Summary: This is a revised and updated version of a report given to the July 2026 Convention of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By Peter Hudis<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Journal of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The hour of the barbarian is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, Discourse on Colonialism<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n August 22, 2026 – When Rosa Luxemburg proclaimed during the midst of World War I that the choice facing humanity was \u201csocialism or barbarism,\u201d she could not have known of the depth of barbarism that would engulf much of the world following her death, with the rise of Fascism, Stalinism, and Zionism. But we who have experienced the pain and horror unleashed by rampant racism, sexism, transphobia, political repression, war, and genocide since our last convention two years ago can identify with her sentiment all too well. At issue today is what contribution our organization can make to bringing forth a vision of socialist humanism for our life and times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Part 1: The Nature and Depth of the Ongoing Global Crisis<\/p>\n\n\n\n A pivotal test is our response to the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran. As we anticipated, Trump\u2019s Operation Epic Fury has become Operation Epic Failure. The despotic Iranian regime has not only survived the war but is in a much stronger position despite enduring intensive military assaults. In response, Trump tried to cut his losses by negotiating a provisional settlement with Iran; when that fell apart, he responded by imposing a series of economic sanctions on Iran, which are also likely to fail. Iran\u2019s relentless attacks on U.S. allies in the region and use of inexpensive drones to shut down the Strait of Hormuz has put Trump over a barrel: he can either renew the bloodshed with no assurance it will undo Iran\u2019s control of the Strait through which moves over 20% of the world\u2019s oil, or he can find a way to cut a deal and withdraw, which will be inevitably taken as an unmitigated victory for Iran. Either way, the war is having a devastating impact on the global economy, raising the specter of a severe downturn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is worth noting that absent from the Memorandum of Understanding that the U.S. and Iran signed earlier in the summer was any discussion of Gaza. And not just by the U.S. While Iran stipulated that an end to Israel\u2019s attacks on Hezbollah is an integral part of its tentative agreement with the U.S., it did not make ending Israel\u2019s continuing war on Gaza a precondition of negotiations. Nor has Russia or China cut links to Israel: bilateral trade between Russia and Israel has recovered to $3 billion (Israel did not join Western sanctions against it), and China remains one of Israel\u2019s largest trading partners, even as both maintain close links to Iran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Conditions in Gaza today remain truly horrific. Israeli troops have killed over 1,200 Palestinians since the fake \u201cceasefire\u201d started; virtually all the populace lives amid rubble, malnutrition is rampant, medical care severely compromised, and as if that is not bad enough, Israel has expanded its zone of control from 53% of Gaza to 70%. Ghada Abdulfattah reports,<\/p>\n\n\n\n It isn\u2019t just the sadness of what was demolished. Seeing endless piles of concrete brings a second layer of violence\u2014the violence of being forced to live with destruction. Rubble doesn\u2019t just destroy the past; it erases the future. It forces your mind to stop imagining, to stop thinking, to stop dreaming about life after today\u2026 How that war became something they carried through the rest of their lives. I am afraid that this war will remain living within us as it did with them. Every time I recall these stories, a few of many, I try my best to move on. But there\u2019s one question that comes back to me: not how will we survive war, but how will we learn to continue living after it.[1]<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of this is connected to Trump\u2019s and Netanyahu\u2019s plans for Gaza once they cleanse it of most of its Palestinian populace. Rafeef Ziadeh outlines the plans as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The so-called Gaza 2035 plan is Netanyahu\u2019s vision of [Gaza] transformed into a sanitized economic zone for fossil-fuel extraction, logistics and speculative urbanism\u2026it casts Gaza as an empty canvas for redevelopment through gas projects, \u201cgreen\u201d technologies and luxury real estate schemes, a colonial vision that openly fuses military occupation with capital accumulation. It proposes an interim custodial regime led by Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Morocco \u2026similar schemes, such as the so-called \u201cTrump Riviera\u201d plan, market Gaza\u2019s coastline as a resort hub for regional investors. Far from advancing recovery, these visions erase Palestinian political claims and integrate Gaza into a regional infrastructure of extraction, logistics and finance accelerated by the Abraham Accords, in which war, humanitarianism and development are woven together, transforming destruction into an investment frontier. In this configuration, reconstruction does not lead toward Palestinian self-determination, but embeds new architectures of control, deepens aid dependency and advances settler-colonial objectives through the legitimizing language of modernization and \u201ceconomic peace.