On “New Passions and New Forces”: Marxist-Humanism’s Break from Both Spontaneism and Vanguardism

In a April 18, 1976 piece, “Our Original Contribution to the Dialectic of the Absolute Idea as New Beginning:  In Theory, and Leadership, and Practice,” Dunayevskaya stated,

[A]t the height of Capital, we see [Marx] breaking up the Absolute Idea by speaking about the general absolute law of capitalist accumulation.  But its opposite was always taken to be only the unemployed army – and not the absolutely, totally opposite which we take it to be now.  Marx only mentioned it as ‘the new passions and new forces for the reconstruction of society.’  The negation of the negation at that point certainly wasn’t spelled out. Read the rest of this entry »

The concreteness of Marxist-Humanism

The author examines Dunayevskaya’s method of concretizing Marx and suggests that Hegel and Marx together spell out the material, conceptual ground for developing an alternative to capitalism today.
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Left Forum 2009: Concretizing Marx’s Alternative to Capitalism: A Marxist-Humanist Perspective

The Marxist-Humanist Initiative, along with the New SPACE, sponsored the panel “Concretizing Marx’s Alternative to Capitalism: A Marxist-Humanist Perspective” at the 2009 Left Forum. Below is the audio from that panel’s presentations and along with the discussion that took place afterwards.

Concretizing Marx’s Alternative To Capitalism: A Marxist-Humanist Perspective

Chair: Ray McKay
Presenters:
Joshua Howard – “Commodity Fetishism and Today’s Economic Crisis.”
Seth G. Weiss – “Silicon Valley Socialism: A Critical Examination of Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick’s Conception of Post-capitalist Society.”
Anne Jaclard – “One System, Two Moments”
Discussant: Andrew Kliman

Theorizing women’s liberation before, during and after the revolution

Talk by Anne Jaclard at the Anarchist Book Fair, New York City, April 12, 2008, on a panel entitled “Building a Movement Against Capitalism through Thinking of its Alternatives”

My title is tongue in cheek because I can’t possibly talk about all that in a few minutes. My point is to pose a theoretic challenge to feminists to work out the relationship of women’s liberation to the transformation of society as a whole. I think such a transformation of all human relations necessitates tearing up capitalism and starting a new society based on a new mode of production. My view is that the mode of production and women’s freedom are inextricably intertwined, not as if one were first and the other second, but as a revolutionary process of self-emancipation by massive movements of people before, during and after the overthrow of capitalism. And I argue that a philosophy of liberation—Marx’s humanism—is essential to this process. I can’t discuss very much of this project today, but I invite you to join the investigation.

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Why a New Organization?

As the global capitalist economy spirals ever deeper into the most severe and acute crisis since the Great Depression, we are proud to respond by announcing the formation of the Marxist-Humanist Initiative. This new U.S. organization is a freely associated collective that seeks to rebuild an organization capable of projecting, developing, and concretizing the bodies of ideas of Karl Marx and of Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-1987), who founded Marxist-Humanism in the U.S. We aim to renew the legacy of Marxist-Humanism for the new times in which we live.
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