This is not, of course, the first time the U.S. has lost a war—just recall Vietnam, Iraq 2003, and the twenty-year debacle in Afghanistan. The latter two developments, together with the rise of China and the failure of the U.S. economy to overcome the endemic problems that led to the 2008 recession, had indicated some time ago that the U.S. drive for single world domination was giving way to a multipolar one in which the major powers focus on their immediate spheres of influence (China with East Asia, Russia with Ukraine, the Baltics, and the Caucasus, and the U.S. with the Western Hemisphere). Trump himself seemed to embrace this reality by ending military aid to Ukraine, promising to end the “forever wars” in the Middle East, and threatening Canada, Greenland, Cuba, and anyone else in what he calls the U.S.’s “backyard.”

But while the U.S. has lost its war on Iran, that does not mean it marks a victory for the Iranian people, who are now suffering from a regime even more repressive than the one that massacred thousands of protestors in January and an economic crisis greatly exacerbated (though by no means created) by the war itself.

So, where does this multipolar world of competing centers of capitalist power leave us now in the aftermath of U.S. imperialism’s defeat against Iran? As the world fractures into respective spheres of influence, each of the leading states will work to exert ever-greater control upon them.

This is clearly indicated by Trump’s designs on Latin America. Faced with the Iran quagmire, he is moving headlong against Cuba—a target closer to home and far more vulnerable. After kidnapping its close ally Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela on January 3, the U.S. has blockaded oil and other goods from reaching Cuba. Coming on top of over 60 years of crushing sanctions, it has produced the gravest threat facing the country since the 1959 Revolution. Even before the oil blockade, between 2018 and 2025, Cuba’s infant mortality rate—once one of the lowest in the world—skyrocketed by 148%, and at least two million left the country. Today the situation is far worse: power is available only a few hours a day, schools and hospitals are barely functioning, and malnutrition looms in some areas. The Cuban people are remaining vigilant despite these conditions, even as its government agreed (in June) under U.S. pressure to adopt a package of 175 free-market reforms aimed at the privatization of its economy.

Regardless of how one evaluates the Cuban government’s long-standing claim of having established “socialism” in the early 1960’s by nationalizing property, one thing is clear—it successfully resisted six decades of efforts by the U.S. to deny its right to self-determination and political independence. That by itself is a remarkable accomplishment, even with the many limitations of the Castro regime and its successor. And that is precisely what Trump is now seeking to destroy, as part of imposing his imperial ukase upon Latin America as a whole.

One might expect Mexico to come to Cuba’s assistance, since it shipped tens of thousands of barrels of oil per month there for years. But it has yet to do so, no doubt over fear of Trump’s response. Nor has Lula’s government in Brazil provided significant assistance; he is facing a difficult re-election against the far Right and is reluctant to risk his political capital. If not for the brave actions of independent activists leading aid convoys, Cuba would be left standing alone. This applies to Russia as well: it sent Cuba 700,000 barrels of much-needed oil on March 31, but a second promised shipment was re-routed (without explanation) to South America on May 29.

This is one of the signposts of our multipolar world. Putin is not interested in ruffling Trump’s feathers over Cuba, since what matters to him is his effort to impose Russian neocolonial domination upon his sphere of influence—first and foremost Ukraine. Trump has shown he is fine with that so long as he can get part of the cut by gaining access to Ukraine’s oil and mineral deposits. Hence, it has been over a year since Ukraine obtained U.S. military assistance, even as it is subjected to intensifying missile and drone attacks on civilian areas. But Ukraine has not buckled: thanks to its home-made drones directed at Russian oil refineries and facilities, it has managed to reduce Russia’s oil exports by 40% this year. During the same time span, Russia gained a mere 0.8% of Ukrainian territory at the cost of 400,000 casualties.

