IWD: Raya Dunayevskaya

Since today is International Women's Day I thought I would blog about an overlooked founder of the New Left and Marxist Feminism; Raya Dunayevskaya.
Founder of News and Letters, and a Marxist philosopher whose praxis focused on the revolutionary potential of youth, women and black workers and the anti-war movement.

I cannot recommend highly enough Eugene Gogol's historical biography of her life and work which she termed Marxist Humanism. Raya Dunayevskaya: Philosopher of Marxist-Humanism, Wipfandstock Publishers: Eugene, Oregon, 2003. This extraordinarily accessible work covers the development of her ideas and theories in relation to her life which was a revolutionary praxis.

I can think of no higher praise then the fact that I lent the book to a friend who while a Leftist had not heard of Dunayevskaya. He read the whole work in week, and while the work deals with Hegelian and Marxist Philosophy, Gogols presentation, within the context of her life and political development, my friend was suitably impressed that he went in search of her works online. He returned the book, and related to me that not being as computer literate as some, this was the first time he had downloaded her papers to read later. If you know nothing of her, then this is the political biography to read.

This philosophical comprehension of Marx's mature work of political economy needs to be reckoned with by today's "anti-globalization" movement. That movement is largely motivated by the injustice of the huge disparity in wealth between the northern, advanced capitalist nations and the nations of the south. The rallying cry is for a more just distribution of the world's wealth. Marxism and Freedom moves beyond this politics of equity. It illuminates how deeply capital must be uprooted in order to transform labor into an activity for human development and the realization of individual potentialities.

Dunayevskaya highlights the question, "What are we for?" Typically it is more immediately clear what we are against-capital's globalized reach, or imperialism. The question of the kind of society we are working for is usually ducked as too remote or potentially divisive. Dunayevskaya nonetheless insists on the need for full-fledged discussion within the movement and a collective focus for working it out.

This orientation comes out of Dunayevskaya's embrace of Hegel's method of the negation of the negation. She likens it to Marx's concept of "revolution in permanence," which "made it clear that the revolution does not end with the overthrow of the old but must continue to the new, so you begin to feel this presence of the future in the present" (12). The revolutionary impulse thus seeks the creation of a new human being beyond the uprooting of the old society. Only this ceaseless negation, including the negation of the initial attempts at negation, can lead us beyond a reshuffling of the cards so as to achieve an equitable redistribution of the world's wealth.

For Dunayevskaya the dialectic of negativity is the notion that forward movement emerges from the negation of obstacles to freedom. Negation needs to go further than the refutation of the given, because the first negation is still imprinted with the old. Only when negativity goes on to become self-directed, self-related, or in Hegelian terms "absolute," does it create the positive and the truly new.

While the aim of a humanistic transformation of society has this dialectical philosophical basis, it emerges out of actual human struggles. Dunayevskaya anticipates the focus on fighting for "new human relations" that later became central to the women's, Black liberation and workers' struggles. She quotes a young worker from Los Angeles who asked: "What skill do you need in this day of Automation? What pride can you have in your work if everything is done electronically...? What about the human being?"

She was raised in the Ukrainian diaspora in Chicago. Amongst the immigrant workers who shared the ghetto and jobs in the meat packing plants with their African American neighbors. It was in this community that Raya began as a young Communist to identify the indigenous class struggle in America as dealing with the Negro Question and Womens Liberation. They were not side issues, or matters simply of oppression, for her they were were key to class struggle.

"Those who have dedicated their lives to the creation of more just societies stand back now and take stock of the disintegration of so many of the socialist experiments. Feminism was palpably missing from those plans drawn up by men. Raya Dunayevskaya knew the importance of a feminist vision and hers informed the Marxist-Humanism she explained so well. Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution is as relevant today as when it was written, perhaps more so. This is necessary reading for all who want to know what went wrong and how to do it better next time."— Margaret Randall

While many will point to others as founders of the New Left, in reality it was her and her comrade's C.L. R. James and Grace Lee Boggs that really gave birth to the American Marxist New Left. While much of the New Left in America was shaped by the baby boom and subsequent proletarianization of post secondary education and the consequences of the draft which created a youth revolt, it was the change in production that is Fordism that really was key to Dunayevskaya's work.

under capitalism machines exploit labor. “Capital is then a material thing which exploits labor” (p. 13). Instead of analyzing the capitalist labor process and thus discovering how a material thing becomes an exploiting force, ........that the thing, means of production, has become the social relation, capital, because of what Marx calls “the contradiction between the personification of objects and the representation of persons by things.”

The focal point of Marx’s analysis of capitalist society is his critique of capitalist production. The ideology which flows from this historic mode of production is enveloped in the perverted relation of dead to living labor. Marx pointed out that the very simple relation—capital uses labor—expresses “the personification of things and the reification of people.” That is to say, the means of production become capital and are personified as capitalists at the same time that the workers become reified, that is, their labor becomes objectified into the property of others.

Marx’s critique of capitalist society, based primarily on this inverted relation of dead to living labor at the point of production, extends also to the surface of society (the market), where the social relation between people assumes “the fantastic form of a relation between things.”This is the fetishism of commodities.

Marx proceeds to analyze the capitalist mode of production. Now that the worker is in the factory, the “social relation” becomes a production relation.

By virtue of that fact his relationship to the boss is very clear; it in no sense assumes the fantastic form of a relation between things. On the contrary, there the worker overestimates the capitalist’s might. He thinks that the capitalist alone is responsible for his plight instead of seeing the cause in the mode of production which the capitalist represents. There the worker personifies things: the means of production used as capital become the capitalists. We are here confronted with what Marx called “the personification of things and the reification of people.” Marx was most emphatic in laying bare this “reification of people” because that is the very heart of his critique of political economy. He grasped this very early. “When one speaks of private property,” wrote the young Marx in 1844, “one thinks of something outside of man. When one speaks of labor, one has to do immediately with man himself. The new formulation of the question already involves its solution.”

