Kincheloe, Mich.—Recently, as I was awaiting a visit at the Control Center at Chippewa Correctional Facility, I observed three facility staff members around a computer monitor. I heard sound from a video they were viewing of an incident earlier that day involving staff use of TASER-manufactured electro-shock weapons on a prisoner in one of the [=>]
Author: Franklin Dmitryev
Latino voice reaches beyond SHU walls
August 12, 2012Pelican Bay, Calif.—I have been a prisoner at Pelican Bay State Prison Security Housing Unit (SHU) for well over 20 years. As is the case with so many, contact with the outside world is rare. I hope my voice brings an awareness to those who may care to listen.
The struggle for justice and equality carries [=>]
End prison media ban!
August 11, 2012photo by Urszula Wislanka/News & Letters
On June 12 prisoners’ families and prison reform advocates demonstrated on capitol steps in Sacramento, Ca. to urge the lifting of the media ban, which prevents press access to report on prison conditions.
From the belly of the beast—Pelican Bay prisoners speak
August 10, 2012A new pamphlet
Pamphlet front cover
From the Introduction:
Hunger strikes by California prisoners, fighting perpetual solitary confinement, arose in mid-summer 2011 and the fall just when the Occupy movement took off. The prisoners’ thoughts and actions put the criminal justice system on trial in the same spirit as the Occupy Everywhere movements put [=>]
Red Onion prisoners STRIKE!
August 9, 2012Wise County, Va.—On May 19 an inmate from Red Onion State Prison (ROSP) phoned a member of Supporting Prisoners and Acting for Radical Change (SPARC), informing her that on May 22 at least 11 inmates were going on hunger strike to protest the inhumane conditions of Red Onion.
The group of participating prisoners spanning two cell [=>]
Queer Notes, July-August 2012
August 8, 2012by Elise
Brave were the marchers in this year’s Pride Parades in Warsaw, Poland; Riga, Latvia; and Split, Croatia. Heavy police protection was required at each march. While the Roman Catholic Church’s anti-Queer stand remains strong, an openly Gay man and a Transsexual person were voted into Poland’s Parliament in 2011 and a number of [=>]
ADAPT activists sentenced
August 7, 2012Washington, D.C—Fourteen of 74 ADAPT activists arrested in April for protesting Chair of the House Budget Committee Representative Ryan’s proposal to cut Medicaid funding by $800 billion were sentenced in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.
During the court proceedings, Mike Oxford, an ADAPT organizer from Kansas, made a statement on behalf of the [=>]
Carlos Montes claims victory
August 6, 2012Los Angeles—Carlos Montes was targeted by the FBI and charged with six felony counts in 2011 for his long history of anti-war and Chicano rights activism since the 1970s. He was facing 18 years. After over a year of struggle—demonstrating, organizing and court hearings—the district attorney offered a plea bargain in which Carlos was to [=>]
Commemorating the Los Angeles Rebellion
August 5, 2012Los Angeles, Calif.—On April 28, people from the Black community, some from Occupy LA, and others gathered at the 71st and Normandie Ave. block party on the 20th anniversary of the 1992 LA Rebellion.
The event was moderated by Mollie Ball—long-time community activist and part of the LA-4-Plus Defense Committee. That committee was formed to support [=>]
Mali’s contradictions
August 4, 2012The fracturing of Mali and the demand for self-determination of the Tuareg people in the north continue (see May-June N&L), but with grave contradictions. The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), the coalition that has fought for independence and a new country, Azawad, joined forces with Ansar Dine, a Tuareg-led militant Islamist group [=>]
Vets used and abused
August 3, 2012Memphis, Tenn.—When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, the military did find weapons of mass destruction in the form of chemical weapons. This was not made public, because the weapons had been a gift to Saddam Hussein from the U.S. Since the canisters still showed they were U.S. government property, they were destroyed, by the [=>]
Occupy Movement faces racism
August 2, 2012Chicago—On June 18, Occupy Chicago held the first of a series of discussions on “The Elephant in the Room: A workshop about dismantling racism in the Occupy Movement.”
Discussion was lively, and comradely, among the majority Black, Latino and Native American participants, but represented just the beginning of an effort to “voice the unvoiced.” One Latino [=>]
Occupy the school—keep Lakeview open!
