Lead
Obama’s re-election doesn’t end clash of two worlds
The two worlds of the rulers and the ruled shone through the suffocating blanket of propaganda surrounding the election in which Barack Obama won a second term. A pronounced gender gap and long lines at the polls in African-American and Latino areas reflected the determination to defeat the reactionary Republicans and retain the first Black President. The biggest defeats were handed to the Tea Party and the Religious Right, notably with votes in four states in favor of marriage equality.
At the same time a number of protests immediately made it clear that the struggle continues.
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya
The Cuban Missile Crisis and its test of movements’ negative character
On the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, we present Raya Dunayevskaya’s analysis of how it tested not only the rulers’ rash folly but the anti-war movement’s short-mindedness–a lesson still urgent today.
“Above all we oppose war not only as ‘againsters’ but primarily because we are for a totally new society, on new, on human beginnings, free from exploitation and discrimination, where the population to a man has the destiny in his own hands, beginning with the workers at the point of production.”
Essay
The 200th anniversary of Hegel’s absolute method
In 1812 Hegel made a startling proclamation, and demonstration in his Science of Logic, of an absolute method in which the concept (Notion) determines itself. The philosophical world and the world of revolutionary theory continue to be alternately attracted and repulsed by Hegel’s assertion in his 1812 Preface that “a given particular is not subsumed under this universal” of absolute method. Rather, Hegel says, absolute method is the movement through which the particular, the given, the concrete determines itself.
Editorial
Stop the war on Gaza!
Israel’s attack must be opposed. “Operation Cast Lead” in 2008, Israel’s last war in Gaza, killed thousands, including hundreds of civilians–many of them children. For a government that includes Avigdor Lieberman, the advocate of Palestinian genocide, to carry on a new war against Palestinians is absolutely unacceptable and must be opposed by all people of conscience. That government must be overthrown.
Workshop Talks
Just who are the makers and takers
The unparalleled billions of dollars spent in the 2012 elections, in the midst of the Great Recession, drowned us in endless ads. Yet Mitt Romney was defeated in no small measure by workers in Ohio and elsewhere.
Woman as Reason
The Left and Malala
In a recent blog post, Meredith Tax takes up the delegation of Code Pink, a U.S. peace group that purports to be feminist, to Pakistan, where they marched with former cricket champion turned politician Imran Khan to the borders of South Waziristan, a Taliban stronghold but had not a word to say about the many hundreds killed in Pakistan by the Taliban, or those killed in Mumbai, India, by Lashkar-e-Taiba, part of a coalition of terrorist groups supported by their host and guide, Imran Khan.
World in View
Yemen: famine, drones and freedom
Demands for freedom and dignity drove the Arab Spring. In Tunisia, in Tahrir Square in Egypt, in Daraa, Syria, and elsewhere these weren’t abstract, but concrete efforts to create new human relations under conditions of dictatorship, capitalist crisis, endemic corruption, spiraling food prices and environmental degradation. While bourgeois commentators have rushed to declare the Arab Spring over, Yemen reveals that all these issues remain determinants.
Special offer! Just off the press:
Marxist-Humanist writings on the Middle East
From the Foreword: The Arab Spring can become a real turning point in human history. …. In publishing this collection of Raya Dunayevskaya’s writings on the Middle East and revolution in permanence, we hope to be part of the worldwide dialogue that will move the revolution, and humanity, beyond the inhuman system of capitalism with its eternal threats of war and deprivation, its racism, sexism and heterosexism. These horrors must end. In no respect are we willing to be passive spectators at yet another wrong turning of history.