Dunayevskaya Outline of Marx's Capital--volume one

In evolving through the Communist party to Trotskyism, Dunayevskaya and James became the Forrest Johnson Tendency after Trotsky's death as a political crisis shook the Fourth International. They articulated the earliest State Capitalist critique , within Trotskyism, of the Soviet Union and subsequently of historical capitalism as it evolved through WWII and the Cold War.

She became Leon Trotsky’s Russian-language secretary in 1937 during his exile in Mexico, but broke with him in 1939 at the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Her simultaneous study of the Russian economy and of Marx’s early writings (later known as the 1844 Humanist Essays) led to her 1941-42 analysis that not only was Russia a state-capitalist society, but that state-capitalism was a new world stage.

It was this articulation plus their emphasis on women, blacks and youth as part of the class struggle, culturally as well as politically and economically that set them apart from the rest of the Left. They were part of a movement known as the third way, but different from its other proponents because even though they were steeped in Leninism, they confronted the failure of the Vanguard of professional revolutionaries and their parties, to really speak for the whole of the class.

When we reach state-capitalism, one-party state, cold war, hydrogen bomb, it is obvious that we have reached ultimates. We are now at the stage where all universal questions are matters of concrete specific urgency for society in general as well as for every individual. As we wrote in The Invading Socialist Society:

“It is precisely the character of our age and the maturity of humanity that obliterates the opposition between theory and practice, between the intellectual occupations of the ‘educated’ and the masses.” (p. 14.)

All previous distinctions, politics and economics, war and peace, agitation and propaganda, party and mass, the individual and society, national, civil and imperialist war, single country and one world, immediate needs and ultimate solutions – all these it is impossible to keep separate any longer. Total planning is inseparable from permanent crisis, the world struggle for the minds of men from the world tendency to the complete mechanization of men.

State-capitalism is in itself the total contradiction, absolute antagonism. In it are concentrated all the contradictions of revolution and counter-revolution. The proletariat, never so revolutionary as it is today, is over half the world in the stranglehold of Stalinism, the form of the counter-revolution in our day, the absolute opposite of the proletarian revolution.

It is the totality of these contradictions that today compels philosophy, a total conception. Hence the propaganda ministry of Hitler, the omnipresent orthodoxy of Stalinism, the Voice of America. The war over productivity is fought in terms of philosophy, a way of life. When men question not the fruits of toil but the toil itself, then philosophy in Marx’s sense of human activity has become actual.

World War I plunged the world into complete chaos. Lenin between 1914 and 1917 established in theory: (a) the economic basis of the counter-revolutionary Social Democracy (The economic basis of imperialist war had been established before him.); (b) the Soviet democracy in contradistinction to bourgeois democracy. But before he did this, he had to break with the philosophical method of the Second International. He worked at this privately in a profound study of the Hegelian dialectic applied to Marx’s Capital, the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Thirty years have now passed. Lenin’s method of economic analysis is ours to use, not to repeat his findings. His political conception of complete abolition of bureaucracy and all ordering from above is today to be driven to its ultimate as the revolutionary weapon against the one-party state. But today the problems of production which Lenin had to tackle in Russia in 1920 are universal. No longer to be ignored is the philosophical method he used in holding fast to the creation of a new and higher social organization of labor as "the essence” of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is not the Marxists who have compelled society to face this issue. Today in every layer of society, the great philosophical battles that matter are precisely those over production, the role of the proletariat, the one-party state, and many of the combatants are professed dialecticians.

The crisis of production today is the crisis of the antagonism between manual and intellectual labor. The problem of modern philosophy from Descartes in the sixteenth century to Stalinism in 1950 is the problem of the division of labor between the intellectuals and the workers.

Source: State Capitalism and World Revolution, by C.L.R. James in collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya & Grace Lee; with a new introduction by Paul Buhle. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986. Chapter XI, pp. 113-135. Original publication: 1950. Note: Asterisks were changed to numbered footnotes for greater clarity.

News and Letters, Dunayevskaya's organization evolved out of the post war Cold War as the Left faced the crisis of Imperialism and Stalinism. Those who came out of the Trotskyist movement created a new force on the Left called the Third Way, neither supporting Stalinism or American Imperialism. In Europe they moved beyond Trotskyism into Libertarian Marxism and Socialism.

Like News and Letters, these organizations were small and centered around the need to build radical rank and file based proletarian organizations, like the ICC and Socialism and Barbarism in France and England. These organizations originated out of the crisis of the Fourth International as well as the Left/Council Communist movement.

What made News and Letters unique, was they did not give up on class struggle, instead they focused on the new wave of post WWII Fordist industrialization and the new proletarianization of African Americans, women and youth.

While originating out of Leninism, James and Dunayevskaya's praxis made them critical of the Leninist, Trotskyist and Stalinist left, and its failure to see the working class as a broad based movement of race, sex and class. Most of the left had identified with the white industrial working class, rather than understanding the key to class struggle in America was the self organization of the most oppressed and exploited proletarians.

The New Left would mistakenly identify this later as groups who were the revolutionary vanguard, always looking for a vanguard to be the vanguard party of. Third Worldism, support for Black Power and the Black Panthers, the very origins of todays 'identity politics' by the New Left saw youth, blacks, the oppressed in general as revolutionary and rejected the white industrial working class as reactionary.

Such was not the case with Dunyaveskaya and her group News and Letters. In fact one of her collaborators for many years was Martin Glaberman. Together they identified with and worked in building rank and file movements in the Detroit area unions, the very heart of modern and post modern Fordism.