August 1, 2012Photo by Urszula Wislanka for News & Letters
Parents, students and teachers have occupied Lakeview Elementary School in Oakland, Calif., since June 15 to keep it open, just one of five schools slated for closure. Under threat from police and the Oakland Unified School District, the protesters, including Occupy Oakland, nevertheless have created social [=>]
A voice from Occupy
July 31, 2012Oakland, Calif.—I am an anarchist and believe in acting according to my principles, most recently in Stockton on May 31 in a general strike protesting the murders of three Black men—James Rivera, Jr., Luther “Champ” Brown, Jr., and James Cooke—killed by police. The demonstration showed the community, masked up, willing to defend themselves from the [=>]
Specter of Depression: Mattick’s Business as Usual
July 30, 2012Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism by Paul Mattick, Reaktion Books (London), 2011.
Paul Mattick’s Business as Usual is an attempt to come to grips in Marxist terms with the global economic crisis that began in 2007. It is an entry into a growing category of books which includes David Harvey’s [=>]
Using robots to attack labor upsurge in China
July 29, 2012Workers who created a wave of strikes in China from auto and electronics to steel over the past two years have confronted the power of private capital, the state and the Communist Party. In 2011 alone, China’s State Council acknowledged 500 large-scale “mass incidents” per day, including peasant resistance to land grabs as well as [=>]
Sutter nurses strike!
July 28, 2012Photo by David M’Oto
Oakland, Calif.—Sutter Health nurses throughout Northern California walked off the job for one day on June 13. Hundreds of nurses and some doctors marched and rallied in front of Oakland’s Summit Medical Center and Berkeley’s Alta Bates Hospital.
Summit will not even renew the previous contract because they insist on a [=>]
NYC May Day march
July 27, 2012New York—There was a large May Day rally and march in New York City—but you would not have known it from reading The New York Times. The march of around 10,000 was a convergence of individuals, organizations, and participants in actions earlier in the day, primarily targeting sites of labor disputes and financial headquarters.
Although the [=>]
Fukushima nuclear worker’s testimony
July 26, 2012Editor’s note: “S,” an organizer of nuclear workers for the Precariat Union in Tokyo, currently works at Daiichi and Daini as a subcontract worker. He spoke on March 4 to about 200 people in New York City on a panel, “Eyewitnesses to Fukushima,” sponsored by Shut Down Indian Point Now! (SDIPN!).
Eighty percent of nuclear [=>]
Women Worldwide, July-August 2012
July 25, 2012by Artemis
In May, delegations of Japanese officials came to Palisades Park, N.J., where more than half the community is of Korean descent, to request the removal of a memorial to the Korean “comfort women.” They shockingly claimed that the more than 200 women, who were forced to be sex slaves for the Japanese military [=>]
Radical feminism redux
July 24, 2012In blogs and podcasts, feminists have been discussing the perennial problem of having to explain that feminism means the struggle for gender equality, not female supremacy. Now many third wave and younger feminists have found the courage to reclaim not only the original meaning of “feminism,” but “radical feminism.” During the 1960s and early 1970s, [=>]
Mexico: ‘Yo soy #132’
July 23, 2012World in View
Mexico: ‘Yo soy #132’
Mexico City—Into this dismal Presidential electoral season has come a breath of fresh air: a student movement by the name of “I am #132.” It arose in mid-May and spread like wildfire in universities throughout the country, with thousands and then tens of thousands of secondary and university students joining [=>]
Arab spring continues
July 22, 2012World in View
by Gerry Emmett
Arab spring continues
Egypt
Egypt’s first presidential election presented voters with two bad choices: Ahmed Shafiq, a Mubarak ally, or Mohammed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood. Neither candidate has any connection to the working women, the youth, or the mass self-organization that have been at the heart of Egypt’s revolution.
This election showed [=>]
Syria and the Left
July 21, 2012World in View
by Gerry Emmett
“None of us believe that peace is so sweet or life so dear that we are willing to sell our freedom at the price of chains and slavery.”
These words of a young Syrian woman express the passion that animates the Syrian Revolution now facing the most brutal, determined opposition from Assad’s [=>]
Québec ‘Maple Spring’ repression
July 20, 2012Montreal–The Printemps Érable (Maple Spring), named after the Arab Spring, continues in Québec and reverberates throughout Canada in an ever-deepening crisis since the massive Québec student strike began in February. It faces a new wave of brutal repression, whose extreme character accentuates the bankruptcy of Québec’s government.