\u201d[2]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump and his mis-named \u201cBoard of Peace\u201d for Gaza remain fully committed to these plans, despite recent tensions that have arisen between Israel and the U.S. over Trump\u2019s decision not to move ahead (at least for now) with plans to bomb Iran into oblivion. While Israel remains totally dependent on the support it has received for decades from both major political parties in the U.S., the desire of virtually every political party in Israel to keep the war against Iran going despite its cost to the U.S. economy has led Trump to mildly chastise Netanyahu. This should come as no surprise; despite claims to the contrary, it is the U.S. that pulls the strings when it comes to Israel, not the other way around. And there is no difference between the two when it comes to evicting as many Palestinians from Gaza as possible in the name of creating a \u201cTrump Riveria.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n For this and many other reasons, all roads lead to and from Gaza\u2014despite the studied indifference on the part of the major players in our new multipolar world. (Continued)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n This is not, of course, the first time the U.S. has lost a war\u2014just 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 \u201cforever wars\u201d in the Middle East, and threatening Canada, Greenland, Cuba, and anyone else in what he calls the U.S.\u2019s \u201cbackyard.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, where does this multipolar world of competing centers of capitalist power leave us now in the aftermath of U.S. imperialism\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is clearly indicated by Trump\u2019s designs on Latin America. Faced with the Iran quagmire, he is moving headlong against Cuba\u2014a 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\u2019s infant mortality rate\u2014once one of the lowest in the world\u2014skyrocketed 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Regardless of how one evaluates the Cuban government\u2019s long-standing claim of having established \u201csocialism\u201d in the early 1960\u2019s by nationalizing property, one thing is clear\u2014it 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One might expect Mexico to come to Cuba\u2019s 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\u2019s response. Nor has Lula\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is one of the signposts of our multipolar world. Putin is not interested in ruffling Trump\u2019s feathers over Cuba, since what matters to him is his effort to impose Russian neocolonial domination upon his sphere of influence\u2014first 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nevertheless, few regimes have gained more from the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran than Putin\u2019s. The doubling of oil prices since its outbreak has added tens of billions of dollars to Russia\u2019s 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\u2019s government is growing in Ukraine\u2014in large part due to his effort to introduce changes in the labor code that would restrict workers\u2019 rights and promote the privatization of industries\u2014the vast majority of Ukrainians remain opposed to being forced to concede to Russia\u2019s occupation of 20% of their country (which Trump has called for on numerous occasions).<\/p>\n\n\n\n In an act of solidarity between national liberation struggles, in April a group of Ukrainian activists joined the Global Sumud Flotilla Mission to Gaza. \u201cOur journey is not about geopolitics,\u201d Nina Potarska stated. \u201cWe are here to remind the world that international law and human rights are universal principles. As Ukrainians, we understand how occupation affects civilian life\u2014through control over infrastructure, mobility and access to basic necessities.\u201d Andrii Movchan added, \u201cAs Ukrainians\u2014representatives of a nation resisting aggression and occupation\u2014we cannot stand aside. We cannot leave the Palestinian people alone.\u201d[3]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such acts of solidarity can hardly be expected of China, which remains the world\u2019s 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\u2019s tariffs, it is looking for opportunities to obtain consumers of its surplus product elsewhere\u2014and above all in East and Central Asia. It can hardly do otherwise, since China\u2019s much-touted economic growth depends on suppressing workers\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s 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\u2014in which China is a central player.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As for the European Union, it is caught between a rock and a hard place\u2014with 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\u2019s 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\u2014at 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%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201clesser evil.\u201d Today we don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Part 2: The Nature and Depth of the Challenges Facing Today\u2019s Social Movements<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s rights, trans rights and the LGBTQ+ movement, and Blacks, Latinas, and other minorities\u2014while 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\u2019s onslaught.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the core of what he has done (and plans to\u2014more 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s supporters are making a determined effort to return to power; in El Salvador, where Nayib Bukele\u2019s concentration camps (aka \u201cprisons\u201d) has won Trump\u2019s admiration\u2014not to mention such genocidal regimes as Putin\u2019s Russia and Israel, where the best its left of center \u201copposition\u201d can muster is to attack Netanyahu for not being harsh enough in its attacks on Lebanon and Iran. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage\u2019s far-Right Reform Party in the UK may soon emerge as the largest party, Le Pen\u2019s National Rally could win the next French presidential election, and Germany\u2019s Alternative for Deutschland, despite its neo-Nazi roots, continues to gain popular support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, again, what explains this? It\u2019s a huge question that I don\u2019t pretend to answer, but here is some food for thought. As I see it, two seemingly distinct but related phenomena may be at play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2014labor whose value is determined by the average amount of socially necessary labor time it takes to produce a commodity. Marx called it \u201cabstract labor.