In 1953, Dunayevskaya split with Lee and James, leading to the formation of Marxist-Humanism by Dunayevskaya (later solidified into the group News and Letters), while James and Lee would go on to form a new group, Facing Reality, which would eventually see the split between James and now Grace Lee-Boggs. James' work would continue to influence other people through the journal started by longtime co-revolutionary Martin Glaberman called "Radical America", whose writers are a virtual "Who's Who of the Marxist critique of racism and white supremacy, including George Rawick and David Roediger. The group Sojourner Truth was influenced by James' work and took up the name of autonomist Marxism, but independent of James' practical organisational efforts. The work of Noel Ignatiev and Race Traitor would form the other well known tendency within the Marxist critique of white supremacy through the theory of 'white skin privilege.'

Dunayevskaya and News and Letters have been influenced by the early Hegelians and the Frankfurt School and themselves represent one of the more vocal defenders of a Hegelian Marxism which they refer to as Marxist-Humanism, having made theoretical contributions to the study of Marx and Hegel and the post-Marx Marxist world, as well as innovative readings of Lenin and issues of race, gender and sexuality. The group is also influenced by Rosa Luxemburg and did much to resurrect her in the English-speaking world as a major theorist.

Rank and file organizing against the union bosses and bureaucracy, self organization, the need for revolutionaries to recognize all struggles of the oppressed in America as part of the class struggle took News and Letters and Glaberman and Dunayevskaya, into a different non-Leninist non-vanguard form of revolutionary organization and praxis. As their detractors have pointed out; There is also a close internal relationship between Dunayevskaya and the morality of anarchism.

Indeed Dunayevskaya, Glaberman and James influenced many of the anarchist and autonomists of the 1970's. In Canada their works influenced a Toronto Libertarian Socialist mileux called Lotta Continua, aka The New Tendency which was situated in the Post Office. Most of the Left at this time was adopting a back to the factories approach to revolutionary politics. The failure of the social revolution to occur through and around the Anti-War and Youth movements, led the socialist groups in Canada to identify student and anti-war movements as petite-bourgeoisie and they needed to hone their revolutionary practice by engaging the working class.

What they overlooked was that they were the proletariat, whether in school or in the factory. Many went to work in auto plants in Southern Ontario, but by far the vast majority went to work at the Post Office. The Post Office struggles became the class struggle for the left in Canada, every one of Canada's socialist groups had a cell in the Post Office, and still do today, their influence is felt in CUPW the postal workers union they helped build in practice. Which is why CUPW still to this day uses the slogan Lotta Continua, the Struggle Continues.

That praxis was far more in keeping with the class struggle as Glaberman and Dunayevskaya saw it than the ideologies of the Heinz 57 varieties of Leninist organizations that headed back to the factories.

I was introduced to their works from having heard CLR James speak in Edmonton, in the Seventies, and we carried their books at our anarchist bookstore Erewhon Books.

All her life as a revolutionary Dunayevskaya was an optimist, she saw the revolution not as armed struggle, or a mere moment in history, she like Marx saw class struggle as the evolution of society towards a better more human future.
And her view of that class struggle was inclusive formulated as it was in the Chicago ghetto where she grew up.


Her work is approachable, important and still relevant.

MARX AND CRITICAL THOUGHT.

Raya Dunayevskaya Archive

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
CLR Jamaes, Raya Dunayevskaya, News and Letters, Martin Glaberman, marxism, marxist-humanism, feminism, socialist-feminism, black, Afro Americans, black workers, youth revolt, New Left, Trotskyism

[Video] Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism

Get to know Raya Dunayevskaya’s brand of intersectional Marxism at this book launch event sponsored by the IMHO. Recorded on February 17, 2021. Speakers: Paul Mason, Alessandra Spano, Karel Ludenhoff, David Black, and Kieran Durkin — Editors.

Raya Dunayevskaya is one of the twentieth century’s great but underappreciated Marxist, feminist, and anti-racist thinkers. Her unique philosophy and practice of Marxist-Humanism—as well as her grasp of Hegelian dialectics and the deep humanism that informs Marx’s thought—has much to teach us today.

Join us for a launching session of Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Class, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Kieran Durkin, one of the editors of the book, will introduce the meeting. Then we will hear four presentations from Alessandra Spano, Paul Mason, Karel Ludenhoff, and David Black, each of whom have contributed chapters to the book, in which they discuss how different aspects of Dunayevskaya’s works can inspire us today.

Paul Mason is an award-winning journalist, writer, filmmaker and public speaker. He has written a number of books, including Postcapitalism, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere and Clear Bright Future: A Radical Defence of the Human Being. Current work in development includes a short book about Karl Marx, a drama-documentary about the Spanish Civil War, and the play Feel My Pulse.

Alessandra Spano is a Ph.D candidate in Political Philosophy at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of Catania. She received an M.A. in Philosophy at the University of Bologna with a thesis focused on the political thought of Raya Dunayevskaya. This research was the inspiration for her focus on Marxist-Feminism and critical theory, the concentration for her doctoral investigation, particularly looking at the United States as a political space that is simultaneously imperialist, ‘colonized’, and global. Her interests include: Marxism, feminist theory, African-American studies, German idealism, psychoanalysis, and radicalism in the United States.

Karel Ludenhoff is an Amsterdam-based labor activist and a writer on Marx’s critique of political economy whose essays have appeared in Logos and other journals.

David Black born 1950 in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, now resident in London, works as a journalist, author, musician and video-maker. His published books include, (co-authored with Chris Ford) 1839: The Chartist Insurrection; The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism: Essays on History, Culture, and Dialectical Thought; (as editor) Red Republican: the Complete Annotated Works of Helen Macfarlane; and Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD.

Kieran Durkin is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the University of York, and former Visiting Scholar at University of California Santa Barbara, where he has been studying the Marxist Humanist tradition. He is author of The Radical Humanism of Erich Fromm and (co-edited with Joan Braune) Erich Fromm’s Critical Theory: Hope, Humanism, and the Future.