In mid-May Line Beauchamp, Minister of Education, bad as she was, [=>]
Chicago Spring vs. NATO summit
July 19, 2012Chicago–“Some of us killed innocents. Some of us helped in continuing these wars from home. Some of us watched our friends die. Some of us are not here because we took our own lives. We did not get the care promised to us by our government. All of us watched failed policies turn into bloodshed. [=>]
Woman as Reason: Egypt, women and permanent revolution
July 18, 2012by Terry Moon
Mona Eltahawy, an American-Egyptian journalist, wrote an eloquent essay published in the May/June edition of Foreign Policy titled “Why Do They Hate Us? The real war on women is in the Middle East.” The myriad negative responses to it reveal serious examples of counter-revolution from within the revolution in the wake of Arab Spring.
ARAB [=>]
Workshop Talks: Capitalism trashes union democracy
July 16, 2012Workshop Talks
by Htun Lin
The “Great Recession” we’re living in will continue so long as we accept that there is no alternative to capitalism. It is a lie perpetuated by the dominant ideology.
In the past year, the Occupy Movement has given many of us hope that things can change. One idea in the movement is that [=>]
Fighting the war against women
July 15, 2012Chicago–On June 8 about 30 determined activists for reproductive justice faced off around 800 anti-abortion, anti-birth control fanatics. The fanatics acted like thugs, sending people to our demonstration with their signs to try and block us from view and to start arguments, or try to record pro-choice demonstrators. Many times police had to order them [=>]
One billionaire, one vote
July 14, 2012Editorial
“For Sale” signs for public offices will be popping up all over the country following Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s stunning victory this month over the effort to recall him from office. Walker’s revoking the right of public unions to negotiate contracts created national and statewide protests that rocked the nation for months.
The recall campaign pitted [=>]
Trade unionism and revolutionary syndicalism
July 13, 2012by Michael Gilbert
The theory and practice of how to organize workers to take power into their own hands and fight for a new social order has always been uppermost in the minds of all true revolutionaries, even in the darkest moments of capitalist and state-capitalist repression. Following Marx, the founder of Marxist-Humanism, Raya Dunayevskaya, has [=>]
Why Hegel’s Phenomenology now?
July 12, 2012From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya
Why Hegel’s Phenomenology now?
Editor’s Note: 2012 is marked by potential historic turning points and the search for new beginnings. It also marks the 25th anniversary of Raya Dunayevskaya’s last writings. We present part of her unfinished “Why Hegel’s Phenomenology? Why Now?” which was an important aspect of her work on Dialectics of [=>]
Spain, Greece, Europe: capitalist crisis and revolt
July 10, 2012by Franklin Dmitryev
When the bailout of banks in Spain, the Eurozone’s fourth largest economy, was announced on June 9, the immediate reactions revealed the two worlds that exist in every country. The Spanish masses intensified their protests, marching directly on both banks and government, while Greek and Spanish workers exchanged messages of solidarity against the [=>]
July-August 2012 issue of News & Letters is on the web
July 8, 2012News & Letters, Vol. 57, No. 4
July-August 2012
Lead: Spain, Greece, Europe: capitalist crisis and revolt
When the bailout of banks in Spain was announced on June 9, the immediate reactions revealed the two worlds that exist in every country. The Spanish masses intensified their protests, marching directly on both banks and government, while Greek and Spanish [=>]
Earth Summit 20 years on
June 2, 2012To mark the 20th anniversary of the original “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, here is what we wrote about it at the time (from the July 1992 News & Letters):
Ideological pollution at ‘Earth Summit’
by Franklin Dmitryev
The UN Conference on Environment and Development (or Earth Summit) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, began June 3 with [=>]
Virginia prison hunger strike
May 30, 2012Prisoners at Red Onion State Prison in Wise County, Virginia, went on hunger strike on May 22. More details can be found at the Solidarity with Virginia Prison Hunger Strikers blog, which lists the ten demands here. You can join a facebook group to support the strike.