Nevertheless, few regimes have gained more from the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran than Putin’s. The doubling of oil prices since its outbreak has added tens of billions of dollars to Russia’s war-fueled economy, enabling it (at least for now) to reverse the fall in revenues produced by four years of continuous combat. At the same time, it has enabled him to ignore calls to engage in negotiations to end hostilities. But while discontent with Zelensky’s government is growing in Ukraine—in large part due to his effort to introduce changes in the labor code that would restrict workers’ rights and promote the privatization of industries—the vast majority of Ukrainians remain opposed to being forced to concede to Russia’s occupation of 20% of their country (which Trump has called for on numerous occasions).

In an act of solidarity between national liberation struggles, in April a group of Ukrainian activists joined the Global Sumud Flotilla Mission to Gaza. “Our journey is not about geopolitics,” Nina Potarska stated. “We are here to remind the world that international law and human rights are universal principles. As Ukrainians, we understand how occupation affects civilian life—through control over infrastructure, mobility and access to basic necessities.” Andrii Movchan added, “As Ukrainians—representatives of a nation resisting aggression and occupation—we cannot stand aside. We cannot leave the Palestinian people alone.”[3]

Such acts of solidarity can hardly be expected of China, which remains the world’s second largest importer of Israeli products (it is the largest exporter of goods to Israel, totaling $16 billion last year).[4] Its primary sphere of interest is East Asia, especially Taiwan, whose unofficial independent status it finds totally unacceptable. Moreover, as China finds its access to the U.S. markets threatened by Trump’s tariffs, it is looking for opportunities to obtain consumers of its surplus product elsewhere—and above all in East and Central Asia. It can hardly do otherwise, since China’s much-touted economic growth depends on suppressing workers’ wages; that attracts foreign capital, but it also leads to a lack of sufficient domestic demand to absorb the surplus product. China is therefore highly dependent on exporting its surplus overseas.[5] Countries in Asia (especially Vietnam) are being increasingly flooded with Chinese-made goods, raising concerns about their ability to sustain the growth of their own domestic industries.

And where does Africa fit into this new multipolar world? The Trump administration is disengaging from the continent on virtually every front. It has drastically reduced foreign aid and the funding of programs to combat disease, climate change, and natural disasters. Countries in southern Africa depended on the U.S. for over 75% of the funds needed to treat HIV infection and AIDS. That money (as well as for an assortment of other illnesses) is now gone. Modest estimates are that this will result in the deaths of three to four million Africans. There are already signs that this has made it harder to control the outbreak of the Ebola virus. China, on the other hand, is doing everything except disengaging. It has become the primary foreign investor in Africa, spending tens of billions of dollars in building ports, road and mines to facilitate the export of the continent’s raw materials to China that it uses to fuel its insatiable drive to accumulate capital. As a result, much of Africa remains tethered to a neocolonial extractivist project that primarily benefits the capitalist metropole—in which China is a central player.

As for the European Union, it is caught between a rock and a hard place—with little consensus at this point as to how to define its place in this multipolar world. Its days of serving as the handmaiden of U.S. imperialism may be over, especially after it earned Trump’s scorn in refusing to provide full-throttled support for the war on Iran. Hence, the dissolution of NATO further down the line cannot be totally discounted. But neither can the EU move closer to Russia or China, since Russia is waging war on Ukraine and sending drones over the borders of several EU and NATO members to test their mettle, while China is competing with it over their share of manufacturing and digital technology in the world economy. Many EU countries are trying to carve out an independent position by massively increasing military spending—at the cost of imposing serious cuts in social services and foreign aid; the UK has recently reduced medical and health assistance to the most impoverished countries in Africa by 40%.

Clearly, this multipolar world is not a safer one. None of these poles of global capital represent an alternative to U.S. imperialism. Let us recall that what brought down the international socialist movement at the outbreak of World War I in 1914 was that most of its leading figures (and many of its rank and file) supported one or another pole of capital as the “lesser evil.” Today we don’t have a powerful socialist international that can betray us, but the task of not being diverted from upholding a universal vision of human emancipation remains with us.

