On Women’s Day, August 9 in South Africa, Abahlali baseMjondolo will celebrate all the women whose names are not remembered in the official celebrations who struggled in community organisations and trade unions and held families together under a brutal system of oppression.
On June 30, after 18 days of protests, the government of Ecuador sat at the negotiating table with the leaders of the Indigenous movement. A representative of the Catholic Church asked reluctant Indigenous leaders to sign the agreement prepared by the government.
Well over 3,000 women and men overran downtown Federal Plaza in Chicago, spilling into the streets demanding abortion rights and castigating a U.S. Supreme Court whose legitimacy is no longer recognized by the citizens it oppresses.
With the gutting of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has taken away a human right and stripped bodily autonomy from half the population. It is a giant step towards fascism. What is the answer to such an outrage? It is not the Democratic Party, who couldn’t even rid us of the Hyde Amendment.
Colombia’s first leftist vice president, Francia Marquez Mina, has told her story and the struggles of Afro-Colombians in the pages of News & Letters.
Review of ‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,’ states that it missed a great chance to be political in a meaningful way. Writer Katy Brand left out the hard part, creating characters who live in a safe world that doesn’t exist. You can’t comprehend prostitution, sex work and sex workers without talking about capitalism and how it alienates and destroys human relationships.
Catholicism, “traditional family life,” silencing of women, combine to make life a “living hell” for many and reveal how the normalizing of domestic violence wars against the Universal of Freedom.
Dedicated youth from the cities have joined the resistance in Burma (Myanmar), primarily from the urban working class. In the rural “heartland” of Upper Burma the People’s Defense Forces is a broader phenomenon–hundreds of thousands have rallied to the red banner, more all the time.
Takes up: UK waffling on protecting LGBTQI+ people from so-called conversion therapy; reviewers are calling ‘Badhaai Do,’ Harshavardhan Kulkarni’s Indian dramedy film about Lesbians and Gay men, bold and refreshing; Gay man Venton Jones won the Democratic runoff primary for Texas’s 10th House district against queerphobe Sandra Crenshaw; and a teacher in Florida created a template letter that cleverly works around Gov. Ron DeSantis’ hate-filled Don’t Say Gay Bill, HB 1557.
Takes up: in a groundbreaking ruling a Tokyo Court ordered Juntendo University to compensate women because they were rejected from medical school which had tampered with their exam scores and set stricter requirements for women; women in refugee camps in Somalia created their own credit lending system; Sandbach High School’s feminist club in Cheshire, UK, launched a petition calling for the government to ban sales of school uniforms in sex shops and their use in porn videos; and the girls’ track team at Albany High School in New York launched a petition to “Stop Gender Biased Dress Codes: Allow the Girls Track Team to Wear Sports Bras.”
In San Francisco on May 14 over 10,000 people marched for the right to abortion and against the U.S. Supreme Court which has now lost all legitimacy. A million people marched in over 450 events across the U.S. to show their anger at the Supreme Court’s impending reversal of Roe v. Wade, which had legalized women’s right to abortion.
Thought disjointed from objective truth is running amok today—even including self-described Marxists who oppose self-determination of Ukraine and side with Putin, the avowed enemy of Lenin. This compels a new look at Hegel’s category philosophically comprehending that phenomenon, which he called “The Third Attitude of Thought toward the Objective World.”
The battle over the latest UN report on climate change laid bare the stark alternative between business as usual and the forces fighting for social transformation to stave off catastrophe. Protesting scientists called for “climate revolution.”
Having control over what happens to your own body is the difference between fascism and freedom. A woman’s right to control her own body is inherently a fight for a universal freedom. Contempt and hate have worked so well for Republicans that they will go after birth control and LGBTQ+ people.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resistance to it are shaking up the world and revealing the ideological pollution of society, including of the Left.
The Diné, one of the largest Native American tribes in the U.S., show a strikingly different attitude to the COVID-19 pandemic. They have a strong sense of group responsibility as opposed to the phony “rugged individualism” that reveals a warped idea of what freedom means.
In April Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, had his public prosecutors demand that We Will Stop Femicide, Turkey’s largest women’s rights group, be disbanded for “activity against law and morals.” Protests immediately broke out across the country with hundreds marching in Istanbul and Ankara.
Trump’s national health emergency, continued by Biden, had temporarily superseded certain statutes so that asylum seekers had to wait in Mexico for an appointment. While other pandemic emergency measures have lifted, virtually all Republicans and a growing number of Democrats are urging the Biden Administration to keep breaking the law past May 23.
Porters, doorpersons, superintendents, concierges and handypersons in more than 3,000 New York City high rise buildings were able to avoid a cutback in benefits by insisting they would rather go on strike.
Takes up: feminist-led protesters in London hurling 1,000 rape alarms at Charing Cross police station on the first anniversary of the Clapham Common vigil for Sarah Everard; the launch of Somalia’s first all-female media house, Bilan; a worldwide roundup of actions on International Women’s Day; and Women Take the Wheel, an all-woman volunteer service driving women fleeing Ukraine to homes or shelters in Poland.
Taylor is trying to change how institutions and the public view the effects of trauma. Drawing upon years as a feminist therapist in rape crisis, domestic violence, and child trafficking centers, she describes staff’s success calming distressed clients and helping them live their lives after abuse.
The Republican attack against women won’t stop with trashing our right to control our bodies. Hate has worked so well for them that they will also come down harder on LGBTQ+ people, especially Trans people who trample every notion the Right has of “how things are supposed to be.”
‘The 1619 Project’ tackles U.S. history since the first enslaved Africans were brought to Virginia—from multiple perspectives. Each essay is grounded in original sources, scholarly works, interviews and oral histories. Historical events, photographs of ordinary African-Americans and poetry surround each essay, adding a human touch.
