From the November-December 2020 issue of News & Letters
Count every vote demonstration in Oakland, Calif., on Nov. 4, 2020. Photo: Urszula Wislanka/News & Letters
Oakland, Calif.—In virtually every Bay Area city at least several hundred came out to “Count Every Vote” rallies on Nov. 4, the day after the election with the feeling, as one speaker put it, “vacillating between anxiety and hope.” Defeating Trump and protecting the vote only reflected deeper issues raised in Oakland’s Oscar Grant Plaza, called “ground zero for people power” because it was the site of Occupy Oakland.
The “interfaith rally for human integrity” challenged all to imagine defunding the police and fully funding schools, healthcare and the kind of future we want for our children and future generations.
Elder George opened the rally by saying we’re all guests on Ohlone land, where every person is precious, the earth is precious, as is counting every vote. “We’re here,” he said, “to defeat injustice, hate and choose life.” Bay Resistance raised the ongoing struggle against the abuse of immigrants by customs officials at the San Francisco airport and at the ICE Richmond detention facility. #WeAreAllEssential demanded “respect, full pay and fair elections.”
The ongoing theme was human solidarity, the spirit of “I am because you are,” and readiness “to show up for one another to defeat U.S. fascism, racism and white supremacy.”
Everywhere the election was seen not as an end but as a possible opening for the ongoing struggle for a new human society.
—Marxist-Humanist
The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism:
selected writings by Raya Dunayevskaya
To order, click here.
This collection of 17 writings by Raya Dunayevskaya, founder of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S., contains a selection of her writings on the theory of state-capitalism, ranging from her original analysis of Russia as a state-capitalist society in the early 1940s to writings on the global phenomenon of state-capitalism from the 1940s to our era.
“Raya Dunayevskaya’s essays on the nature of capitalist and Soviet societies are full of the kind of scholarly insights and political wisdom that no one interested in these topics can afford to ignore. A mind-stretching exercise for those willing to risk it!”
—Bertell Ollman