Part 2: The Nature and Depth of the Challenges Facing Today’s Social Movements

These shifts in global politics are integrally connected to the rise of the neofascist far Right, which has come to power in some countries and threatens to in others. This is especially the case in the U.S., where the administration is waging a relentless war against immigrants, women’s rights, trans rights and the LGBTQ+ movement, and Blacks, Latinas, and other minorities—while providing free rein for capital to wage a relentless assault on the working class. Trump & Co. has dismantled dozens of government agencies, fired hundreds of thousands of civil servants, drastically cut funding for science, health, and education, targeted universities and law firms that do not bow to its will, and gutted policies to combat global warming and environmental destruction. It has done so while running roughshod over the Democratic Party, which with a few exceptions has been unable to mount even a feeble resistance to Trump’s onslaught.

At the core of what he has done (and plans to—more is to come) is an attack on what remains of liberal democracy. His effort to impose single-party and indeed one-man rule characterizes everything from suppressing free speech to violating court orders that get in the way of deporting immigrants, and from undermining voting rights to creating a $1.8 billion slush fund for instigators of the January 6, 2021 riot to prevent the transfer of power. In doing so, he has the active support of tens of millions who blindly follow his dictates regardless of the consequences. It indicates that the movement he leads will remain a major threat long after he leaves office.

So, how can all this be happening? And why is it a global neofascist threat, as in India, where Modi has just cemented his drive for single-party rule with its victory in the West Bengal elections, once controlled by the communist left; in Brazil, where Bolsonaro’s supporters are making a determined effort to return to power; in El Salvador, where Nayib Bukele’s concentration camps (aka “prisons”) has won Trump’s admiration—not to mention such genocidal regimes as Putin’s Russia and Israel, where the best its left of center “opposition” can muster is to attack Netanyahu for not being harsh enough in its attacks on Lebanon and Iran. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s far-Right Reform Party in the UK may soon emerge as the largest party, Le Pen’s National Rally could win the next French presidential election, and Germany’s Alternative for Deutschland, despite its neo-Nazi roots, continues to gain popular support.

So, again, what explains this? It’s a huge question that I don’t pretend to answer, but here is some food for thought. As I see it, two seemingly distinct but related phenomena may be at play.

One is the problem of ensuring the expanded reproduction of capital in an era defined by declining rates of profit. As we all know, capitalism is based on a drive for profit maximization. It can no more put it aside than a cancer cell can convince itself to stop growing. Capital is driven to expand because it embodies a peculiar social form of labor—labor whose value is determined by the average amount of socially necessary labor time it takes to produce a commodity. Marx called it “abstract labor.” If it takes, on average, three hours to produce a widget, any labor expended above three hours does not produce value (it is a wasted cost of production). This is why we are always pressured to work faster and harder. But what happens when a new technology lowers the amount of time that is necessary to produce a commodity? All must adhere to the new (abstract) average, otherwise less profit is earned. In sum, augmenting profit entails lowering the ratio of living to dead labor (constant capital, machines).

This poses a problem, since the factor that generates greater masses of profit generates a tendency toward a decline in the rate of profit, for living labor is the source of all value. In the 1970s, even some bourgeois economists noticed a substantial decline in profit rates. With the global economic recession of 2008, this tendency again came to the fore. Capitalists responded, as they always do, by trying to restore profitability by investing in new labor-saving devices. But that reproduces the problem since it further lowers the relative proportion of living to dead labor—which leads to a further decline in profit rates. It’s like a treadmill one can never get off.

There is an added factor—introducing new technologies aimed at producing more in less time has deleterious effects on nature. Just think of the environmental damage caused by data centers built to replace software engineers with AI. Think of the carbon imprint it leaves from the energy needed to run them. Think of the impact it has on global warming. And yet, capital cannot step back from this self-destructive path, since it is programmed to adhere to the law of value.

In sum, capitalism is riven by a contradiction: it is driven by the endless pursuit of profit, which entails disregarding any natural limits to its infinite expansion; yet at the same time, it keeps running up against social and environmental barriers that threaten its realization.

So, what does this have to do with the neofascist threat? As barriers to profit maximization intensify while capital undermines its conditions of existence through environmental destruction, a section of the global elite senses the system no longer offers the golden future they once cherished. But they still believe in profit maximization! They respond by parasitically siphoning off as much wealth as they can for themselves before the ship goes down.