 RECENT ARTICLES IN THE INTERNATIONAL MARXIST-HUMANIST WEBZINE (October 2023)

The Middle East and the World After October 7, and Israel’s War on Palestine by Kevin B. Anderson A global turning point has been reached, showing systemic fragility, but with genocidal repression looming over Gaza. Approved as a Statement of the Steering Committee of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization. Clarifying Our Perspectives on Palestine and Israel after October 7 by Alireza Kia On several tendencies on the left, especially in Iran and the diaspora. Front Commun: The Herculean Leap of the Working Class Quebecois by Kaveh Boveiri Quebec general strike has become a real possibility. Los Angeles Demonstration for Palestine Amidst Rising Fears of Israeli Invasion by Derek Lewis The demonstration of several thousand galvanized support for Palestine. The Uyghurs and the Palestinians by Chinese Student The oppression of Uyghurs in China compares to that of the Palestinians. Poems of the Living Dialectic by Sam Friedman A series of 7 poems on the dialectic. Ongoing Strikes Show Increasing U.S. Labor Militancy by Derek Lewis Increasing militancy of unions at the leadership and grassroots levels illustrates an increased resolve to resist capital. Review of Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Class, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation by Sevgi Doğan Review of “Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Class, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation,” Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin, Heather A. Brown (eds.), Palgrave 2021. Originally appeared in Science & Society, 2023, 87:3. How Green Was Karl Marx? – On Kohei Saito and the Anthropocene by David Black Review of Saito’s "Marx in the Anthropocene."

UPCOMING EVENTS SPONSORED BY THE IMHO [Chicago] The Regional and Global Impact of Israel’s War Against the  Palestinian People   Monday, October 30, 6:30 pm (Central time) Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84126516993?pwd=OHk4a3lNS25zM2N5RzVwRG53bk9vZz09 The growing opposition around the world to Israel’s genocidal assault on in Gaza has shattered the illusion of the U.S., Israel, and their allies in and beyond the Arab world that, after having been politically isolated, confined, and driven to despair, the Palestinian people would gradually disappear or acquiesce to the new “reality” of total Israeli domination. The past two weeks show, as in Poland, Ireland, or South Africa in earlier times, or the history of the Jews themselves, that oppressed peoples who have acquired a clear sense of identity and organization are capable of outlasting their oppressors, even in the face of decades and even centuries of setbacks. Join us for a discussion of the regional and global impact of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel and the Israeli state’s ongoing effort to bomb and starve Gaza into submission. Opening the discussion: Peter Hudis, author of Frantz Fanon, Philosopher of the Barricades Ali Reza, Iranian revolutionary activist. Suggested Reading: “The Middle East and the World After October 7, and Israel’s War on Palestine,” by Kevin B. Anderson, in The International Marxist-Humanist     [London] Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism   Wednesday, November 8, 2023, 19:00 (GMT) Bertrand Russell Room, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Chair: Sandra Rein, University of Alberta, Canada, scholar of Rosa Luxemburg Speakers: Kieran Durkin, University of York, UK, author of Erich Fromm’s Radical Humanism Heather Brown, Westfield State University, USA, author of Marx on Gender and the Family David Black, writer and cultural critic, UK, author of Helen Macfarlane Janaina de Faria, Federal University of Vales do Jequitinhonha e Mucuri, Brazil and Journal of the Brazilian Society for Political Economy Kevin B. Anderson, University of California, USA, author of Marx at the Margins Sponsored by the International Marxist-Humanist Organisation Free admission Copies will be available at 50% discount of new paperback edition of Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Class, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation, ed. by Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin, and Heather Brown RECENT PUBLICATIONS OF INTEREST (with reviews posted on our Publications pages) Raya Dunayevskaya's Intersectional Marxism: Race, Class, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation edited by Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather A. Brown (Palgrave Macmillan). A Precious Residue: Poems that ponder efforts to spark a working class socialism in the 1970s and after by Sam Friedman (International Marxist-Humanist). Marxist-Humanism in the Present Moment: Reflections on Theory and Practice in Light of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Black Lives Matter Uprisings edited by Jens Johansson & Kristopher Baumgartner (The International Marxist-Humanist Organization). Critique of the Gotha Program (Revised Translation & New Introduction) by Karl Marx, Peter Hudis (Introduction), Peter Linebaugh (Foreword), translated by Kevin B. Anderson & Karel Ludenhoff (PM Press). A Revolutionary Subject: Pedagogy of Women of Color and Indigeneity by Lilia D. Monzó (Peter Lang Inc.). Dialectics of Revolution: Hegel, Marxism, and its Critics Through a Lens of Race, Class, Gender, and Colonialism by Kevin B. Anderson (Daraja Press). ******* We have also posted reviews of these and other of our books in a variety of journals, including ECONOMIC & POLITICAL WEEKLY (India). See also our dropdown menu for our LANGUAGES on our homepage for newly uploaded articles, reviews, interviews, and book announcements in Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Persian, German, Turkish, Italian, Korean, French, Spanish, Czech, and other languages. THE INTERNATIONAL MARXIST-HUMANIST is the webzine of the INTERNATIONAL MARXIST-HUMANIST ORGANIZATION (IMHO) Web:  https://www.imhojournal.org/ Email: arise@imhojournal.org  Follow us on Twitter (upper right on IMHO homepage) for immediate notice of new posts. Join our Facebook page: "International Marxist-Humanist Organization," https://www.facebook.com/groups/imhorg/ We would love to hear your thoughts on our webzine or our organization, either through the "arise" email account above or as a comment in our (moderated) comments pages. Consider a donation (tax deductible in USA) to the IMHO to support our work bit.ly/IMHO-DONATE

Battle of Ideas: Race, Class, Gender, and Revolution in Theory and in Practice


August 21, 2020

Length:4770 words


Summary: Report to the July 2020 Interim Convention of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization, slightly updated — Editors


INTRODUCTION


Ours is the age that can meet the challenge of the times when we work out so new a relationship of theory to practice that the proof of the unity is in the Subject’s own self-development. Philosophy and revolution will first then liberate the innate talents of men and women who will become whole. Whether or not we recognize that this is the task history has ‘assigned’, to our epoch, it is a task that remains to be done.

