falling into paranoia and unfounded accusations against those one may disagree with. We support the students who have steadfastly refused to let the movement be silenced or co-opted by police, saboteurs, racists, and agents provocateurs. We call on solidarity groups to be vigilant in recognizing that suspicious behavior is to knowingly and repeatedly insist on defying the agreed upon points of unity and try to impose expressions that are not called for by the Palestinian consensus and that pose a risk to the group.

Learning from the long history of racial and social justice movements (including the Black Lives Matter movement most recently), and based on our engagement over decades with hundreds of solidarity groups and movements worldwide, as well as on the recent experiences of US student activists over the last months, we affirm that the Palestinian consensus asks of the solidarity movement worldwide to:

Respect and advocate for the comprehensive rights of the Palestinian people (at the very least the three rights listed in the historic BDS Call of 2005); and


Isolate Israel’s regime of oppression by ending all state, corporate and institutional complicity with it.

In any solidarity coalition, we call for adopting the above in the points of unity and for standing united against racism in all its forms, including antisemitism. All racist expressions, including those equating Israel and its racist ideology of Zionism on the one hand with Jewish communities and persons on the other, must be categorically rejected and isolated in solidarity spaces.

Signed by:

Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine


Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC)


Student Frames Secretariat - Gaza


Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) - Gaza


Global Palestine Right of Return Coalition


General Union of Palestinian Women


Union of Youth Activity Centers-Palestine Refugee Camps


Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE)


Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)


FEPAL - Palestine Arab Federation of Brazil


Palestinian Forum in Britain


Canadian Arab Federation


Palestinian Community in Europe - Belgium and Luxembourg


Handala Association for Cultural Development - Europe


Palestinian Democratic Forum - Europe


National Institution of Social Care and Vocational Training - Lebanon


General Union of Palestinian Teachers (GUPT)


Palestinian Bar Association


Palestinian Dental Association


Palestinian Pharmacists Association


Palestinian Medical Association


Palestinian Engineers Association


Palestinian Agricultural Engineers Association


Palestinian Veterinarians Syndicate


Civic Coalition for the Defense of Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem


Coalition for Jerusalem


Palestinian Farmers Union


Grassroots Anti Apartheid Wall Campaign (Stop The Wall)


Women Campaign to Boycott Israeli Products


An-Najah National University Student Council


Union of Palestinian Charitable Organizations


Federation of Independent Trade Unions


General Union of Palestinian Workers


Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO)


Palestinian National Institute for NGOs


Occupied Palestine and Syrian Golan Heights Initiative (OPGAI)


General Union of Palestinian Writers


Union of Palestinian Farmers


Grassroots Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign (STW)


Popular Struggle Coordination Committee (PSCC)


Palestinian Federation of New Unions


General Union of Palestinian Peasants


Palestinian Union of Professional Associations


Agricultural Cooperatives Union

My Heart Makes My Head Swim

by Vijay Prashad / May 16th, 2024

Malak Mattar (Palestine), Hind’s Hall, 2024.

The title of this newsletter, ‘My heart makes my head swim’, comes from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952). In a chapter called ‘The Fact of Blackness’, Fanon writes about the despair that racism produces, the immense anxiety about living in a world that has decided that certain people are simply not human or not sufficiently human. The lives of these people, children of a lesser god, are assigned less worth than the lives of the powerful and the propertied. An international division of humanity tears the world into pieces, throwing masses of people into the fires of anguish and oblivion.

What is happening in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, is ghastly. Since October 2023, Israel has ordered 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza to move southwards as the Israeli armed forces have steadily moved their gunsights across the Wadi Gaza wetlands down to the edge of Rafah. Kilometre by kilometre, as the Israeli military advances, the so-called safe zone moves further and further south. In December, the Israeli government claimed, with great cruelty, that the tent city of al-Mawasi (west of Rafah, along the Mediterranean Sea) was the new designated safe area. A mere 6.5 square kilometres (half the size of London’s Heathrow airport), the supposed safe zone within al-Mawasi is nowhere near large enough to house the more than one million Palestinians who are in Rafah. Not only was it absurd for Israel to say that al-Mawasi would be a refuge, but – according to the laws of war – a safe zone must be agreed upon by all parties.

Ismail Shammout (Palestine), Odyssey of a People, 1980.

‘How can a zone be safe in a war zone if it is only unilaterally decided by one part of the conflict?’, asked Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA); ‘It can only promote the false feeling that it will be safe’. Furthermore, on several occasions, Israel has bombed al-Mawasi, the area it says is safe. On 20 February, Israel attacked a shelter operated by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, killing two family members of the organisation’s staff. This week, on 13 May, an international UN staff member was killed after the Israeli army opened fire on a UN vehicle, one of the nearly 200 UN workers killed in Gaza in addition to the targeted assassination of aid workers.

Aref El-Rayyes (Lebanon), Untitled, 1963.

Not only has Israel begun to bomb Rafah, but it hastily sent in tanks to seize the only border crossing through which aid dribbled in on the few trucks a day that were allowed to enter. After Israel seized the Rafah border, it prevented the entry of aid into Gaza altogether. Starving Palestinians has long been Israeli policy, which is of course a war crime. Preventing aid from entering Gaza is part of the international division of humanity that has defined not only this genocide, but the occupation of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank since 1967 and the system of apartheid within the borders defined by Israel following the 1948 Nakba (‘Catastrophe’).