The second phenomenon, which I believe is converging with the above, is that our increasingly high-tech world produces astonishing levels of social isolation and anxiety. In response to increasing atomization, as directly social labor is replaced by indirectly social labor, many attempt to find solace in an imaginary world free of such transformations. The faster things change, the more the wish to hold onto what seems to some to be changeless—racial hierarchy, gender assigned at birth, woman’s role as handmaiden to man, etc. All sorts of fundamentalisms —religious, racial, and gendered—define the standpoint of those who recoil from the alienation of modern life without understanding that what causes it is the capitalist mode of production.

Trump, as I see it (probably without realizing it), has brought these two phenomena together, which may help explain how the MAGA Republicans (as well as many other like-minded tendencies outside the U.S.) have managed to gain mass support for an agenda that materially profits a small number of misanthropic billionaires.

Nevertheless, an active debate is occurring on the Left as to whether there really is a fascist threat. Based on the history of fascism in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, Jeff Webber and Todd Gordon have argued (as did Leon Trotsky at the time) that fascism emerges in response to a revolutionary threat to the capitalist class. In his talk at a plenary of the Historical Materialism Conference in London last November, Webber stated that since no such threat exists today, given the weakness of the labor movement, “fascist movements in the U.S. are neither the most immediate authoritarian threat, nor do they define the Trump government.”[6]

I took the floor in the discussion after Webber’s talk by pointing out that while there is no imminent threat of proletarian revolution, the capitalists have and are facing mass movements against racism, sexism, and homophobia, most recently with the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, which involved over 26 million. The MAGA Republicans are determined to erase from memory the entire history of such struggles, reaching as far back as the Civil Rights Movement. Since class relations in the U.S. have always been structured and mediated by racial determinants, any forward movement in the class struggle has depended upon the gains made in fighting white supremacy. However, to reverse these gains requires tremendous force and violence, since they have become embedded in the social consciousness of so many through more than 60 years of struggle. That, in my mind, explains the fascist threat. Fascism isn’t always a response to an imminent threat posed by the class struggle; in certain contexts, it emerges in response to the gains made by struggles that make successful class struggle possible.

These considerations, as you may notice, do not represent any insight on my part. They flow directly from the Marxist-Humanist conception that “Black Masses as Vanguard” of U.S. history and that racism is the “Achilles heel” of American “civilization.”[7]

Few can doubt that Trump and his allies have focused with laser beam intensity on dismantling every gain made in fighting racism and sexism from the 1960s onward. It is evident in the attacks on “wokism,” the gutting of programs that benefit minorities, and the draconian assault against immigrants. Especially egregious is the decision of the Supreme Court majority to scuttle Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which now makes it illegal to redraw electoral maps to account for racial discrimination. By approving the efforts of Republicans to split Black-majority districts into different pieces, Black political representation will suffer a massive blow while effectively handing the Republican Party single-party control of the South. Jamie Bouie rightly states, “A system in which political parties can rewrite the rules to keep themselves in power indefinitely is a system in which, barring a tsunami of opposition, they cannot lose—is not a democracy in any meaningful sense. But that is where the U.S. is headed, if it’s not already there, thanks in large part to [Supreme Court Justice] Roberts and his majority, who have enabled the worst tendencies of their co-partisans in the Republican Party.” [8]

The Court’s decision is not alone an attack on Black political representation, but on the laws, rules, and stipulations that made America a democratic nation. It was not truly one before 1965—any more than Israel is one today. Democracy for one race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or ideology is not democracy. It always is and forever shall be for those who are different. “Make America Great Again” is all about returning the U.S. to where the South (and a good deal of the North) was prior to the 1965 Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.