-Raya Dunayevskaya, 1973 in Philosophy & Revolution Chapter 9, “New Passions and New Forces The Black Dimension, The Anti-Vietnam War Youth, Rank-and-File Labor, Women’s Liberation”.


Over the past 10 years, we have seen the rise of authoritarianism, state repression and white supremacy across the globe. As always, Black, Indigenous people of color, youth, women, LGBTQ folks, and people with disabilities will often bear the brunt of these dehumanizing structures. Some of the structural issues Black and Brown populations are experiencing in the United States at this time, include over-policing, police brutality, gentrification of already under-resourced communities, depressed wages, lowered health outcomes, housing insecurity, mass incarceration to name a few.

Marxist-Humanism is a philosophy that engages with the totality of Marx’s work, posits that alienation is at the center of dehumanizing structures humans face under capital and embraces Marx’s philosophy of liberation. To analyze the current uprisings we must try to understand the dialectical relationship between the objective and subjective forces in these movements. This report will examine issues of race and gender from a United States based context. Because we are living through an unprecedented time, of a Black-led multi-racial movement, this report will primarily focus on United States-based Black and feminist movements.


THE MOVEMENTS OF BLACK MASSES


Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.

-Ruth Wilson Gilmore


Black Lives Matter and Related Movements

Each generation of revolutionaries must theorize, and act based on current conditions. Movements like Black Lives Matter have been at the forefront of not only fighting police violence, the incarceration of Black, Brown and Indigenous people, and an unjust immigration system, but have also taken on issues such as mental health, LGBTQ rights, and reproductive justice for folks of color. Moreover, the current Covid-19 pandemic has not revealed a “we’re in this together” moment as many in the bourgeoisie were claiming it would. In fact, this particular crisis has laid bare all of the inequities in our society as Black, Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) find themselves disproportionately affected by this catastrophe. Indeed, the social and economic impacts of this crisis coupled with recent racist murders of Black folks is fueling the revolts we see as BIPOC, women, youth, the working class, immigrants and sexual minorities rise up against the domination of racialized and gendered capitalism.

Throughout this decade, the United States public has been forcefully confronted with what many communities of color have long understood, i.e. their bodies are considered disposable in this society. A 2015 study by the Harvard Public Health Review confirms this, revealing that Black men are three times more likely to have a fatal encounter with the police compared to white men. The same study also shows there’s been a sharp rise in these fatal incidents since the 1980s. The 2014 brutal murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown by police mobilized the Black masses to say, “I can’t breathe,” a reference to Garner’s last words as police manhandled him cutting off his circulation and “We have nothing to lose but our chains,” a phrase found in the Communist Manifesto but popularized by Assata Shakur in the 1970s. Today we repeat the same harrowing last words of George Floyd as he pleaded for his life and called out for his mother, while a police officer kneeled on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. “I can’t breathe” is now the cry of the streets as masses everywhere protest Mr. Floyd’s murder, racialized capitalism and state violence worldwide.

Public perception of the movement for Black lives and of systemic racism have shifted over the past 7 years. A July 2020 poll by Langer Research Associates reveals that 63% of U.S. Americans support the Black Lives Matter movement and 69% of the same group acknowledge that Black people and other racialized minorities face institutional racism within the criminal justice system. The response to the question of systemic racism has jumped 15 percentage points since 2014, the year the Black Lives Matter movement was born. This shift in consciousness for the masses does not necessarily translate into widespread desire for revolutionary change. At a time when confidence in law enforcement institutions is at a 30 year low (48% across the general population, 56% among whites and 19% among Blacks), the U.S. masses favor widespread police reforms over defunding or abolishing the police (Brennan, 2020). White U.S. citizens are less likely to support the defunding of the police department budgets and shifting resources to social programs (41% compared to 49% of the Hispanic and 70% of the Black population). And while the U.S. general population does not support the complete abolishment of policing as we know it (15% support from the general population BUT 33% for persons under 35 years old), the public is now having important conversations about the carceral state (Crabtree, 2020).

Taylor (2020) carefully examines the superficial display of solidarity we are witnessing from our public and private institutions. “At one level, the rapid, reflexive default to offering symbolic recognition of racism was quite typical. No other country engages in the cavernous nothingness of the fake apology as frequently as the United States.”. At the same time she acknowledges what other radical scholars have that the uprisings are a response to prolonged systemic inequities minorities suffer under racialized capital and that the emerging social movements are forcing everyone, including the left to engage seriously with issues around class, race, anti-blackness, crime, and state-sanctioned violence.

An important task for those in these movements is to offer a critical analysis of the role of looting and vandalism during protests. As Vicky Osterweil (2014) and others have noted, the media attempts to distinguish “good” protesters from “bad” ones and by doing so “reproduces racist and white supremacist ideologies, deeming some unworthy of our solidarity and protection, marking them, subtly, as legitimate targets of police violence. These days, the police, whose public-facing racism is much more manicured, if no less virulent, argue that ‘outside agitators’ engage in rioting and looting. Meanwhile, police will consistently praise ‘non-violent’ demonstrators, and claim that they want to keep thosedemonstrators safe.” In this current revolt, the “good” protesters can be seen marching during the day, chanting and expressing anger in a way that is only slightly unacceptable in civil society. The “bad” protesters are characterized by actions like looting, ignoring curfews, vandalism, mocking police officers, allowing their anger to spill over onto freeways by occupying them, and displaying generally antisocial behavior. Embracing the “good vs. bad” protester logic risks dividing movements and undermining the solidarity protesters might otherwise have. This logic also implies that those engaged in these acts don’t have agency and are not involved in conscious and tactical resistance. Furthermore, undermining the more violent aspects of a revolt underestimates the very visceral rage many are experiencing at this time. Organizers and activists should continuously push their demands forward and not fall into this logic, particularly at a time when we see the state making concessions and wide public condemnations of systemic racism. Conversations about non-community invaders should center on police and National Guard troops who are the true outside agitators as they’ve been deployed from other cities to repress communities. Moreover protesters can and have been using this moment to push forward a counter-narrative, using the language of looting, stealing and violence to confront the white supremacist settler-colonial project that is the United States, and making the case that exploitation under capitalism is actually the ultimate form of looting.