\u201d 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2014which leads to a further decline in profit rates. It\u2019s like a treadmill one can never get off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is an added factor\u2014introducing 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2014racial hierarchy, gender assigned at birth, woman\u2019s role as handmaiden to man, etc. All sorts of fundamentalisms \u2014religious, racial, and gendered\u2014define the standpoint of those who recoil from the alienation of modern life without understanding that what causes it is the capitalist mode of production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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, \u201cfascist movements in the U.S. are neither the most immediate authoritarian threat, nor do they define the Trump government.\u201d[6]<\/p>\n\n\n\n I took the floor in the discussion after Webber\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These considerations, as you may notice, do not represent any insight on my part. They flow directly from the Marxist-Humanist conception that \u201cBlack Masses as Vanguard\u201d of U.S. history and that racism is the \u201cAchilles heel\u201d of American \u201ccivilization.\u201d[7]<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cwokism,\u201d 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, \u201cA 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\u2014is not a democracy in any meaningful sense. But that is where the U.S. is headed, if it\u2019s 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.\u201d [8]<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Court\u2019s 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\u2014any 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. \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The year 1965 was also a watershed for another historic piece of legislation\u2014the 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\u2014to 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump\u2019s 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\u2014the 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What he did not anticipate is the response to the aptly named \u201cOperation Midway Blitz\u201d 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\u2019s presence and actions. Immigrant rights groups were of course involved, but no party or single organization was responsible\u2014it 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The impact of the anti-ICE protests has been remarkable\u2014today 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2014Sri 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s a problem, since \u201cleftism without a socialist destination is not a politics worth fighting for.\u201d[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 \u201cfair\u201d 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s and LGBTQ+ rights, and so much more? Isn\u2019t doing so a luxury we cannot afford at a time like this? My response is that one\u2019s 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\u2019re likely to follow social democratic politics; if it means municipal forms of self-governing associations, we\u2019re likely to follow anarchist politics; and if it means nationalized property plan under the control of a single party state, we\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cMarxist-Leninist\u201d tendencies share with social democrats an impoverished vision of socialism, based on an \u201cequitable\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One need not be either a campist or a social democratic to exhibit such tendencies. For example, S\u00f8ren Mau, author of a valuable study of Marxist theory, Mute Compulsion, has published an essay \u201cCommunism is Freedom,\u201d which states: \u201cThe 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\u2014land, buildings, machines, etc.\u2014as 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\u2026under communism, decisions about what to produce would be taken democratically.\u201d All very good. But he also writes, \u201cUnder capitalism, a society\u2019s economic activities are organized according to one single principle: profit\u2026 communism doesn\u2019t 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.\u201d[10]<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is a rather odd statement, since profit is the phenomenal expression of surplus value\u2014and 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 \u201cdemocratic decision-making\u201d that he rightly says is central to communism?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Part 3: The Nature and Depth of the Challenges Facing Our Organization<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, Marx on Gender and the Family, Marx at the Margins, Late Marx\u2019s Revolutionary Roads, a translation and commentary on Marx\u2019s Critique of the Gotha Program, Raya Dunayevskaya\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2014no 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cdead letter.\u201d He asked what happens to the effort to develop a socialist alternative when humanism is left aside. ItIt\u2019s a great question for us all to ponder\u2014again, 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.