A new conflict broke out in Bolivia at the end of March. Thousands of miners blocked highways in five departments of Bolivia to protest a pending new mining law. Three miners were killed by the national police, while the miners took dozens of police hostage.
Author: Franklin Dmitryev
Measured to death
Reliance on metrics in healthcare has become a new Taylorism, or management by time study. Everything in the hospital workplace is now tracked by sophisticated computer programs, down to every last pill, gauze and penny, and down to every last motion. This vast pool of information becomes Big Data.
Unchaining the revolutionary dialectic
May 10, 2014Marx, by unchaining the dialectic, discovered a whole new continent of thought and of revolution. Marx’s critique of Hegelian dialectic meant not merely a substitution of materialism for idealism, but an extension of the dialectic from its seeming burial in Thought alone by the presence of the dialectic in the development of reality.
Philosophy and organization
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2014-2015. IV. Philosophy and organization. A. The philosophic moment of Marxist-Humanism. B. Organizational tasks.
Capitalism’s political and economic degeneracy
May 7, 2014Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2014-2015. III. Capitalism’s political and economic degeneracy. A. Karl Marx haunts capitalism’s stagnation. B. The race toward climate chaos.
Revolt and retrogression at home
May 6, 2014Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2014-2015: From the U.S. to Ukraine, crises and revolts call for philosophy. II. Revolt and retrogression at home. A. Women under attack. B. Many dimensions of revolt
From the U.S. to Ukraine, crises and revolts call for philosophy
May 5, 2014Revolution and counter-revolution contend now, while the prolonged global capitalist economic crisis refuses to end. The question arises: where is the needed banner of total uprooting of the system and creation of new human relations as the goal? This objective need is present in every struggle from outright revolution in the Middle East to movements in the U.S. Beset by attacks and contradictions, they have in turn sparked counter-revolutions.
May-June 2014 News & Letters online
May 2, 2014May-June 2014 News & Letters online: “From the U.S. to Ukraine, crises and revolts call for philosophy”; “Unchaining the revolutionary dialectic”; much more…
Readers’ Views, March-April 2014, Part 2
April 9, 2014Readers’ Views from the March-April 2014 issue of News & Letters, part 2.
Readers’ Views, March-April 2014, Part 1
April 8, 2014Readers’ Views from the March-April 2014 issue of News & Letters, part 1.
Handicap This! March-April 2014
April 7, 2014Cops beat deaf man in Hawthorne, Calif.; Assad’s forces torment man with Down Syndrome in Syria; South Carolina abuses mentally ill prisoners; disabled Chicago woman illegally evicted.
Legislators let us down
April 6, 2014People shared stories about their experiences with Medicaid, the minimum wage, disability rights, and talked about the importance of seeing the human side of issues. The only things the legislators would say was that “revenues were the problem.”
Detroit fights blight, but who profits?
April 5, 2014We don’t want our neighborhoods razed for “profit-making capitalist folks.” Detroit residents are concerned with improved quality of life in our communities.
Tour the world’s most polluted places
April 4, 2014Few people relish pollution tourism and fewer still can so appropriately express their disgust and delight as Andrew Blackwell in “Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World’s Most Polluted Places.”
The art of Arab Spring
April 3, 2014“Creative Dissent: Arts of the Arab World Uprisings” is an exhibit which magnificently captures the voices, images and revolutionary ideas of participants in the Arab Spring.
Queer Notes, March-April 2014
April 2, 2014CeCe McDonald; Arizona’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act; Global Day of Action called by Solidarity Alliance in Nigeria.
Israel threw me out
April 1, 2014As it becomes more commonplace to openly criticize Israeli apartheid and occupation, peace activists, human rights workers and even people who have publicly criticized the state of Israel are deemed a security risk, deported and banned from entering Israel for 10 years.
Free Leonard Peltier!
March 31, 2014Los Angeles—On Feb. 8, 50 activists of all races gathered at MacArthur Park to be part of freeing Leonard Peltier, who is starting his 38th year in a federal penitentiary for a crime he did not commit.
‘A Dreadful Deceit’ and unceasing rebellion
March 30, 2014Jacqueline Jones’ new book, A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America, is not a call to ignore effects of the concept of race in law and practice. She finds the definition of race repeatedly twisted to suit the needs of the ruling class and wielded as a tool for subjugation of Black and white labor alike.
Stop police spying
March 29, 2014Oakland City Council delayed voting on a Domain Awareness Center that would allow police and other agencies to deploy a network of cameras and computers to monitor Twitter and Facebook. If not for the mayor’s decision to delay the vote, the measure would have been defeated.