Three words in this sentence are fundamentally contested by Israel: apartheid, occupation, and genocide. Israel and its Global North allies want to claim that the use of these words to describe Israeli policies, Zionism, or the oppression of Palestinians is tantamount to anti-Semitism. But, as the United Nations and numerous respected human rights groups note, these are legal descriptions of the reality on the ground and not moral judgments that are made either in haste or out of anti-Semitism. A short primer on the accuracy of these three concepts is necessary to counter this denial.

Nelson Makamo (South Africa), Decoration of the Youth, 2019.

Apartheid. The Israeli government treats the Palestinian minority population within the borders defined in 1948 (21%) as second-class citizens. There are at least sixty-five Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel. One of them, passed in 2018, declares the country a ‘nation state of the Jewish people’. As the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm wrote, through this new law, the Israeli government ‘formally endorses’ the use of ‘apartheid methods within Israel’s recognised borders’. The United Nations and Human Rights Watch have both said that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians falls under the definition of apartheid. The use of this term is entirely factual.

Laila Shawa (Palestine), The Hands of Fatima, 2013.

Occupation. In 1967, Israel occupied the three Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank. From 1967 to 1999, these three areas were referred to as part of the Occupied Arab Territories (which at different times also included Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Syria’s Golan region, and southern Lebanon). Since 1999, they have been termed the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). In UN documents and at the International Court of Justice, Israel is referred to as the ‘occupying power’, which is a term of art that requires certain obligations from Israel toward those whom it occupies. Although the 1993 Oslo Accords set up the Palestinian Authority, Israel remains the occupying power of the OPT, a designation that has not been revised. An occupation is identical to colonial rule: it is when a foreign power dominates a people in their homeland and denies them sovereignty and rights. Despite Israel’s military withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 (which included the dismantling of twenty-one illegal settlements), Israel continues to occupy Gaza by building a perimeter fence around the Gaza Strip and by policing the Mediterranean waters of Gaza. Annexation of parts of East Jerusalem and the West Bank as well as the punctual bombing of Gaza are violations of Israel’s obligation as the occupying power.

An occupation imposes a structural condition of violence upon the occupied. That is why international law recognises that those who are occupied have the right to resist. In 1965, in the midst of Guinea Bissau’s struggle against Portuguese colonialism, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 2105 (‘Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples’). Paragraph 10 of this resolution is worth reading carefully: ‘The General Assembly… [r]ecognises the legitimacy of the struggle by the peoples under colonial rule to exercise their right to self-determination and independence and invites all States to provide material and moral assistance to the national liberation movements in colonial Territories’. There is no ambiguity here. Those who are occupied have the right to resist, and, in fact, all member states of the United Nations are bound by this treaty to assist them. Rather than sell arms to the occupying power, who is the aggressor in the ongoing genocide, the members states of the United Nations – particularly from the Global North – should aid the Palestinians.

Abdulqader al-Rais (United Arab Emirates), Waiting, c. 1970.

Genocide. In its order published on 26 January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that there was ‘plausible’ evidence of Israel committing genocide against Palestinians. In March, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Francesca Albanese, published a monumental report called Anatomy of a Genocide. In this report, Albanese wrote that ‘there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met’. ‘More broadly’, she wrote, ‘they also indicate that Israel’s actions have been driven by a genocidal logic integral to its settler-colonial project in Palestine, signalling a tragedy foretold’.

Intent to commit genocide is easily proved in the context of Israel’s bombardment. In October 2023, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog said that ‘an entire nation out there is responsible’ for the attacks on 7 October, and it was not true that ‘civilians [were] not… aware, not involved’. The ICJ pointed to this statement, among others, since it expresses Israel’s intent and use of ‘collective punishment’, a genocidal war crime. The following month, Israel’s Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was ‘an option’ since ‘there are no non-combatants in Gaza’. Before the ICJ ruling was published, Moshe Saada, a member of the Israeli parliament from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, said that ‘all Gazans must be destroyed’. These sentiments, by any international standard, demonstrate an intent to commit genocide. As with ‘apartheid’ and ‘occupation’, the use of the term ‘genocide’ is entirely accurate.

Vijay Prashad presents Frantz Fanon’s daughter, Mireille Fanon Mendès-France, with a poster of the cover of the new isiZulu edition of her father’s classic, The Wretched of the Earth, in Paris, France, 2024.

Earlier this year, Inkani Books, a Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research project based in South Africa, published the isiZulu translation of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Izimpabanga Zomhlaba, translated by Makhosazana Xaba. We are so proud of this accomplishment, bringing the work of Fanon into another African language (it has already been translated into Arabic and Swahili).

When I was last in Palestine, I spoke with young children about their aspirations. What they told me reminded me of a section from The Wretched of the Earth: ‘At twelve or thirteen years of age the village children know the names of the old men who were in the last rising, and the dreams they dream in the douars [camps] or in the villages are not those of money or of getting through their exams like the children of the towns, but dreams of identification with some rebel or another, the story of whose heroic death still today moves them to tears’.

Children in Gaza will remember this genocide with at least the same intensity as their ancestors remembered 1948 and as their parents remembered the occupation that has loomed over this narrow piece of land since their own childhood. Children in South Africa will read these lines from Fanon in isiZulu and remember those who fell to inaugurate a new South Africa thirty years ago.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. Prashad is the author of twenty-five books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. Read other articles by Vijay, or visit Vijay's website.