The year 1965 was also a watershed for another historic piece of legislation—the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act, which abolished national origin quotas based on race and ethnicity. The 1924 iteration of these restrictions limited the number of visas to 2% of those residing in the U.S. as of the 1890 Census, effectively preventing Africans, Asians, and many eastern and southern Europeans, especially Jews, from entering the country. The 1965 revocation of those restrictions made it possible for tens of millions of people of color from the global south to come to the U.S. in the ensuing decades—to the point that today, they constitute 85% of those born outside the U.S. Trump was determined to reverse this from the first day he announced his candidacy for president in 2015, and over the last year, it has been fully set into motion.

Trump’s militarization of attacks on immigrants is so breathtaking that it is easy to forget that ridding the country of as many documented as well as undocumented immigrants as possible is for him not an end-in-itself but rather a means to an end—the end being to make America white again. But that cannot be accomplished so long as the vestiges of liberal democracy remain intact. This is why the attack on all levels of democratic life and governance is so intense.

What he did not anticipate is the response to the aptly named “Operation Midway Blitz” as ICE goons terrorized whole areas of Chicago, Minneapolis, and other cities. Thousands of residents in Chicago and even more in Minneapolis came into the streets to hand out whistles, provide free rides to and from work and school for those too fearful to go outside, provide mutual aid to immigrants and their families, and work collaboratively with neighbors to protest ICE’s presence and actions. Immigrant rights groups were of course involved, but no party or single organization was responsible—it was a spontaneous outpouring aimed at keeping neighbors safe. Many involved in these actions told me that this was the first time they had gotten to know their neighbors, generating a vibrant sense of community and comradeship. Indirect social relations got subsumed for a time by direct person to person solidarity.

The impact of the anti-ICE protests has been remarkable—today the majority of Americans favor its abolition, contrary to Republicans and many mainstream Democratic Party officials who have yet to do so. This upsurge of opposition has a great deal to do with the growing number of candidates from the democratic socialist left winning primaries and elections around the country, most notably in New York but also in Michigan and even Florida. The battle is just beginning, since there is little doubt that once the midterm elections are out of the way, the Administration will redouble its plans to send ICE agents into areas with large numbers of immigrants.

The emergence of spontaneous initiatives calling for the extension of democracy and a radical improvement in the economy and social life also characterizes the GenZ revolts in many parts of the world. Our Call for Convention discussed some of them—Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Timor-Leste, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Kenya. These mass uprisings were motivated by the lack of jobs, the high cost of living, corruption, government repression, and more.

At the same time, despite a widespread disillusionment with existing parties on both the Right and Left, more often than not old or new parties come to power in the aftermath of the revolts that remain tethered to the established order. An alternative to capitalism seems out of reach.

That’s a problem, since “leftism without a socialist destination is not a politics worth fighting for.”[9] Without it, we shuffle from one struggle and campaign to another without getting to articulate what we ultimately are for. But that makes it all more important to specify what constitutes a socialist destination. Does it mean a “fair” redistribution of the products of labor through an enhanced welfare state? Is it the abolition of the state through municipal forms of self-governing associations? Or does it mean state ownership of the means of production under the control of a single party that claims to speak for the working class?

One may ask, but why dwell on these seemingly abstract questions when we face such immediate threats as imperialist war, attacks on immigrants, taking away women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, and so much more? Isn’t doing so a luxury we cannot afford at a time like this? My response is that one’s implicit or explicit view of socialism directly impacts everyday politics, even when that is not self-evident. If socialism means a fair redistribution of the products of labor, we’re likely to follow social democratic politics; if it means municipal forms of self-governing associations, we’re likely to follow anarchist politics; and if it means nationalized property plan under the control of a single party state, we’re likely to follow neo-Stalinist politics that presumes the only imperialist threat in the world comes from the U.S. or NATO. We need not less but more discussion of what socialism means as a liberatory project, as we work together in united actions to more effectively take on the powers that be.

If the question of what constitutes a viable socialist destination is left aside, socialism or communism will be defined by those who stop short of a total uprooting of existing society. We see plenty of evidence of this today, with the re-emergence of neo-Stalinist and campist tendencies.