Egyptian strike wave topples cabinet
March 28, 2014Workers in the state-controlled textile industry, mostly women workers, and public transport workers, sanitation workers, office workers, doctors, and even policemen launched a wave of strikes that caused Egypt’s Prime Minister and his entire cabinet to resign.
VW anti-UAW vote
March 27, 2014The shocking defeat of the United Auto Workers in a union election at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, dealt a serious blow to the organizing strategy of the UAW in the South.
Locked out Minnesota musicians return
March 26, 2014On Feb. 1, 2014, the Minnesota Orchestral Association [MOA] ended its lockout of striking union musicians. The lockout began on Oct. 1, 2012, the longest work stoppage in U.S. orchestra history. in a focus that would not have been possible without union and community solidarity, the Tea Party destruction of nonprofits everywhere in Minnesota and in the U.S.
Women Worldwide, March-April 2014
March 25, 2014Women worldwide, March-April 2014: Sexism in chemistry profession; Shulamit Aloni; Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot.
‘Humane immigration reform now!’
March 24, 2014400 immigrant workers from Mexico and Central America and their U.S. supporters marched through downtown Los Angeles for “comprehensive and humane immigration reform now!”
‘Sex Workers Unite’
March 23, 2014“Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk,” by Melinda Chateauvert, is a valuable history of the Sex Workers’ Rights Movement in the U.S. from its start in the 1960s to the present and its intersection with other social justice movements.
Court, fanatics besiege clinics
March 22, 2014In June the U.S. Supreme Court will decide if buffer zones around clinics that offer abortion are a violation of freedom of speech. Court watchers say they look ready to rule the zones illegal. That would be a tragedy.
Venezuela protests
March 21, 2014What began in early February as a small student protest against a sexual assault at a university campus in the state of Tachira, which the government repressed, spread to a number of other campuses and cities, where demonstrations were also repressed and students arrested. Seizing the moment, a faction of the right-wing opposition party called for more protests, demanding the removal of President Maduro from office.
‘Say NO to KXL!’
March 20, 2014Chicago–“Say NO to KXL!” was the message of 100 protesters outside the local State Department offices on the bitter cold night of Feb. 3, demanding that President Obama reject the Keystone XL pipeline that would carry extra-dirty tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast. It was one of 283 actions across the U.S. and Canada organized in three days after the State Department released its fake environmental report on the pipeline–a report crafted by cronies of TransCanada, Keystone’s owner, with the imprimatur of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
California legislators ignore hunger strikers’ voices
March 19, 2014Sacramento, Calif.–At the Legislative Hearings on Feb. 11, experts presented their analyses, which showed that even the very small changes California Department of Corrections (CDC) said they were implementing, in fact they are not. No policies are being changed to address the problems brought out by prisoners and their families. One family member was taking the legislators to task, saying that the promises of reform the legislators vow to make now, they made 10 years ago. Nothing changed. Things got worse.
UK sees Marxists under every bedroom tax protest
March 18, 2014London, England–The UN’s own rapporteur for housing, Raquel Rolnik, has denounced UK government policy as creating a housing crisis for its most vulnerable citizens. Her findings were dismissed as a “misleading Marxist diatribe” by cabinet ministers. In a report detailing her investigation into the British housing sector, Rolnik specifically targets the government’s now infamous “bedroom tax.” She described it for Al Jazeera as having “an enormous impact on [a citizen’s] right to housing and also on other human rights, like the right to food [and] the right to education.”
Don’t stop at raising wages
March 17, 2014That there are two Americas when it comes to the economy and the wealth of our nation is no mystery to anyone. Everyone now knows the top 1% have essentially been the only beneficiaries of the latest “boom.” Journalists and economists take pains to point out how this jobless expansion has allowed the investors to recover from their losses of the 2008 financial collapse. Workers, though, are still left holding the bag.
Ukraine and Bosnia: historic uprisings
March 16, 2014In Ukraine, an unexpected eruption of mass struggle led to the overthrow of Ukraine’s corrupt, oligarchic, and ultimately murderous President Viktor Yanukovych. In Bosnia, at the same time, massive, nationwide discontent with the corrupt system left in place when the 1995 Dayton Accords partitioned the country has led to the equally unexpected creation of new forms of democratic organization.