The current Black Lives Matter movement has been viewed as a form of race-based identity politics by some on the Marxist left who remain only interested in class-first solutions to the problems we experience under capitalism. These critics claim that these forms of identity politics undermine class solidarity for neoliberal reforms or for bourgeois individualisms. Understanding that the politics of recognition do not develop in a vacuum, Raya Dunayevskaya (1982) did not reject these politics wholesale, in fact she evokes Hegelian concepts in support saying, “it is clear that for the Black masses, Black consciousness, awareness of themselves as African-Americans with their dual history and special pride, is a drive toward wholeness. Far from being a separation from the objective, it means an end to the separation between objective and subjective. Not even the most elitist Black has quite the same arrogant attitude as the White intellectual toward the worker, not to mention the prisoner.” (1982:281)

Dunayevskaya recognizes something that scholars like Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2016) point to, that even the Black elites in the United States society cannot escape racialization. This is an important observation that the class-reductionists are usually not able to make. Their fear of being derailed from struggling against a global class war prevents them from understanding how comparatively little power Black and Brown elites hold in a racist society. They also fail to realize that even the bourgeois Black and Brown classes are willing to fight against racialized oppression and have historically done so. Indeed, almost all United States mainstream politicians of color at our present time are willing to proclaim, “Black Lives Matter.”

Concerning the issue of identity-first or race-based movements, Dunayevskaya (1982) also rejects the idea that Black self-development of subjectivity is bourgeois. Over the span of her career, she remains committed to the struggle against structural racism and its relationship to capital. She also follows the activities and self-development of people of color, particularly in relation to the Black dimension in the United States. Determined to always get to the root of racial domination, she was consistently willing to take the class-reductionist left as well as the Black bourgeois leadership to task. Dunayevskaya (1963) does more than champion the rights of racialized minorities or simply explain how their oppression is connected to a larger class war. Through her dialectical exploration of history, she is able to demonstrate that not only are the United States Black populations always on the forefront of liberation movements but that no system of domination can snuff out the human desire to be free. In American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard, she writes, “[the Black dimension] at each turning point in history, anticipates the next stage of development of labor in its relationship with capital. Because of his dual oppression, it could not be otherwise” (1963:81). To make this claim she analyzes the creativity of abolitionists through the slave revolts, Black anti-imperial resistances during the turn of the 20th century, Black labor battles of the reconstruction era, the courageous actions of the Little Rock Nine in their quest to desegregate schools and the Black wildcat Detroit strikes — notice that many of the struggles she highlights have no obvious or immediate class character. Dunayevskaya takes a special interest in the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott asserting that this struggle was as relevant and radical as the Hungarian revolution that occurred the year after. She writes extensively on not only the relatedness of these movements but on the underlying humanism that propels them. Throughout her scholarship, Dunayevskaya observes that the Black masses at this time remain revolutionary, “contrary to the reports in the white press, Black America’s actual rejection of white capitalistic-imperialistic exploitation, with or without Black lackeys, is, all one and the same time, a time-bomb that is sure to explode, and a time for thinking and readying for action.” ([1978] 1986:12)


Black Pain for White Witnesses

In a provocative essay Zoe Samudzi (2020) explores the question of why we watch videos of Black people being murdered or brutalized by state actors or white vigilantes. She asserts, “it serves usually, as a reinscription of white supremacy: a reification of the boundary between the white self and the black ‘others’ through a passive bystander witnessing and the enforcement of race through public violence.” In other words, it is possible to view these heinous acts over and over again, express concern, and share the videos for the purpose of awareness-raising without actually engaging in anti-racist praxis. If state violence is a mainstay of Black life, what awareness is there to raise? Why have the masses at this point not come to understand how violence functions under racial capitalism?

Samudzi also claims that “the killings, in a way, become a macabre method of marking social and political time” and an opportunity for white progressives and leftists to claim moral superiority over other white people because they experience sympathy by watching the horror and subsequently sharing them in a quest for justice (that as we’ve seen is rarely achieved). One other reason for the sharing of these videos is to convince the masses of the innocence of the victims. If Black people in this society by default are guilty, then there must be evidence of the opposite before the masses can demand justice for their murders. The families of state murder victims understand this and also often urge us not to look away from the dehumanization of their Black family members. What remains clear is that we will continue to witness violence against Black, Brown, Indigenous, non-male, queer and disabled folks until we fundamentally change social relations in our societies. We will continue to share and be horrified by the videos that capture this violence. One question we should ask is how to move mass passive white viewership from this place of witnessing to one of struggling for justice. Perhaps we are on the way there as the witnessing of George Floyd’s murder has become the impetus for the current uprising against state violence.


Women’s Movements and Abolition Feminisms


Let this (moment) radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.

-Mariame Kaba



We’ve seen tremendous activism and organizing of women (many of color) and queer folks over the past several years. In 2019, we witnessed Sara Nelson, the head of the flight attendants union call for a general strike after a government shutdown left TSA screeners, air traffic controllers, and customs agents unpaid for 35 days. This tactic has not been attempted in the United States for over 70 years! Although flight attendants are paid by the private airlines they work for, Nelson made a rousing speech calling for worker solidarity across all sectors, “Some would say the answer is for them to walk off the job. I say, ‘What are you willing to do?’ Their destiny is tied up with our destiny — and they don’t even have time to ask us for help. Don’t wait for an invitation. Get engaged, join or plan a rally, get on a picket line, organize sit-ins at lawmakers’ offices.” Perhaps Nelson like many have recognized, the current political and economic conditions have opened the door for these radical ideas to be broached and the masses are hungry for changes. She would go on to say, “I think what we’re seeing, with the teachers strikes, the hotel workers who took on Marriott and won, is that people are not willing to put up with it anymore. People are willing to do more to fight for their families because they have been pushed so far, and there has been so much productivity put on the backs of the American worker without any increases in wages.” When asked about her call for a general strike, she wondered, “What is the labor movement waiting for?”

