The March-April 2015 issue of News & Letters, Vol. 60, #2, is available on the web.
View the issue online or as pdf.
Lead: From Turkey to USA, women as force and reason fight inhumanity
Another 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.
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.
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.
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.
Detroiters fight to keep their homes
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.
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.
Nihilist Daesh attacks humanity, history
The late Syrian writer Alisar Iram, for one, saw where IS/Daesh were heading, long before they took their hammers into the Mosul Museum.
Letter from Mexico: Guerrero in a national focus
By putting their bodies between the army and the community police, by accepting and sheltering the latter in their town, the community of Petaquillas put their ideas into the struggle as well: the right to autonomy and self-government.
Illinois 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
More
Page 2
Review of Unspeakable Things
Transgender women murdered
Women WorldWide
UltraViolet goes live
Women in solitary
Page 3
CTU strike frames vote
Coal and Its People
Will UAW represent rank and file again?
Page 5
The todayness of Selma, USA, 1965
Philosophic Dialogue: On the 1953 letters
Pages 6-7, Readers’ Views
60 Years of News & Letters
RVs, part 1
RVs, part 2
Page 8
Marx and Transgender
Stop Israeli settlements
King March transformed
Handicap This!
Page 9
Queer Notes
Page 11
Youth in Action
Stop nuclear power’s addiction to $$
Oakland March for Climate Leadership
Review: ‘The Value of Radical Theory’ by Wayne Price
L.A. march against police brutality
Page 12, World in View
Africa, oh Africa!
Do Black lives matter in Brazil?
Threats to Rohingya