Capitalist economy is failing
March 15, 2014Ongoing national strikes and demonstrations by fast food workers demanding a $15 an hour living wage show that workers’ reality is not the media-touted economic “recovery” enjoyed by the super-wealthy finance capitalists. In real life the 2008 depression drags on. In a punitive move, Congressional Republicans wouldn’t even allow a vote for long-term unemployment benefits to continue, in spite of the record 1.7 million, or 37% of the officially unemployed, who have been out of work for six months or longer. Previously, a rate anywhere near this was called an emergency, compelling an automatic extension of benefits.
On THE Philosophic Point and Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy
March 14, 2014To understand today we must begin at the beginning, that is to say, as always, with Marx. Specifically the two periods are: the first and the last, the first being the philosophic moment, 1844 [Marx’s Humanist Essays or Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts]. That laid the ground for all future development. The last being the long hard trek and process of developments–all the revolutions, as well as philosophic-political-economic concretizations, culminating in Capital. Yet the full organizational expression of all came only then, i.e., the last decade, especially the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. Why only then?
Women fight for freedom against growing retrogression
March 13, 2014While experiences in the squares of the Arab Spring, in Turkey’s Gezi Park, in the streets of Spain and Greece, and in the U.S. Occupy Movements have revealed moments of what new human relations between women and men could look like, those moments of hope and exhilaration have been followed by devastating reaction and retrogression.
March-April 2014 News & Letters online
March 12, 2014March-April 2014 News & Letters: Women fight for freedom against growing retrogression; On THE Philosophic Point and Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy; Capitalist economy is failing; Ukraine and Bosnia: historic uprisings; more…
Call for News and Letters Committees Convention, 2014
March 11, 2014News and Letters Committees has posted its
OFFICIAL CALL FOR CONVENTION
to Work Out Marxist-Humanist Perspectives for 2014-2015
February 23, 2014
To All Members of News and Letters Committees
Dear Friends:
The sharpness of revolution and counter-revolution contending now, while the prolonged global capitalist economic crisis refuses to end, cries out for a philosophical [=>]
Readers’ Views, Jan.-Feb. 2014, Part 2
March 9, 2014ENVIRONMENT UNDER THREAT
Recently I attended a talk near Berkeley, Calif., by a retired professor about the effect of environmental damage on political instability in the Middle East. He spoke disparagingly of Arab countries, but was full of praise for Israeli technology and “adaptive science.” He stated that autocracy was the best way to confront [=>]
Readers’ Views, Jan.-Feb. 2014, Part 1
March 8, 2014THE SYRIAN REVOLUTION AS TEST OF WORLD POLITICS
I have been active in a number of student groups around labor and women’s issues. We always talk about “intersectionality” and recognizing different struggles. Somehow that didn’t seem to apply, though, when it came to the Syrian Revolution. Suddenly people didn’t want to talk about it. I [=>]
War against abortion is war against women (Readers’ Views)
A pedestrian walking by our clinic summed up the absurdity of anti-abortionists: “Why would you take life advice from someone screaming standing on a sidewalk corner?!”
A.H., Clinic escort
Midwest
***
Here’s my favorite quote from our favorite protester this morning “I bet you guys voted for that Halfrican American Obama!” What is wrong [=>]
La escuelita zapatista (Zapatista Little School)
March 7, 2014In-person report from La escuelita zapatista (Zapatista Little School)
Kansas City confronts anti-immigrant Nazis
March 6, 2014More than 300 people of all races came out to confront a handful of Nazis rallying in Kansas City.
Queer Notes, Jan.-Feb. 2014
Opposition to Russia’s renewed oppression of LGBT people; India’s Supreme Court upholds British colonial-era anti-sodomy law
Solidarity with Guantanamo hunger strikers, Part 2
March 5, 2014“My decision to go on hunger strike points to the need for new forces to defend the idea of universal human rights. Although the number of inmates refusing to take food at Guantanamo has recently declined substantially, solidarity remains a vitally important factor.”
Hyper-‘gentrification’
Displacement of lower income people in San Francisco has entered a new stage because of the massive expansion of Silicon Valley and massive real estate speculation.
For Nelson Mandela
March 4, 2014“For Nelson Mandela,” a poem by Paul Knopf.
Illegal evictions sully Mandela’s legacy
March 3, 2014Just when Mandela has passed, the African National Congress is not even ashamed of the lives the poor are living, or the fact that the residents of Cato Crest will spend Christmas on the street.
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
March 1, 2014Obamacare responds to a serious problem, yet is a needlessly complex scheme that subsidizes insurance companies and has objectionable features.
Protests at CUNY
February 28, 2014Students at City University of New York and supporters protest and take direct action to save the Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Center, and face criminalization of their activities.