While we have yet to observe a general strike, we cannot discount the strikes and other labor-related activities that have occurred over the past few years. Indeed, we’ve witnessed widespread teacher strikes in states like West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, California and Colorado. These teacher strikes can be understood as both labor and feminist issues, considering that 77 % of all K-12 educators in the United States are female, and that the demands educators have been making address matters of social reproduction. As teachers during these strikes have demanded better pay and/or work conditions, they’ve also called for changes that socialist feminists everywhere have considered important for life-making. These include a demand to invest in counselors, librarians and mental health support for students, re-investment in after-school and early education programs for public education, access to quality education for working-class students, access to quality food in schools, and demands for the safety of children, and specifically, a halt to random searches and the policing of students.

One framework socialist feminists of color are rallying around particularly when it comes to issues of social reproduction, is that of abolitionist feminism (Lorber, 2018). Abolitionist feminism is an anti-capitalist framework with Marxist roots which seeks to not only dismantle the carceral state but project a new world. According to Maureen Mansfield (2018), “abolitionist feminism invites us to consider the world we want, and how to organize to build it. Seeking a world beyond cages, policing and surveillance, Abolitionist Feminism focuses our attention on developing stronger communities and bringing about gender, race and economic justice. It encourages us to consider our approach systemically and collectively rather than individually… Abolitionist Feminism asks us to consider the violence and harm caused by the state, as well as inter-personally, and seek alternative strategies for addressing these harms.”

While abolitionist frameworks are not new, we find new generations of feminists of color adopting these ideas. The abolitionist frameworks are indeed informing activists and theorists in this moment of civil unrest. When the Black Lives Matter movement launched in 2014, most calls for justice from even the leaders of the organization were reformist in nature. In this second wave of BLM activism, we are witnessing these demands change to have a more abolitionist character. The present-day abolitionist movements comprise of grassroots organizers, feminist collectives and scholars and is a very decentralized movement. Beyond the abolitionist frameworks that unite their work, the organizing principles are carried out in context-specific ways. By eschewing big party politics, vanguardism or hierarchical organizations, abolitionists have managed to be nimble and propose an abolitionist platform that meets current Black Lives Matter uprising. For example, the calls to #defundpolice and for #carenotcops were crafted quite thoughtfully. When abolitionists proposed these demands, they looked at actionable ways of approaching police abolition that had the potential to shrink the scope of policing, the size of the prison-industrial complex and to undermine the surveillance state. Defunding the police and investing public monies in services for communities that are most affected by the carceral system, creates the potential for new communities of care where societal ills are no longer addressed through either interpersonal or state violence.

By contrast, liberal reformers are calling for a police reform program known as #8cantwait. This platform proposes measures to combat police brutality that many states have tried with little success (e.g. banning chokeholds on arrest victims) to ones that are almost unenforceable (e.g. mandating police officers to use de-escalation techniques in their arresting practices). These proposals seek to make tweaks to a system that can not be accountable to itself and offers no generative community-based to address peoples’ material needs. But for the ongoing radical organizing of contemporary abolitionists, this framework would be accepted as the most progressive solution to the problems of state violence and police terror we face. So strong was the opposition to the #8cantwait program that its original framers have almost abandoned it and a collective of revolutionary abolitionists have released their own plan titled #8toabolition.

Abolitionist frameworks have the potential of upending all systems of domination and projecting new humanist alternatives. As famed abolitionist feminist Mariame Kaba says, “a big part of the abolitionist project… is unleashing people’s imaginations while getting concrete — so that we have to imagine while we build, always both.” Abolishing the carceral state would necessitate the abolishment of capitalism. The current abolitionist feminisms we are witnessing are advocating for a politic that goes beyond the redistribution of resources and instead proposes new human social relations that are not based on commodification and exploitation. This framework refuses to explore the “woman question,” “the race question” or the “prison/policing/surveillance abolition question” after the revolution but demands that it be theoretically worked on now. Time will tell if these and related movements can potentially uproot the capitalist mode of production and overcome the mental and manual division of labor that creates alienated human relations.


CONCLUSION


Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

-Arundhati Roy




We therefore now need to initiate the exploration of the new reconceptualized form of knowledge that would be called for by Fanon’s redefinition of being humanas that of skins (phylogeny/ontogeny) and masks (sociogeny). Therefore bios and mythoi. And notice! One major implication here: humanness is no longer a noun. Being human is a praxis.

-Sylvia Wynter



At the current moment, we are facing a global pandemic and multiple historic political uprisings. How are we to identify and be in solidarity with the revolutionary subjects of our day? What kinds of organizations do we need at this time and what role can Marxist-Humanists play in articulating a theory of organization that meets this moment? It is abundantly clear that the masses are eschewing vanguardism and hierarchical organizations for smaller, more horizontal democratic female and queer-led models. As we theorize about organization, we should consider Dunayevskaya’s insights when asked to address the question of decentralization within the Womens’ liberation movement. She writes, “ the demand for small informal groups is not to be disregarded as if it were a question of not understanding the difference between small and large, and that large is better. Nor can this demand be answered in our bureaucratic age by attributing to Women’s liberation a deep-down belief in private property, petty home industry, and “of course” Mother Earth. Nothing of the kind. The demand for decentralization involves the two pivotal questions of the day; and, I might add, questions of tomorrow, because we are not going to have a successful revolution unless we do answer them. They are, first, the totality and the depth of the necessary uprooting of this exploitative, sexist, racist society. Second, the dual rhythm of revolution: not just the overthrow of the old, but the creation of the new: not just the reorganization of objective, material foundations but the release of subjective personal freedom, creativity, and talents. In a word, there must be such appreciation of the movement from below, from practice, that we can never again let theory and practice get separated. That is the cornerstone” (Dunayevskaya [1982] 1991:108)

