Class,Race,Revolution,and the Humanist Imperative

Abstract

This article advances a revolutionary framework for humanist sociology grounded in the struggle for human emancipation amid intensifying capitalist crisis, racialized exploitation, ecological collapse, and emergent fascist rule. Drawing on Marxist, Black radical, and humanist traditions, we distinguish between a bourgeois “science-of-humanity” that interprets and manages inequality while reproducing capitalist hegemony, and a revolutionary “science-for-humanity” committed to transforming the material conditions that produce dehumanization. We argue that humanist sociology is inseparable from the humanist imperative – the ethical and political responsibility to actively struggle for systemic change. Central to this analysis is the dialectical relationship between class and race, with particular attention to anti-Blackness as a strategic weapon of capitalist domination and a key obstacle to working-class unity. Within this framework, woke is theorized not as a pejorative slogan, but a renewed expression of race and class consciousness expanded through collective struggle against white supremacy, capitalism, and fascism. Situating contemporary struggles within a world-historical context, we identify three interconnected fronts of struggle – the fight against inequality and poverty, the fight against state violence and militarism, and the fight for revolutionary education – as key sites for cultivating woke revolutionary consciousness and building multiracial, multinational, and multigender working-class power aimed at abolishing systems of dehumanization.