Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2023-2024: Polycrisis and the need to transform reality. Parts VI & VII

June 15, 2023

Where will even the greatest movements from below lead so long as they lack a philosophy of revolution that would give these revolutionary struggles a direction? Any mass movement and any organization can regress and even transform into its opposite. This historic problem cannot be solved by the right program, leadership, or even form of organization. It highlights the indispensability of the need for a philosophy of revolution, the need for the organization of thought and its demand to be embodied in organizations based on the movement from theory.

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60th International Antiwar Assembly

November 11, 2022

Excerpts of the appeal from the Executive Committee for the 60th International Antiwar Assembly, together with the message of solidarity sent to the Assembly from News and Letters Committees. Against Putin’s war and for revolutionary new beginnings!

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World in View: Haitians demand self-determination

When the U.S.-imposed non-elected, illegitimate government of Ariel Henry decided to raise highly subsidized fuel prices in September, all hell broke loose in Haiti. Mass protests occurred everywhere, particularly on the streets of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

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‘Women, Life, Freedom!’ The transformation of Iran

September 28, 2022

The Iranian hardline regime should be very afraid. The cries of: “Women, life and freedom!” “Death to the head scarf!” “Death to the dictator!” fill the streets. Iranian women have inspired the world and put Iran’s oligarchs on notice that their repressive regime is in grave danger.

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Thoughts From the Outside: Capital is out of control

June 29, 2021

Where I work among the homeless on the street, I see the infinite degradation experienced by those discarded by capitalist society and barely surviving on its margins. There were always those who live on the edge. Karl Marx was describing the lack of transparency in social relations: what appears to be a free decision to sell your labor is nothing of the kind. Yet people stay away from thinking about how all labor, even paid labor, is forced labor.

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Argentina’s feminist revolution

January 10, 2021

At four in the morning on Dec. 30, the Argentine Senate finally passed an abortion rights bill, making it legal to terminate a pregnancy in the first 14 weeks. The procedure will be free in government hospitals, crucially important for poor women.

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Pipeline tragedy in Mexico

March 11, 2019

The horrendous oil pipeline explosion in Tlahuelilpan, Mexico, which killed over 100 campesinos and injured many more, has shaken all of Mexico. This was a tragedy long in the making.

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Readers’ Views, November-December 2018

December 14, 2018

Readers’ Views on: Capitalism vs. the Planet; Anti-Semitism’s Inhumanity; Kavanaugh Travesty; Youth Rock!; Freedom Movements vs. Fascism across the Globe; Catholic Church Crisis; Voices from behind Bars

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Election deepens illegitimacy of Trump’s minority rule

A Marxist-Humanist view of the 2018 U.S. midterm elections that highlights the illegitimacy of Trump’s rule, showing how it is the rule of a minority won because of anti-democratic voter suppression, gerrymandering, racism, sexism, extreme anti-immigration rhetoric, hate speech and lies. It highlights the other America that opposes such neo-fascism.

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Nicaraguans rise up against Ortega

September 20, 2018

Nicaraguans rally in San Francisco to raise awareness and support for the spreading anti-government protests in Nicaragua against President Ortega and his government’s brutal oppression.

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In Syria only solution: ‘revolution, revolution’

March 12, 2018

As Assad regime and Russian forces continue slaughter in Ghouta with bombs and chemical weapons while world powers refuse to interfere, supporters of Free Syria staged emergency vigils in Chicago on Feb. 18 and 25 demanding the bombing of Ghouta end and the blockade be lifted.

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Editorial: Venezuela: Which way forward?

September 5, 2017

Editorial on the situation in Venezuela including the deterioration of living conditions; the repression practiced by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and their attempt to gut Venezuela’s Bolivarian Constitution; and the personality cult built around Hugo Chávez, revealing contradictions in the movements for freedom. .

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Futureless people

April 27, 2017

For-profit CoreCivic prison inmate’s lament on lack of hope because of slave-like treatment in prison and outside of jail, if one is lucky enough to be paroled.

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Essay: Marx’s Marxism vs. Trump-Putin’s barbarism

March 21, 2017

Trump’s barbarism in power is a crisis for bourgeois democracy and revolutionary thought. Opposition from below is far deeper than bourgeois opposition to Trump. To have efficacy today, Marx’s body of ideas must be grasped and projected as a whole. The movement from theory needs to meet the challenge of history, of freedom struggles and revolution.

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How can we, once and for all, end sexism?

September 17, 2016

From the September-October 2016 issue of News & Letters

Art by Paul Tanzawa

Women have been fighting for our freedom for centuries and yet we are still raped, beaten, enslaved–treated as less than human. We will never be free under capitalism, which has only made women’s lives worse and now threatens our [=>]

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Turkey’s Erdoğan – the pious dictator

September 7, 2016

A view of what the failed coup in Turkey has wrought, including mass arrests of teachers, trade unionists, doctors, medical personnel, and others as Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, makes a grab for total power.

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Youth in Action: July-August 2016

July 9, 2016

In West Auckland, New Zealand, Massey High School students and their parents petition for weather-appropriate summer uniforms; 82 Huntsville, Alabama, Grissom High School students defy the dress code for girls because the code endorses rape culture and violates Title IX rights; across the USA Muslim youth are harassed in a variety of ways making them feel unsafe, so much so that the majority of Muslim youth believe that reporting the harassment won’t make a difference.

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‘Workless’ capitalism?

July 4, 2016

Universal Basic Income is posed by some as a solution to the robotization of work and a “workless society” but this ignores Marx’s liberatory vision of a society in which labor is completely transformed so as to become life’s prime want.

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Workshop Talks: Bleak future if no labor solidarity

July 3, 2016

Workshop Talks columnist Htun Lin looks at the world situation from the massacre of LGBTQ people in Orlando to the murder of Jo Cox in Britain to Brexit and to how workers are reacting, suggesting that there is no exit from global capitalism without international labor solidarity.

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