An affiliate of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization
The U.S. Marxist-Humanists organization, grounded in Marx’s Marxism and Raya Dunayevskaya’s ideas, aims to develop a viable vision of a truly new human society that can give direction to today’s many freedom struggles.
The crisis afflicting the anti-war movement goes deeper than the dominance of one or another “vanguard” party, though they have done plenty of damage. Rather, the problem is political and conceptual: a failure to recognize that the present moment calls for a total view, in which opposition to U.S. imperialism is made absolutely inseparable from a critique of reactionary Islamic fundamentalism and a projection of the kind of new, human society we are for — Editors
A two-fold disaster descended upon the world with the cruel and inhuman terrorist attack on New York and Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11. The first was the terrorist attack, which created a level of destruction and mayhem not seen in a U.S. city since the Civil War. The second is the Bush administration’s response to it by declaring a “state of war” and engaging in total militarization, at home and abroad.
A review of Georg Lukacs’s recently discovered manuscript, published as Tailism and the Dialectic. This previously unpublished book was written as a defense of Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness (1923) in response to attacks on it from within the Communist International by Abram Deborin and Laszlo Rudas. Originally composed in 1925 or 1926, Lukacs’s Tailism is somewhat of a disappointment in that it reduces the concept of subjectivity to a defense of the vanguard party. At the same time, Lukacs continues in muted form his earlier critique of Engels’s scientism and the book contains some brilliant insights on Hegel. It is unfortunate that philosophers like Slavoj Zizek and Trotskyist writers like Jonathan Rees have embraced Tailism uncritically today, using it to attack Rosa Luxemburg for having criticized Lenin’s single-party state — Editors
An analysis of the April 2001 rebellion in the Black community of Cincinnati in response to the police murder of a young man, Timothy Thomas. Though racial profiling, harassment, and murder of Blacks by the police have become an everyday fact of life in this country, Cincinnati included, the events that followed Thomas’ death were anything but normal. The ensuing events represented one of those unusual moments when the everyday becomes extraordinary, when what is considered normal suddenly becomes the object of discussion, argument, and critique. In response to Thomas’ death, Black Cincinnati exploded in the most massive urban upheaval since the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992 — Editors
Review of Peter McLaren, Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution– Editors
Is it possible to ameliorate the debilitating impact of globalization by forcing capital to become democratically accountable? Should we instead be aiming for the ABOLITION of capital? And if we favor the latter, how are we to project this concretely?
This article argues that while the limitations of Hegel’s political reconciliation with existing reality has long been evident, the depth of Marx’s challenge to capital cannot be fully comprehended, let alone restated for today, without a re-encounter with Marx’s rootedness in and transcendence of Hegel’s concept of absolute negativity. The need to go beyond critiques of private property and the market by projecting ground for the negation of capital creates a compulsion to return to Hegel at his most ‘abstract’ level — the Absolute.
This article originally appeared in Capital & Class, No. 70, Spring 2000
Read More...Marxist Humanism’s review of Chomsky’s book on the war in Kosovo, in which they criticise him for failing to make enough of Milosevic’s crimes.
Read More...This critique of Istvan Meszaros’s Beyond Capital (1995) interrogates Meszaros’s relationship to Lukács and to Hegel and Marx, while discussing the possibility of an emancipatory alternative to capitalism.
Originally appeared in Socialism & Democracy 11:1, January 1997
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Editors: Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell
The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx, and Critical Theory is published by Lexington Books (April 12, 2012)
This book presents for the first time the correspondence during the years 1954 to 1978 between the Marxist-Humanist and feminist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-87) and two other noted thinkers, the Hegelian Marxist philosopher and social theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) and the psychologist and social critic Erich Fromm (1900-80), both of the latter members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.
Authors: David Black and Chris Ford.
Newly published by Unkant, with a foreword by John McDonnell MP, appendices include Julian Harney’s The Tremendous Uprising and Edward Aveling’s memoir, George Julian Harney: A Straggler of 1848. Illustrated throughout.
“… in most histories of the British Labour movement the story of the Chartists has focused on the large-scale mobilisations of petitioners, the development of mass-circulation radical newspapers for working people and the promulgation of the tactic of the general strike, the ‘sacred month’ or ‘big holiday’. The Newport Uprising and other attempts to use physical, as opposed to moral force have been, if not hidden from history, then at least pretty heavily disguised.