Their resurgence is in part a reaction against those drawn into the Democratic Party and social democracy in recent years, which often involved taking compromised positions on Palestine, defunding police, and trans rights. But campism hardly poses an alternative, since neo-Stalinist and related “Marxist-Leninist” tendencies share with social democrats an impoverished vision of socialism, based on an “equitable” redistribution of surplus value. The difference is that one favors a parliamentary route to achieving it, the other a revolutionary one. But neither projects a concept of socialism in which human relations no longer assume the form of relations between things.

One need not be either a campist or a social democratic to exhibit such tendencies. For example, Søren Mau, author of a valuable study of Marxist theory, Mute Compulsion, has published an essay “Communism is Freedom,” which states: “The fundamental condition of communism is that the basic conditions of the life of society are brought under democratic control. The state would be abolished, all private companies would be dissolved, and all privately owned means of production—land, buildings, machines, etc.—as well as the wealth of the upper class would be expropriated. At the same time, new institutions would need to be built, which would not only take over many of the functions we usually associate with the state today, but would also manage and oversee the economy…under communism, decisions about what to produce would be taken democratically.” All very good. But he also writes, “Under capitalism, a society’s economic activities are organized according to one single principle: profit… communism doesn’t consist in replacing this principle with another economic principle, but rather in enabling democratic decision-making about how our shared activities and resources should be organized.”[10]

This is a rather odd statement, since profit is the phenomenal expression of surplus value—and surplus value is the portion of value created by workers which exceeds the value of their means of subsistence. Value itself is generated by subjecting workers to the hegemon of socially necessary labor time, a social average that operates behind their backs and is completely outside of their control. So how can retaining the principle of profit maximization be compatible with the “democratic decision-making” that he rightly says is central to communism?

Part 3: The Nature and Depth of the Challenges Facing Our Organization

In the 17 years since we established the International Marxist-Humanist Organization, we can proudly say we have achieved a lot. We formed the organization in response to a crisis in Marxist-Humanism, when its predecessor, News and Letters Committees, recoiled from developing the philosophy for our time and instead reduced it to a sterile dogma. We also did something very new in forming our group as an international organization so that Marxist-Humanists who are dispersed around the world can come together as a philosophic nucleus to together develop our ideas.

Since 2009, we have created a body of theoretical work that is a considerable accomplishment for an organization of our size. Books by our members include Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, Marx on Gender and the Family, Marx at the Margins, Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads, a translation and commentary on Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism, The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism, The Radical Humanism of Erich Fromm, Frantz Fanon, Philosopher of the Barricades, A Revolutionary Subject: Pedagogy of Women of Color and Indigeneity, and more. We have also published a website with hundreds of political and theoretical articles (as well as poetry and podcasts), participated in numerous conference and movement events, and been active in various protests and political campaigns.

Nevertheless, we have a way to go before we can claim to be an organization that goes beyond holding zoom meetings and reading groups by engaging in ongoing political struggles that builds the organization as an active force in the Left. And we have a lot of work to do to ensure that the IMHO continues its existence—no easy task given our small numbers and the nature of the political situation facing us. We therefore proposed that this Convention focus above all on how we can build our organization, what our success and failures have been, what experiences have you had that we can build on, what are we not doing that we should. We want to discuss how we can become a more noticeable and attractive force in the movement.

One of our comrades in the pre-Convention discussion period made a great point when he said too many today look at humanism as a “dead letter.” He asked what happens to the effort to develop a socialist alternative when humanism is left aside. ItIt’s a great question for us all to ponder—again, not just among ourselves, but taking it out to the movement. In that spirit, I want to conclude with some brief comments on how the history of Marxist-Humanism addresses it.’s a great question, so here are just a few preliminary thoughts in response.

The step that led to the development of Marxist-Humanism was Raya Dunayevskaya’s theory that the Soviet Union under Stalin (and the world economy more generally) was state-capitalist. She developed the theory of state-capitalism in the early 1940’s as the co-leader of the Johnson-Forest Tendency along with C.L.R. James. The orthodox Trotskyists (following Trotsky himself) held that Russia was not socialist but still a workers’ state, since it had abolished private ownership of the means of production. It may seem rather absurd to claim that a state in which workers had no power was still a workers’ state. But in their view, capitalism cannot exist without private property, so the USSR could not be capitalist.