As banning books that take up racism, feminism or LGBTQI+ subjects alarmingly escalates, students fight back, creating groups to read censored books.
Putin’s invasion confronted fierce resistance in Ukraine and opposition on Russian streets. The war reveals a changed world of competing centers of capital–which is in a state of stalled accumulation globally, devolving into militarism, other-hating fascism and fomenting new forms of genocide–signaling the future this system holds if left unchecked.
A call from women living in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico, to meet together to fight developmentalist capitalism, and stop the rampant violence against women in the area.
No to war on Ukraine! The capitalist system in crisis ever veers toward war. Putin is not so much the exception but the embodiment of the ongoing shift in world politics, signaling the future this system holds if left unchecked. The destruction of democracy and the move to the Right, which Putin has aided, helps set the stage for that nightmare.
Voices of Starbucks workers around the country who are filing to start unions. As of Feb.21, the movement had spread to 103 stores, and three union elections had been finalized, with two Buffalo, N.Y. stores going union.
We, socialists, trade unionists, scholars, activists for human rights, social justice and peace, stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine against Russian imperialism.
The international left and labour movement must vigorously oppose Russia’s threats against Ukraine.
We say neither Washington nor Moscow. We oppose the policy and manoeuvrings of the big Western powers and NATO.
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Despite 90% of Canadian truckers being vaccinated, organizers counted on a couple hundred semis to mask the fascist movements and money propelling this “freedom convoy.” The mask came off quickly, as participants paraded Nazi and Confederate flags, and even TRUMP 2024 banners, while others desecrated national memorials.
In the face of climate justice movements from below, the rulers are determined to keep control in their hands. With creative new actions and thinking raising the possibility of alternative, anti-capitalist paths of development, the powers that be are working hard to reduce that to a mere “energy transition.”
Many post-Marx Marxists have painted Marx as a materialist. While no one denies the aspects of Marx that are materialistic, to call his philosophy materialist is as accurate as calling his philosophy idealist. Both are key aspects that play a part in shaping human life. Both are important to understanding human life and human activity.
The raging attack on abortion rights is an attack on freedom by fascist leaders and their followers who want to undermine democracy and save a decrepit, unworkable, exploitative, racist-patriarchal capitalism.
Ours is an age of total crises and pervasive angst about humanity’s future. Marx’s recreation of Hegel’s freedom Idea, a humanism that is directly part of life and nature, is a unifying pull of the future in freedom movements and presages “the new society” Dunayevskaya saw in Hegel’s Idea.
Workers are key in the fight for freedom of speech as is the need for theory grounded in a philosophy of freedom.
The acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse gave a green light to reactionary killings. The uprisings after George Floyd’s murder, and the associated ideas of liberation, are the ultimate target of lynchers.
Women WorldWide takes up: Afghan women MPs set up an organization in exile to help other activist women escape; the thousands who marched in Istanbul, Turkey demanding action against widespread violence against women; women in Poland marching again against restrictions on abortion; and the 7,000 women who gathered in Madrid, Spain, protesting male violence against women.
Join us for an online study group on Capital, Volume 1, which never stops entering into debates. Each new crisis calls forth a new re-examination of Karl Marx’s analysis of the historic law of motion of capitalism, its dialectic of development and downfall, and the seeds for creating a new, human society of freely associated [=>]
Driving across the U.S. one is struck with the amount of corn grown and to the destructive ways in which it is, for the most part, used.
An in-person report from an Accompaniment Brigade which joined a Migrant Caravan crossing southern Mexico on its way to Mexico City and encountered a great deal of difficulty from the Mexican government and little to no aid from agencies charged with helping them.
Transgender Day of Remembrance 2021 marked the deadliest year for the Transgender and gender nonconforming community. Internationally over 375 Transgender people, 47 in the U.S., were reported murdered. The overwhelming majority of them—as it has so often been—were women of color under 30 years old.
A call for solidarity from the Sudanese Workers Alliance for the Restoration of Trade Unions against the counter-revolutionary coup by the al-Bashir Security apparatus and the warlords who traffic in the suffering of the people.
Maâti Monjib, the Moroccan journalist, historian and human rights activist, has begun another hunger strike and needs your support.
In Chicago, four to five thousand rallied and marched downtown to make it clear that women in the U.S. are continuing to fight back against the inhuman anti-abortion legislation that has been surging across Republican-dominated statehouses for years—this, despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
Queer Notes takes up a Queer rights rally in Madrid, Spain, to call for stronger laws to protect LGBTQ+ people; LGBTQ+ people and their supporters in New York City protested the homophobic assault against Abimbola Adelaja and his friend; and Parents in Tennessee and the Human Rights Campaign are suing the state to overturn its anti-Trans law that allows schools to be sued if they allow a Trans student in a cisgender bathroom.
A letter from Maati Monjib asking for support from the human rights community in the face of his next hearing before the Rabat Court of Appeal on September 30.
Participant report of the Fridays for Future climate strike in Chicago on September 24, 2021.
As part of the ongoing Fridays for Future, on Aug. 27 several hundred, mostly youth, gathered in San Francisco to call attention to environmental racism, the climate crisis, and public health.
Excerpted from a draft report for the Convention of News and Letters Committees, the piece takes on different movements and actions form below fighting for climate justice, as well as the actions from governments and companies blocking them.
In conversation with Karen Ng’s book “Hegel’s Concept of Life,” Ron Kelch takes up the concept of life and “naturalism” and their relationship to freedom in Hegel, Marx, and Marxist-Humanism. Whether one takes Marx’s starting point of freedom with respect to human life activity that is inextricably part of nature or Hegel’s beginning again from Nature as mediation, the self-determination of the unifying Idea cannot be taken for granted in the face of the spontaneous self-bringing forth of liberty.