News and Letters Committees issued this solidarity statement:
The courageous [=>]
Marx’s Humanism today
May 15, 2012From the May-June 2012 issue of News & Letters:
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2012-2013
(continued from Part III)
IV. Marx’s Humanism today
“The commodity form of the products of labor became a fetish because of the perverse relationship of subject to object–of living labor to dead capital. Relations between men appear as the relation between things because [=>]
Paths of destruction
May 14, 2012From the May-June 2012 issue of News & Letters:
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2012-2013
III. Paths of destruction
A. From war to war to war
War is one of the rulers’ most potent counter-revolutionary weapons when faced with economic crises and revolt. With a military stretched thin, one eye on China, and the failures of Iraq and [=>]
In the belly of the beast
May 12, 2012From the May-June 2012 issue of News & Letters:
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2012-2013
II. In the belly of the beast
A. Occupy and anti-Occupy
The very new phenomenon of the Occupy Movement brought this moment of revolutionary new beginnings squarely to the U.S. Though not now a revolution, it nevertheless transformed the political atmosphere in the [=>]
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2012-2013
May 11, 2012From the May-June 2012 issue of News & Letters:
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2012-2013
Counter-revolution’s rise shows need for a total philosophy
This special issue carries our Draft Perspectives Thesis, part of our preparation for the national gathering of News and Letters Committees. We publish it because our age is in such total crisis, facing a [=>]
New May-June 2012 issue of News & Letters is online
May 3, 2012Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2012-2013
Counter-revolution’s rise shows need for a total philosophy
Revolution, having forced its way to center stage over the last year and a half, cannot easily be bottled up. That explains the viciousness of the counter-revolution, whether the violent police attacks on occupations from New York to Oakland or the Syrian state’s torture [=>]
Queer Notes, March-April 2012
April 18, 2012From the March-April 2012 issue of News & Letters:
Queer Notes
by Elise
A California Girl Scout put out a YouTube video asking the public to boycott Girl Scout cookies because she objects to a troop admitting a Transgender girl. While three Louisiana troops disbanded over the issue, a national Girl Scouts spokeswoman for the 100-year-old organization [=>]
Iranian critiques ‘anti-imperialist’ Left
April 17, 2012London—Since 2009, the first wave of revolutions in the Middle East was started by the marching of millions in Iran. For many years, the Middle East has been run by the capitalist dictatorial regimes in which the working class is exploited to the maximum. People live in misery while the less than 1% swim in [=>]
Parents, students protest schools hit list
April 15, 2012From the March-April 2012 issue of News & Letters
Chicago—Several hundred people rallied against Chicago’s school “turnarounds” on Feb. 20 and marched to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s house. Many marchers wore stickers over their mouths that read “Silenced” or “Excluded,” symbolizing how the mayor and his school board have run roughshod over schools without listening [=>]
Romanians take to the squares
April 14, 2012Bucharest, Romania—Romania and many European countries are living in times of an unprecedented crisis. Politics of economic austerity combined with populist and nationalistic rhetoric occurring in a constant realm of corruption have increased the growing distance between citizens and authorities throughout the continent. Street protests in various countries showed the level of popular disenchantment with [=>]
Situationists and Absolute Negativity
April 13, 2012Philosophic dialogue
It was good to have Ron Kelch’s Essay, “Absolute Negativity, Occupy and Situationists,” in the Jan.-Feb. News & Letters open an overdue philosophic dialogue. As someone who discovered the work of Guy Debord and Raya Dunayevskaya at about the same time, I’ve given a lot of thought to their relation.
I consider Debord’s work, especially [=>]
Rally for locked out sugar, tire workers
April 12, 2012Chicago—Locked out workers from American Crystal Sugar plants in North Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa joined locked out workers from Cooper Tire in Findlay, Ohio, and came to Chicago on Feb. 25 as one stop in their regional tour to raise support, “From Fargo to Findlay: A Journey for Justice.” Workers from Chicagoland met them at [=>]
Immigrant workers ‘March for Dignity’
April 11, 2012Berkeley, Calif.—On Feb. 17 over 500 people joined a “March for Dignity,” endorsed by Occupy Oakland, in support of the over 200 mostly Latino workers fired the previous month, despite Berkeley being a “sanctuary” city (meaning the city pledged to not cooperate with discrimination based on legal status). An I-9 (Employment Eligibility Verification Form, for [=>]
Justice still overdue for 29 murdered coal miners
April 10, 2012Detroit—A new break in late February signaled a giant step forward in the prosecution of officials at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia, where a methane gas and coal dust explosion two years ago killed 29 miners in the worst mine disaster in 40 years. The break came when federal prosecutors filed [=>]
Women Worldwide, March-April 2012
April 9, 2012by Artemis
Pakistan’s first Academy Award nomination, the documentary Saving Face, follows the successful struggle by the Acid Survivors Foundation to introduce a law ensuring a minimum 14-year prison sentence for perpetrators of acid attacks. There are 150 such attacks, mostly on women and children, reported each year in Pakistan. This type of violence is [=>]