This indicated that even anti-Stalinist Marxists emphasized changes in property forms over the transformation of human relations, beginning at the point of production but not ending there. This meant their concept of socialism could not accommodate humanism. The same was true of a different wing of Trotskyism, led by Max Shachtman and Hal Draper, that denied Russia was a worker’s state but held it was not capitalist since it had abolished private property. They claimed the USSR was a novel form of society not anticipated by Marx, which they called bureaucratic collectivism. This too placed property forms above the transformation of human relations even as they emphasized that a workers’ state requires that the working class have has real political power. Their concept of socialism also could not accommodate humanism.

Dunayevskaya had not developed Marxist-Humanism as of this point; she was still in the orbit of Trotskyism. But in the mid-1940s she discovered Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts (unknown in the English-speaking world at the time), where Marx attacked “crude communism” for presuming that replacing private with collective property constitutes an exit from capitalism. In doing so, he held that the negation of private property is a necessary but insufficient step towards liberation that must itself be negated by abolishing alienated labor and alienated man/woman relations. In doing so he called his philosophy “a thoroughgoing naturalism or humanism.” Dunayevskaya took note and began to move outside the orbit of Trotskyism.

In the late 1940s the British Trotskyist Tony Cliff also concluded the USSR was a state-capitalist society. However, he wanted nothing to do with the 1844 Manuscripts or humanism (let alone the theory of alienation). So that too meant that his concept of socialism could not accommodate humanism. The same was true of other anti-Stalinists who came to a state-capitalist position whom Dunayevskaya tried to work with, such as the Italian Communist Bordiga and a number of Japanese Marxists. None of them succeeded in integrating gender and race into their critique of capital. And by the 1950’s C.L.R. James—who did focus on race and gender—likewise recoiled from humanism; until the end of his life, he identified himself as a Marxist-Leninist.

Everyone on the Left has a concept of socialism; it’s just that most don’t take the trouble to articulate it, and when they do, many keep their distance from Marx’s humanism. Later figures like Althusser and Foucault made a career of it. We are devoted to bringing humanism back into socialism, insofar as we proceed from a body of thought that is grounded in Marx and Hegel while being attentive to such “new passions and new forces” as workers battling automation, women fighting sexism, Blacks combating racism, and youth rejecting an alienated world they did not make.

So, what happens when humanism is taken out of socialism? Marx’s humanism was not an abstract philosophic anthropology a la Feuerbach but rather grounded in a specific understanding of human capacities—the capacity for conscious, purposeful creation, which he called humanity’s “species-being” or species-essence. Marx’s concept, which pervades not just his early writings but also his mature work in Das Kapital, provides the standard for determining whether or not a social formation facilitates human flourishing. Wage labor, alienated labor, and slave labor clearly stand condemned when measured by such a concept. So does alienated relations between the sexes, which Marx termed the “most fundamental” of human relations. Even though Marx did not have as much to say about racism and sexism as the labor process (though he had more to say than some presume), Marx’s specific conception of human capacities and the need for their realization provides a standard for engaging such problems today.

But what happens when we are bereft of such a standard? Without a universal standard of critique, revolutionary politics gets reduced to a struggle for power that all too often ends up replacing one form of domination for another.

Today we are heirs to the tragic rejection of this conception by those on the Left who do not accept Marx’s concept of species-being. To be sure, there are plenty of bad essentialisms — “women are naturally inferior to men,” “Blacks are naturally inferior to whites,” “Gender is defined by the male-female binary at birth,” etc. And plenty of bad leftwing ones—as in Leopold Senghor’s comment that “emotion is as Negro as Reason is Greek.” There are bad socialisms, but we do not for that reason reject socialism. That there are bad essentialisms is likewise no reason for rejecting Marx’s concept of the human essence.