Over the past two years we’ve explored matters of identity, intersectionality, and other politics of recognition in our theorizing around this issue. In the past I have suggested, “instead of becoming frustrated with the consciousness-raising and empowerment projects some identity-based movements have turned to, we should position ourselves to do the theoretical and practical labor required to be in critical solidarity with Black and Brown movements.” I have also proposed that these projects be taken on by theorizing around the psychic components of racialized and gendered oppression while seeking out ways to move incomplete articulations of intersectionality and emerging movements to a place of radical criticality. In addition, my fellow IMHO colleague Lilia Monzó (2019) asks us to move Dunayevskaya’s concept of Black masses as vanguard to what she calls women of color as vanguard, making a case that women of color subjects are currently the force and reason for revolution. Others in our organization like Peter Hudis (2019) propose developing an intersectional historical materialist framework that can theorize not only around Marxist concepts but also take on the issues of dehumanization produced by racialized and gendered domination under capitalism. These are important additions to Marxist-Humanist thought as much of the revolutionary movement work we see today is being led by Black, Brown and Indigenous women and queer folks in the United States who are wrestling with similar questions.

Dunayevskaya always had a long and dialectical view of history and would systematically relate capital’s latest crisis to mass movements and issues concerning people of color. She did so by developing Marxist-Humanism, a philosophy that reanimates the totality of Marx’s Marxism and that posits alienation at the heart of the dehumanization we suffer under capital. She remained situated in the struggles of the day, paying special attention to the activities of the Black dimension which she identified as historically being an important force for liberatory movement. Always working from Marx’s concept of revolution in permanence, she also posed the question “what comes next,” taking care to articulate the potential to produce new humanisms during each revolutionary struggle. As the Marxist left continues to struggle when it comes to issues of race and gender and as identity-based intersectional theories continue to be relevant we are also noticing a liberatory politics emerge from below as people try to make sense of their everyday experiences. Our task as revolutionaries is to project better alternatives that take the everyday material conditions of folks seriously, to be in critical solidarity with the revolutionary subjects of our day and to “recognize that there is a movement from practice — from the actual struggles of the day — to theory; and, second, to work out the method whereby the movement from theory can meet it.” (Dunayevskaya [1965] 2012:73)

Several excerpts of this report can be found in an upcoming book chapter titled, Raya Dunayevskaya on Race, Resistance and Revolutionary Humanism


REFERENCES

8 Can’t Wait Platform: https://8cantwait.org/

8 to Abolition Platform: https://www.8toabolition.com/

Brenan, Megan. “Amid Pandemic, Confidence in Key U.S. Institutions Surges”. Gallup, August, 2020: https://news.gallup.com/poll/317135/amid-pandemic-confidence-key-institutions-surges.aspx

Crabtree, Steve. “Most Americans Say Policing Needs ‘Major Changes”. Gallup, July 2020: https://news.gallup.com/poll/315962/americans-say-policing-needs-major-changes.aspx

Duda, John. Towards the horizon of abolition: A conversation with Mariam. The Next System Project. 2017: https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/towards-horizon-abolition-conversation-mariame-kaba

Dunayevskaya, Raya. [1963] 2003. American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard. Chicago: News and Letters Publications.

Dunayevskaya, Raya. Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm. [1965] 2012. The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx and Critical Theory, K. B. Anderson and R. Rockwell (Eds.). Maryland: Lexington.

Dunayevskaya, Raya. [1973] 2003. Philosophy and Revolution. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Dunayevskaya, Raya. [1982] 1991. Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s

Philosophy of Revolution. 2nd ed. Foreword by Adrienne Rich. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Dunayevskaya, Raya. “A Post-World War II View of Marx’s Humanism, 1843-83; Marxist-Humanism, 1950s-1980s,” News and Letters, 1986.

Grabar, Henry. What Workers Can Learn From “the Largest Lockout in U.S. History”

An interview with Sara Nelson, the flight attendant union head who called this week for a general strike. Slate, 2019.

Hudis, Peter. “How is an Intersectional Historical Materialism Possible?: The Dialectic of Race and Class Reconsidered”. Paper presented at. Toronto, April, 2019.

Krieger, Nancy et.al. “Trends in US deaths due to legal intervention among black and white men, age 15- 34 years, by county income level: 1960-2010”, Harvard Public Health Review, Vol. 3 Jan 2015.

Langer Research Associates. “63 Percent Support Black Lives Matter as Recognition of Discrimination Jumps”. July 21, 2020: https://www.langerresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/1214a3RaceandRights.pdf

Loewus, Liana. The Nation’s Teaching Force Is Still Mostly White and Female. Eduweek, 2017.

Lober, Brooke. “(re)Thinking Sex Positivity, Abolition Feminism, and the #MeToo Movement: Opportunity for a New Synthesis”. Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics, January 2018.

Mansfield, Maureen. “What is Abolitionist Feminism, and Why Does it Matter?”, The Progressive Policy Think Tank,2018. https://www.ippr.org/juncture-item/what-is-abolitionist-feminism-and-why-does-it-matter

McKittrick, Katherine. ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

Monzó, Lilia D. 2019. A Revolutionary Subject: Pedagogy of Women of Color and Indigeneity. New York: Peter Lang.

Osterweil, Vicky 2014. In Defense of Looting. The New Inquiry: https://thenewinquiry.com/in-defense-of-looting/

Samudzi, Zoe. White Witness and the Contemporary Lynching, 2020: https://newrepublic.com/article/157734/white-witness-contemporary-lynching

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. 2016. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket.

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. “We should still defund the police”. The New Yorker, August 14, 2020: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/defund-the-police.