In acquainting readers with News & Letters over its first 60 years, we spotlight here the regular feature “Coal and its People” which featured the voices of coal miners, many from West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Articles
Detroiters fight to keep their houses
The number of Detroiters helping their neighbors resolve property tax foreclosure has grown by leaps and bounds as community groups all over the city host meetings on what can be done.
HandicapThis, March-April 2015
Several hundred people blocked streets; Women with disabilities dumped into institutions; Judge hits mentally disabled man.
Budget cuts are death sentences!
Rauner’s $1.5 billion Medicaid cuts will have a devastating impact on those who depend on this program for their healthcare. “Some people will die from these cuts,” a woman at the rally said.
Editorial: Syriza’s many challenges
The electoral victory of Greece’s Syriza party was an important first step in resisting austerity imposed on the Greek and European working classes as capitalism’s response to its own intractable crisis. Nothing could be in greater contradiction to the movement that lifted Syriza to prominence than the parliamentary alliance with the racist, theocratic Independent Greeks party.
Greece: postmodernism in power
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.
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Miners inspired Marxist-Humanism
From the News and Letters pamphlet The Coal Miners’ General Strike of 1949-50 and the Birth of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S. we excerpt from Raya Dunayevskaya’s “The Emergence of a New Movement from Practice that Is Itself a Form of Theory,” on miners’ contributions to the philosophic birth of Marxist-Humanism.
Women in solitary
A woman prisoner talks about how women experience Security Housing Units (SHUs) at the California Institution for Women (CIW).
Transgender women murdered
This year is setting a horrible record for the number of Transgender women killed across the U.S.
UltraViolet goes live
UltraViolet, a mostly online petition-generating organization, recently went out into the real world by holding 25 or so “meet and greet” events in 15 different states. The one I went to was on the north side of Chicago.
Women WorldWide, March-April 2015
A roundup of short news of women including the death of Geraldine Blankenship, an activist in the 1936-37 Flint, Mich., sit-down strike against General Motors; the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation; and the opening of a Mother Jones Museum in Mt. Olive, Ill., in June 2015.
Review of Unspeakable Things
Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution by Laurie Penny (Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., 2014) describes how neoliberalism is the new face of capitalist patriarchy. Even feminism has been repackaged once again as the opportunity for middle-class women to climb the corporate ladder and earn more money with which to buy more products.
Solidarity with striking oil workers
The first national oil refinery strike since 1980 manifested safety-related demands by the workers and garnered much labor, community, and environmentalist support.
Workshop Talks: Reclaim our labor
Working in healthcare has been transformed in a very alienating way. The workplace is drowning in fancy hi-tech machines. Cadres of bureaucrats spend their working hours promoting the product of healthcare with marketing campaigns. The rank and file hear daily admonitions to smile more and are told, “Just be glad you have a job.” Bureaucrats preach “customers come first,” while cutting service and staffing. Hospital and HMO executives are in a race to eliminate labor as much as possible in their “product.”
From Turkey to USA, women as force & reason fight inhumanity
March 5, 2015Another savage sexual assault and murder—this time in Turkey—brought forth thousands of demonstrators, mostly women, throughout the country and beyond. Özgecan Aslan was a student taking a bus home. Worldwide, women are not only railing against sexism and challenging men to change what is often deadly behavior and when not deadly, deeply oppressive; they are as well explicitly extending their critique to the state itself.
News and Letters Committees Call for Plenum 2015
March 3, 2015Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2015-2016
Özgecan Aslan: Sexual assault and murder in Turkey spark widespread outrage, demonstrations
February 17, 2015Preview of article on women’s oppression and freedom struggles worldwide for March-April issue. Comment now so that your thoughts can be taken into account in the finished article.