One expression of turning away from such a standpoint of critique is campism—the notion that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. It is displayed in those who reject support for Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination while supporting Palestine, or those who oppose the struggle for a free Palestine while supporting Ukraine. It is displayed in those who correctly take issue with police abuse and racism in the U.S. but refrain from criticizing the Chinese state’s use of both in its treatment of Uighurs and other national minorities within its borders. I am not, of course, presuming that one has to be a Marxist-Humanist to take issue with campism. But without a philosophic foundation for one’s critique of campism, we are left chasing one example of it after another in purely political terms, without getting to the root of the problem—let alone posing an alternative to a problem that arises again and again within the revolutionary movement.

What does this have to do with organization? Dunayevskaya’s insistence on the inseparability of socialism and humanism led her to reject the traditional Leninist notion of a vanguard party in favor of a committee form of organization that emphasizes the role of spontaneous struggles. But that leaves open the question: what is the role of small groups like the IMHO—do they have to exist? What is lost if they don’t exist? And why do they always seem to crop up and be around, even as spontaneous struggles come and go?

Here is what she wrote in her very last public statement before her death on June 9, 1987:
“I wasn’t interested either in the mass party, which the masses will build, or in the elitist party, which we definitely oppose, but happens to a small group ‘like us’ who know that nothing can be done without the masses, and [we] are with them, but such small groups of theoreticians always seem to be around too. So, what is the objectivity which explains their presence…”[11]

She is no longer here, so it is up to us to answer the question—not just in theory, but in practice, by demonstrating the objectivity of the presence of our organization in today’s battle of ideas, political protests, and work in united fronts with like-minded groups. Too often we have acted as if our job is to put out the theory and somehow “the masses” will pick it up at some point and forge revolutionary praxis on its basis. And by “we” I am referring not just to our group but to the entire history of our tendency. That standpoint, I wish to argue, doesn’t cut it. We need to get more involved in the daily grind of the struggle, with our ideas in hand. We have the potential to do it, especially because of the youth present who have come to us in recent years. If Marxist-Humanism is to survive, we will need to step up and show the world why socialism without humanism isn’t a goal worth fighting for.

[1] Ghada Abdulfattah, “Gaza’s Rubble is the Grave of Our Future,” The New York Times, April 12, 2026.

[2] Rafeef Ziadeh, “Development as Erasure: Palestine, Genocide and ‘Reconstruction,’” Development and Change, September 2025.

[3] Ukrainians Join Global Sumud Flotilla Mission to Gaza, https://mailchi.mp/ukraine-solidarity.eu/ukrainians-join-global-sumud-flotilla-mission-to-gaza?e=7e4537cd28

[4] “Which countries trade the most with Israel and what do they buy and sell?” Al Jazeera, May 22, 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/22/which-countries-trade-the-most-with-israel-and-what-do-they-buy-and-sell

[5] For more on this, see Yasheng Huang, “How China Forgot Karl Marx: The Chinese Economy Runs on Labor Exploitation,” Reuters, March 23, 2026.

[6] Todd Gordon and Jeffery R. Webber, “Trump 2.0, Fascism, and the Problem of Order Under Capitalism,” Historical Materialism Online, January 2026. See also their “Water on the Brain: Trump 2.0 and the Crisis of Liberal Rule,” Spectre, June 24, 2025, https://spectrejournal.com/water-on-the-brain/

[7] See Raya Dunayevskaya, American Civilization in Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard (Detroit: News and Letters, 1963).

[8] Jamie Bouie, “Living in an America That Doesn’t Exist,” The New York Times, May 10, 2026.

[9] Bhaskar Sunkara, “Rebuilding the Socialist Horizon,” Jacobin Online, May 28, 2026, https://jacobin.com/2026/05/socialism-soviet-planning-social-democracy

[10] Søren Mau, “Communism is Freedom,” Verso Blog Post, July 18, 2023, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/communism-is freedom?srsltid=AfmBOoqJm5JxL7nBFrM8GsMpdAQ6Ohx22v3Z8HRccox3I_CTgY_WnPK1

[11] Raya Dunayevskaya, “Presentation on the Dialectics of Philosophy and Organization,” in The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx,” eds. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2004), p. 7.

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