From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Hegelian Leninism, Part Three

March 18, 2024

Third and last part of Dunayevskaya’s presentation on “Hegelian Leninism.” Here, the author deals with the transformation into opposite of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Lenin’s seven last years (1917-1924), and what has happened with Marxism and Socialism since then, including her critique to the thought and practice of Mao Zedong.

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Cyclone spotlights disasters in Burma, China

June 5, 2023

After Cyclone Mocha devastated Rakhine State in Myanmar (Burma) on May 14, the National Unity Group representing civilian opposition and armed resistance reported 200 Rohingya Muslims had been killed as the storm hit with 130-mile-per-hour winds.

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Xi Jinping’s precarious hold on China

November 11, 2022

The coup that Xi Jinping had long planned to cement his control of the Communist Party of China went according to script: Xi was re-elected to a third five-year term as leader at the Party Congress that ended on Oct. 23.

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Will China make war on Taiwan?

September 13, 2022

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan provoked controversy. Times may have changed since Nixon met Mao but then as now, look to internal reasons in both nations for their foreign policy stances.

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Beijing sham Olympic opening ceremony

March 19, 2022

Critical view of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics opening ceremony, with its rhetorical message echoing the pre-Cultural Revolution campaign to “let 100 flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend.”

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From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Absolute Idea and self-liberation

February 2, 2022

Part of a dialogue with the China scholar Jonathan Spence and of the process of writing Philosophy and Revolution, this piece explains “Hegel’s Absolute Idea in terms of what it means to the book and the whole world’s objective development,” taking up the self-activity of African revolutionaries in contrast to state-capitalism, as in Mao’s China, the struggle for world power between the U.S. and USSR, and what happens after revolution.

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Youth: Marx speaks to youth alienation

May 8, 2021

Young people keep taking matters into our own hands. Our time of total crises calls for a philosophy to help us understand the problems at the root of our misery and give us hope we can create a new society. This makes Marx a contemporary for youth, looking for a way out of life under capitalism’s hopeless future.

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Hong Kong masses fight rulers’ grab for power

August 31, 2019

An account of the development of the Hong Kong protests to block a proposed extradition bill, which could send residents of Hong Kong to face pre-determined injustice before Beijing courts, tracing them back to the 1989 Tiannamen Square Massacre.

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Readers’ Views: May-June 2019

May 6, 2019

Readers’ Views on: Socialism and a philosophy of revolution; Sudan in revolt; Iran vs. Iranians; Flint, Mich., play captures voices; Notre-Dame and fracking on native land; gun control debate; labor strikes; debate on fascism; Trump and DeVos; and voices from behind bars.

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‘Striking to Survive’ in China

December 14, 2018

Report on a talk in Oakland by worker-activists from China, including Fan Shigang, author and editor of “Striking to Survive: Workers’ Resistance to Factory Relocations in China.”

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Jasik workers organize in China

September 26, 2018

This generation of Chinese workers, going on strike repeatedly to demand wages and benefits they are owed or fighting to control their own jobs, together with young intellectuals reclaiming Marx’s work, may be a threat to today’s Chinese rulers.

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New book: Dunayevskaya on Russian Revolution

August 29, 2017

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, a new book collects writings by Raya Dunayevskaya on the Revolution, counter-revolution, and their consequences, aiming to help create new revolutionary beginnings today. .

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III. Chinese labor in revolt

May 7, 2016

Part III of the Draft Perspectives 2016: Strikes and workers’ uprisings in China have forced industrial wages up, not pausing even during the global Great Recession, as a window on capitalism and its crises.

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Greece: postmodernism in power

March 7, 2015

Yanis Varoufakis, the Finance Minister in Greece’s Syriza government, shows where postmodernist attacks on Marx lead politically, declaring that the task of today’s Left is to save capitalism from itself.

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Tiananmen Square Massacre 25 years later

July 8, 2014

From the July-August 2014 issue of News & Letters

Crowds filled Hong Kong’s Victoria Park on June 4 to remember the massacre in Tiananmen Square 25 years ago. Under Hong Kong’s separate administration they bore witness to the two-month-long mass movement of students and workers that spread to city after city across China, and [=>]

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Escape from Camp 14

April 10, 2013

Escape from Camp 14 is the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person born in a North Korean slave labor camp to escape, doing so at the age of 23 in 2005. Shin’s life is testament to the putrid essence of that militarized, state-capitalist totalitarian society.

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Widening labor and peasant revolts threaten Chinese rulers

January 30, 2012

Lead article in the new January-February 2012 issue of News & Letters:

Widening labor and peasant revolts threaten Chinese rulers
by Bob McGuire

Open rebellion in the village of Wukan in December revealed the forced land seizures that have underpinned China’s industrial expansion as it has risen to serve as the world’s workshop. What rulers in [=>]

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World in View: China clamps down

May 26, 2011

State security forces in China have widened their crackdown on public dissent begun Feb. 17 after online calls for a “jasmine revolution” in China on the model of Tunisia and Egypt. Because calls for anti-government demonstrations each Sunday had originated outside China, in the U.S., the authorities used that as a pretext for ferreting out [=>]

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