Report on the resistance against the closure of “low quality” schools in Detroit, Michigan.
Articles
Reader’s Views: March-April 2017, Part 1
Readers’ Views on Trumpism and the many facets of resistance; Fear of immigrants; Specters of internment; War on Queers; Women Fight Back; Women´s Liberation Debates.
Reader’s Views: March-April 2017, Part 2
Readers’ Views on Hegel’s dialectic and today’s retrogression; Why read N&L?; La Raza unida; Education and freedom; Racism in Burma and U.S.; Voices from behind the bars
World In View: Romanian Spring?
Romanians by the hundreds of thousands took to the streets using theater, poetry, and humor to express demands for change.
World In View: Kashmir resistance
While India has an overwhelming military force occupying Kashmir, a significant part of Kashmir’s population continues to demand independence.
World In View: India’s cash woes
Prime Minister Narendra Modi without warning eliminated the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes that made up 86% of all currency in circulation. Difficulties have been enormous and damage to the economy extreme, especially for poor women.
World In View: South Sudan in crisis
War in South Sudan has placed hundreds of thousands in danger of starvation; tens of thousands are in unsafe refugee camps where women are in constant danger of assault.
Voices from the inside out: Parole is broken
Wisconsin Gov. Walker’s plan to replace the state Parole Commission with a Director of Parole would reduce the likelihood of parole in order to save a mere $1.8 million a year, while spending $200 million a year to keep aging parole-eligible prisoners locked up.
Mass rallies denounce Trump and defend immigrants: Los Angeles
Los Angeles youth march against the xenophobic deportations of Mexicans, Muslims and undocumented workers by Trump.
Mass rallies denounce Trump and defend immigrants: ‘City of immigrants’
March 15, 2017Immigrants, Muslims and their supporters in New York rally against Trump and his immigrant ban and in support of all immigrants.
Standing Rock: the struggle continues
March 14, 2017The fight against the Dakota Access pipeline continues despite military-style destruction of resistance camps. The movement for Native American liberation from colonialism and for stopping the fossil-fuel exploitation that drives climate change is still growing.
Editorial: Yemen as world’s future?
March 13, 2017The U.S. raid that destroyed Yakla in Yemen, killing 25 civilians, drew world focus on slaughter of Yemenis since the 2011 uprising in Change Square in Sana’a toppled the Saleh dictatorship.
Close to 5,000 celebrate International Women’s Day in New York
March 12, 2017On March 8, International Women’s Day, Washington Square Park in New York City was overflowing as close to 5,000 women, many dressed in red, rallied to hear speakers denounce the anti-woman steps taken by the Trump administration and to speak of the need to deepen women’s sense of unity.
Mass rallies denounce Trump and defend immigrants: N.Y. Yemenis strike
Yemeni immigrants walk away from their jobs and rally in support of immigrants and against Trump’s first immigrant ban.
Women take the lead against world retrogression
March 8, 2017An in-depth Marxist-Humanist view of the state of the women’s movement in the U.S. and worldwide as it responds to the rising fascism of U.S. President Trump and other world leaders.
Flint-Selma International Women’s Day Solidarity March
March 7, 2017An International Women’s Day March in Flint in solidarity with the Selma-to-Montgomery March 52 years ago highlighted Flint residents’ ongoing struggle for civil and human rights.
News and Letters Committees Call for Plenum 2017
February 26, 2017Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2017-2018
Detroiters oppose school closings
February 7, 2017Report of the “Emergency Community Meeting on School Closings” in Detroit, MI, taking up and condemning Gov. Rick Snyder’s plan to close 38 schools, most of them in Detroit.
Florida students rally for immigrants
Participant report of a 500-strong student rally at the University of South Florida in Tampa in support of immigrants and calling for divestment from companies whose products harm the environment or which produce weapons and supplies for the military.
Voices From the Inside Out: African-American History Month
February 5, 2017Prisoner Faruq looks at how African-American History Month came to be, stressing the importance of Dr. Carter G. Woodson’s vision and how Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy included a critique of cultural and social relations as well as race, concluding that history is necessary for formerly enslaved people to move towards freedom.
January-February 2017 N&L available on the web
The January-February 2017 issue of News & Letters, Vol. 62, #1, is available on the web.
View the issue online or as pdf.
Lead: Inauguration of neo-fascism faces widespread revolt
The lightning move by Republicans in Congress to prepare to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or Obamacare—before Donald Trump even took office, with only the vaguest idea [=>]
Queer Notes: January-February 2017
February 3, 2017Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe bans discrimination on the basis of gender identity; a Transgender boy is thrown out of a Cub Scout pack in New Jersey; and a vigil held by friends and family of people at the Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, California.
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!
In-person report of demonstration of several hundred in Oakland that was part of a National Day of Action to Free Mumia Now and Free Hep-C Meds for All Prisoners.
Transgender Day of Remembrance
A report of the 18th International Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR), observed in November, which commemorated Transgender and gender-nonconforming people who were murdered over the last 12 months just for being brave enough to be themselves.
Youth in Action, January-February 2017
Student journalists at the University of Kentucky targeted for publicizing a professor’s sexual misconduct towards a student; protests against racism at Cornell University; Maryland middle school students’ creative protest against sexist dress codes; Fees Must Fall Movement in South Africa continues shutting down Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.
Readers’ Views: January-February 2017, Part 2
February 2, 2017Readers’ Views on: Practical and Theoretical Intervention; Syria and Humanism; International Crises; and Prisoners Speak.