Los Zapatistas y los padres y estudiantes de Ayotzinapa: Una unión decisiva
February 16, 2015Carta Politico-Filosofica, Num. 3 praxisamericalatina@gmail.com
Un nuevo momento en la dialéctica de la lucha
LOS ZAPATISTAS Y LOS PADRES Y ESTUDIANTES DE AYOTZINAPA: UNA UNIÓN DECISIVA
Eugene Gogol
Desde [=>]
Aceptando el desafío de este nuevo momento en México: De la represión a la resistencia a la rebelión
Carta Politico-Filosofica, Num. 2 praxisamericalatina@gmail.com
¿Que hacer? Una dialetica de la organizacion y la filosofia
ACEPTANDO EL DESAFÍO DE ESTE NUEVO MOMENTO EN MÉXICO:
DE LA REPRESIÓN A LA [=>]
On Greece and Syriza: Against the inhumanity of austerity, we pose the fullness of human liberation!
February 4, 2015The electoral victory of Greece’s Syriza represents resistance to brutal austerity. Alarms are raised by Syriza’s alliance with the racist, theocratic Independent Greeks party.
January-February 2015 N&L available on the web
February 3, 2015The January-February 2015 issue of News & Letters, Vol. 60, #1, is available on the web.
View the issue online or as pdf.
Lead: Revolt surges against racist system destroying Black lives
Protests erupted following the decision by a St. Louis County grand jury not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for the cold-blooded murder of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Thousands marched under the [=>]
World in View: Cuba-U.S. Relations
February 1, 2015Where do we go from here? The U.S. has certainly not given up bringing down the Castros; only the method is different. The pulls of neoliberal capitalism, the world market, are now the weapons.
World in View: Sri Lanka election
The Tamils have faced a military occupation of their region for almost a decade. The Sinhalese majority (70%) have as well grown restive under Rajapaksa rule. Crime, a drug mafia, nepotism and corruption characterized his rule.
World in View: Massacre in Nigeria
The terrorist cult Boko Haram has made its name through massacre, kidnap and rape. On Jan. 7, news from the town of Baga in northeast Nigeria, near Lake Chad, indicated that the largest killing yet had taken place, the massacre of over 2,000 people.
World in View: Zapatistas and the Ayotzinapa rebellion
January 31, 2015More than three months after the forced disappearance of their 43 sons—students of the Normal Rural School Raúl Isidro Burgos in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero—their fathers and mothers continue their protests. In mid-November the parents arrived in Chiapas to share their pain and outrage with the Zapatista Indigenous communities.
Philosophic Dialogue on Dunayevskaya’s May 12, 1953, Letter on Hegel’s Absolutes and Gramsci’s “organic party”
Unlike vanguard parties, our goal is not the incorporation of a cadre into a certain fixed structure that Lenin advocated for in 1902 and rejected in 1905, but the development of “organic intellectuals,” thinkers and philosophers from the ranks of the Black masses as vanguard, women, youth, and workers.
Read and write for News & Letters
Read and write for News & Letters!
Youth in Action, January-February 2015
From the January-February 2015 issue of News & Letters
by Michael Gilbert
Angry youth in Kashmir hit the streets in November, raising anti-India and pro-freedom slogans as they carried the bullet-ridden bodies of two youths in a procession to Nowgam Chowk. Protesters demanded punishment for soldiers who had opened fire without [=>]
Queer Notes, January-February 2015
From the January-February 2015 issue of News & Letters
by Dee Perkins
The late December suicide of 17-year-old Transgender youth Leelah Alcorn has shaken the public with an intimate glimpse into the torment of gender dysphoria in a too frequently uncomprehending world. In the suicide note she posted to Tumblr, the [=>]
Transgender Day of Remembrance
In cities across the world, the names of Transgender people who were murdered or committed suicide were read out at rallies on or around Nov. 20, the Transgender Day of Remembrance.
Handicap This! January-February 2015
January 30, 2015Missouri school district forced to return student’s cane; memorial for people with disabilities systematically murdered by Nazis; people with disabilities enslaved in South Korea’s salt fields.
ADAPT warns Rauner
Illinois Governor Rauner has made his living out of exploiting the disabled and elderly in his many nursing homes.
What solitary means
Nothing can prepare you for entering the Security Housing Unit (SHU). It’s a world unto itself where cold, quiet and emptiness come together, seeping into your bones, then eventually the mind.