\u2019s a great question, so here are just a few preliminary thoughts in response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The step that led to the development of Marxist-Humanism was Raya Dunayevskaya\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019 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\u2019 state. But in their view, capitalism cannot exist without private property, so the USSR could not be capitalist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019 state requires that the working class have has real political power. Their concept of socialism also could not accommodate humanism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s 1844 Manuscripts (unknown in the English-speaking world at the time), where Marx attacked \u201ccrude communism\u201d 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 \u201ca thoroughgoing naturalism or humanism.\u201d Dunayevskaya took note and began to move outside the orbit of Trotskyism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s C.L.R. James\u2014who did focus on race and gender\u2014likewise recoiled from humanism; until the end of his life, he identified himself as a Marxist-Leninist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everyone on the Left has a concept of socialism; it\u2019s just that most don\u2019t take the trouble to articulate it, and when they do, many keep their distance from Marx\u2019s 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 \u201cnew passions and new forces\u201d as workers battling automation, women fighting sexism, Blacks combating racism, and youth rejecting an alienated world they did not make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, what happens when humanism is taken out of socialism? Marx\u2019s humanism was not an abstract philosophic anthropology a la Feuerbach but rather grounded in a specific understanding of human capacities\u2014the capacity for conscious, purposeful creation, which he called humanity\u2019s \u201cspecies-being\u201d or species-essence. Marx\u2019s 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 \u201cmost fundamental\u201d 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\u2019s specific conception of human capacities and the need for their realization provides a standard for engaging such problems today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today we are heirs to the tragic rejection of this conception by those on the Left who do not accept Marx\u2019s concept of species-being. To be sure, there are plenty of bad essentialisms \u2014 \u201cwomen are naturally inferior to men,\u201d \u201cBlacks are naturally inferior to whites,\u201d \u201cGender is defined by the male-female binary at birth,\u201d etc. And plenty of bad leftwing ones\u2014as in Leopold Senghor\u2019s comment that \u201cemotion is as Negro as Reason is Greek.\u201d 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\u2019s concept of the human essence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One expression of turning away from such a standpoint of critique is campism\u2014the notion that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. It is displayed in those who reject support for Ukraine\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2014let alone posing an alternative to a problem that arises again and again within the revolutionary movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does this have to do with organization? Dunayevskaya\u2019s 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\u2014do they have to exist? What is lost if they don\u2019t exist? And why do they always seem to crop up and be around, even as spontaneous struggles come and go?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is what she wrote in her very last public statement before her death on June 9, 1987: She is no longer here, so it is up to us to answer the question\u2014not just in theory, but in practice, by demonstrating the objectivity of the presence of our organization in today\u2019s 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 \u201cthe masses\u201d will pick it up at some point and forge revolutionary praxis on its basis. And by \u201cwe\u201d I am referring not just to our group but to the entire history of our tendency. That standpoint, I wish to argue, doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t a goal worth fighting for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [1] Ghada Abdulfattah, \u201cGaza\u2019s Rubble is the Grave of Our Future,\u201d The New York Times, April 12, 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [2] Rafeef Ziadeh, \u201cDevelopment as Erasure: Palestine, Genocide and \u2018Reconstruction,\u2019\u201d Development and Change, September 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [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<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n [4] \u201cWhich countries trade the most with Israel and what do they buy and sell?\u201d 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<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n [5] For more on this, see Yasheng Huang, \u201cHow China Forgot Karl Marx: The Chinese Economy Runs on Labor Exploitation,\u201d Reuters, March 23, 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [6] Todd Gordon and Jeffery R. Webber, \u201cTrump 2.0, Fascism, and the Problem of Order Under Capitalism,\u201d Historical Materialism Online, January 2026. See also their \u201cWater on the Brain: Trump 2.0 and the Crisis of Liberal Rule,\u201d Spectre, June 24, 2025, https:\/\/spectrejournal.com\/water-on-the-brain\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n [7] See Raya Dunayevskaya, American Civilization in Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard (Detroit: News and Letters, 1963).<\/p>\n\n\n\n [8] Jamie Bouie, \u201cLiving in an America That Doesn\u2019t Exist,\u201d The New York Times, May 10, 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [9] Bhaskar Sunkara, \u201cRebuilding the Socialist Horizon,\u201d Jacobin Online, May 28, 2026, https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2026\/05\/socialism-soviet-planning-social-democracy<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI wasn\u2019t 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 \u2018like us\u2019 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\u2026\u201d[11]<\/p>\n\n\n\n