Readers’ Views: January-February 2017, Part I
January 31, 2017Readers’ Views on: environmental and social crises; Martin Luther King Day; healthcare crisis, Donald Trump and the election; brutal “justice”; and who reads News & Letters.
Trump and unrest confront China
Just weeks after Donald Trump claimed his Electoral College victory, he put the spotlight on U.S.-China relations by taking a call from Taiwan’s President, creating the possibility that the U.S. might abandon the “one China” policy.
As Others See Us: The new French edition of Marxism and Freedom ‘To retake the historical initiative’
Frédéric Monferrand introduces the new French edition of Marxism and Freedom. This excerpt concentrates on how the work reconstructs the Hegelian philosophical consistency of Marx’s Marxism so that it comes to life–from the 1844 Manuscripts to “Capital,” through the idea that history is the history of the efforts of humanity to make itself free.
Letter from Mexico: Indigenous organize to contest 2018 vote
The National Indigenous Congress in Mexico announced that 430 communities had created an Indigenous Governing Council to prepare for selecting a woman to contest the presidential election in 2018, not with the goal of taking power through the ballot box, but to elicit the voices and actions from below.
Women prisoners: ‘Shout Their Names’
Continued testimony from relatives of prisoners at California Institution for Women who had been pushed into suicide by malign official indifference.
Trump’s American fascism must be defeated!
January 30, 2017Protests against Trump’s Muslim ban, and his reorganization of the National Security Council after the model of Hitler’s Reich Main Security Office, signal a profound struggle to be waged over what kind of society the U.S. will be.
Columbia University stalls union victory
Graduate workers at Columbia University who won representation with the UAW in an historic August 2016 NLRB election face further delays as Columbia seeks to overturn the results, seeking to stall union certification until after Trump stacks the NLRB with anti-union appointees.
Postal workers stop Staples
Postal workers won a major victory. In the face of an international campaign of boycotts, leafleting and picket lines, the multinational company Staples stopped pursuing a deal to provide postal services within their stores.
World in View: Cuban Revolution’s dual heritage
The 1959 Cuban Revolution represented a great divide in Latin America. But the grave contradictions in its aftermath leave a dual heritage that must be comprehended and overcome if we are to work out a truly emancipatory future for Latin America.
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Why Phenomenology? Why now?
Because of the urgency of the question of how to make new beginnings in such a reactionary world situation, we excerpt two of Dunayevskaya’s last philosophical writings, which confront “where to begin” as part of her work on dialectics of philosophy and organization.
World in View: The past is prologue
The first mass Black protest meeting in the U.S. was held at Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church in Philadelphia, in January 1817—200 years ago.
World in View: Brazilians resist return to neoliberalism
Since a neoliberal legislative coup by the Brazilian Congress removed President Rousseff of the Workers’ Party from office, there has been a campaign to reverse many of the social gains implemented during the administrations of Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva and Rousseff.
‘City of Immigrants’ rallies against Trump
January 29, 2017Breaking news: participant report of New York protests against Trump’s anti-immigrant actions.
Women WorldWide: January-February 2017
Latonja S. Richardson’s effort to educate African-American girls about Black women’s achievements; a grassroots movement of mostly women to stop the jailing and killing of mentally ill people in police custody; and the ongoing struggle of refugee women jailed in Berks Country Residential Center to free themselves and their children.
Review: Wombs in Labor
Review of “Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India,” by Amrita Pande. Pande references divergent feminist viewpoints but studies surrogacy as a form of labor so that she goes beyond moral questions to the question of how a labor market in wombs is created and how the laborers experience this market.
Chelsea Manning is not yet free
Chelsea Manning received a Presidential commutation but deserves much more. She is owed a pardon, compensation and an apology
Handicap This!: January-February 2017
India: fight for institutionalized women with disabilities; England: cuts to the personal budgets of disabled people; U.S.: standard of education for many disabled children could be raised if Supreme Court rules that they should receive “meaningful benefit” in education; and Transgender African-American woman Kayla Moore, who had schizophrenia, is killed by police.
Confronting fanatics
January 28, 2017In person report of the demonstration against the anti-abortion fanatics so-called March for Life in Chicago.
Justice still denied for Stephon Watts
The murder by police of African-American autistic boy Stephon Watts shows the need to change by direct action the way this society responds to people with mental and physical disabilities.
Continued discussion of “Prisoners’ Human Rights Movement Blueprint”: What is our true human nature?
Prisoner Baridi continues a dialogue about humanism with Urszula Wislanka sparked by California prisoners’ struggle to end the torture of long-term solitary confinement.
The movie Loving, Karl Marx and ‘real life’
Review of the movie “Loving” and the relationship the review’s author sees to Marxism. The movie recounts the interracial romance and interracial marriage between African-American Mildred Jeter Loving and white Richard Loving and the groundbreaking Supreme Court decision which outlawed the ban on interracial marriage.
Woman as Reason: Syrian women as force and revolutionary Reason
January 26, 2017Women’s Liberationist Terry Moon writes about the revolutionary force and reason of Syrian women including those in Raqqa fighting ISIS, in East Aleppo fighting Bashar al-Assad, in Salamiya and Daraya–documenting the forms they chose to fight for freedom.
Oakland, Detroit march on Martin Luther King Day
Reports by participants of celebrations and protests on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Oakland, Calif., and Detroit, Mich.
The Ghost Ship fire
A view of the fire at the Ghost Ship that takes into account the capitalist nature of rents, evictions, land use, and how youth, by the way the live their lives, are fighting back.