Readers’ Views, January-February 2015, Part 2
Dunayevskaya’s letters on Hegel’s Absolutes; Bhopal toxic disaster; Voices from behind the bars
Readers’ Views, January-February 2015, Part 1
From Ferguson to Staten Island; Revolutionary Rojava; Youth Protest; Violence Against Women; Detroit Solidarity; Paris March; Recalling Mary Jo
Enough is enough: This movement is about humanity
On Dec. 4 we marched all over Boston for Black Lives Matter and all traffic we passed was stopped. There was so much humanity that night.
Journey to Death’s door
January 29, 2015Stepping across the threshold of this particular Death’s door, I was greeted by the spectacle of ancient and sick prisoners in wheelchairs being rolled silently through the hallways, looking like so many ghosts in some haunted asylum.
Chicago teachers’ strike reviewed
Review of “Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity” by Micah Uetricht and “How to Jump-Start Your Union: Lessons from the Chicago Teachers” from Labor Notes.
Murderous King Coal on trial
Don Blankenship—owner of the Upper Big Branch Massey mine in West Virginia in 2010 when the mine exploded, killing 29 coal miners—was indicted. Nevertheless, the coal lobby still exerts considerable power in the state, and uses that power to support mountaintop mining and to thwart environmentally progressive programs that try to minimize the many dangerous aspects of coal mining.
Lima climate talks betray future
The 20th “Conference of Parties” was held in Lima, Peru, and, rather than action, issued a “Call for Climate Action” without binding commitments or effective monitoring. The U.S. and other nations as good as admitted the bankruptcy of capitalism by arguing that binding commitments had no chance of being adopted.
Letter from Mexico: Mexican protests deepen
At the end of the Nov. 20 mass demonstration in Mexico City in support of Ayotzinapa’s missing students, acts of repression from state forces became more open and intense.
Essay: ‘We all can’t breathe’–Reflections on Marx’s Humanism and Fanon
As a Black man, I asked myself: Why—through the dialectical crises of the social relations of production and the subsequent implosion of multiple outlived modes of production—has racism persisted? Why, despite the relations of property literally bursting asunder, does racism survive? How and why does racism, sexism, homophobia survive revolution after revolution? Will we again be left behind after the next revolution?
Women as Reason: 60 years of News & Letters, the women’s dimension
January 28, 2015As we celebrate 60 years of publishing News & Letters, a look back at the Women’s Liberation Movement encountering Marxist-Humanism and how the women’s movement was anticipated as well as documented in its pages. It is an ongoing perspective.
WOMAN’S VIEWPOINT
In celebrating 60 years of publishing News & Letters we reprint an article from the first, June 24, 1955, issue written about what the “women’s page” in News & Letters should be.
“NO WOMEN WANTED”
In celebrating 60 years of publishing News & Letters we reprint an article from the first, June 24, 1955, issue written by a columnist for the paper about her confrontation with a union official in her factory.
NJERI — LEADER OF AFRICAN WOMEN
In celebrating 60 years of publishing News & Letters we reprint an article about Kenyan woman activist Njeri from the first issue, dated June 24, 1955.
Women WorldWide January-February 2015
A roundup of women’s news including the beating death of Tugce Albayrak who was attacked for stopping the harassment of two young girls in Germany; the attack against the film, “Vessel” at the Abortion Rights Festival in Stockholm, Sweden; and how at the Seeds of Peace International Camp in Maine the most intense conversations were among women.
Men Explain Things to Me — a review
“Men Explain Things to Me” by Rebecca Solnit is a book of seven essays that eloquently describe how patriarchy attempts to distract us from the fact that seemingly isolated incidents and seemingly separate oppressions are part of a system of profound and devastating violence.
May 20, 1953, letter on Absolute Mind
Raya Dunayevskaya’s May 20, 1953, letter is one of the historic-philosophic writings included in The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism.
Editorial: Never-ending U.S. wars
The formal end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan at the end of 2014 was just in time for post-war wars to begin in Afghanistan itself, as well as in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen.