Marxist-Humanist Bob McGuire looks through history to Marx’s relationship to labor and the Black movement for freedom and then to our day and the relationship of Marxist-Humanism to labor and the Black struggle for freedom in speaking to the question many are asking today: What is socialism?
Raya Dunayevskaya’s archives column explores taking “a further look into the [1976] economy, to measure the depth of the recession, not for statistical purposes, but for the relationship of dialectics of liberation to economic ills.” It bears striking relevance for what is happening in 2019.
Adele reviews “Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight Over Women’s Work,” by Jenny Brown.
Ex-Lyft driver reports on the strike of Uber and Lyft drivers in California and explains the hell that ridesharing businesses are foisting on their workers, the environment, and their customers.
The horrendous oil pipeline explosion in Tlahuelilpan, Mexico, which killed over 100 campesinos and injured many more, has shaken all of Mexico. This was a tragedy long in the making.
Readers’ Views on: Rosa Luxemburg’s revolutionary life; the Green New Deal; and voices from behind bars.
Matthew Desmond’s book “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” is an important contribution to understanding the workings of exploitative housing, although he fails to appreciate that, under the capitalist system, the best-intentioned programs will always become conduits to extract money from the poor.
The retreat from even modest efforts to control nuclear weapons has brought humanity closer than ever to annihilation. President Donald Trump’s suspension of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) with Vladimir Putin’s Russia gins up an already accelerating new arms race.
Readers’ Views regarding: Thought-diving into revolution in permanence; murky waters[ the Church and oppression; why read N&L; and voices from behind bars.
Readers’ Views addressing: challenging fascism across all borders; charter teachers strike; pitfalls of bourgeois politics; women on the march; prison strikes big and small; and the racist criminal injustice system.
The Syrian Revolution has been the physical and intellectual battlefield that defines our time. As early as 2012 it was clear that what happened in Syria would determine the next stage of world history.
Marxist-Humanist Editorial that takes up Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, including his attack on the landless workers movement, on the environment, on those who are LGBTQ, and his support for capitalism and neo-fascism.
A Marxist-Humanist analysis of the state of the U.S. economy and the revolt of labor in the wake of country-wide teachers’ strikes, an historically long government shutdown, and an unsteady, uncertain worldwide economy.
We post this Dec. 24, 2018, commentary by Mohammed Elnaiem as a discussion article which begins: “On these holidays, we mourn for the Kurds in Syria who hopelessly fear an upcoming Turkish invasion, we mourn for the yellow vests in France who rise up in an empire built on colonial wealth but which continues to make destitute its working and unemployed poor…”
Readers’ Views on: Capitalism vs. the Planet; Anti-Semitism’s Inhumanity; Kavanaugh Travesty; Youth Rock!; Freedom Movements vs. Fascism across the Globe; Catholic Church Crisis; Voices from behind Bars
Given the moral bankruptcy of Congress and Donald Trump, it was no surprise that Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court was pushed through Congress. The surprise was the vibrancy, strength and determination of the fight against that nomination…
With hate crimes, anti-Semitism, racism and anti-immigrant xenophobia on the rise, Israel’s “Jewish nation-state” law and fascism brewing globally, we excerpt two pieces addressing roots of these phenomena in capitalism’s crises.
Adele reviews “How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosures to Trump,” by Laura Briggs, which discusses “reproductive labor,” “the work necessary to the reproduction of human life.”
Readers’ Views on: Marx’s New Moments and Today’s Need for Revolution and Philosophy; Fetish of Property vs. Humanity and the Planet; Voices from Behind Bars
Marxist-Humanist analysis of the Trump-Kim summit and G7 summit shows Trump is not charting a path to world peace but rather toward a more openly brutal world order. .
We look at the world economic situation that must be changed: the role of state-capitalism, labor, climate change, the law of value, exploitation, alienation, and revolution and counter-revolution in Syria.
Part I of the Draft Perspectives Thesis: Trump’s war show.
The real threat of war reflects Trump’s extremeness as a product of failing capitalism, which is not an aberration but an index of the nature of U.S. capitalist imperialism.
Prisoner Faruq writes of “those of us confined behind prison walls [who] recognize the pressing need to unify the prison population in the different prisons.”
OFFICIAL CALL FOR CONVENTION
to Work Out Marxist-Humanist Perspectives for 2018-2019
February 25, 2018
To All Members of News and Letters Committees
Dear Friends:
The deeply ingrained rape culture, already widely known but often hushed up, has been exposed in the broadest way yet by the #MeToo movement. How deep and total is the needed uprooting [=>]
Through a view of his childhood as ethnic Chinese in Burma, Htun Lin takes up the plight of the Rohingya and the betrayal of democratic ideals by Aung San Suu Kyi.
At the second gathering of “ConSciences for Humanity,” scientists shared with the Zapatista Indigenous communities their views of “Science in the face of the wall [capitalism].”
Since 2012 Australia has held around 2,000 refugees and asylum seekers in brutal detention camps. Afghans, Iranians, Iraqis, Uighurs, Rohingya and Kurds, thrown together, have been subjected to stress, violence, and rape.
Readers’ views on: U.S. Racism on trial, the right’s crocodile tears, creeping fascism, climate change, nuclear alarms, teachers as labor, Pat Hunt Presente! and Judy and Dan presente!
Readers’ Views on: Puerto Rico:Trump’s Katrina; LGBTQ in Australia; Transgender in Texas; Women’s Liberation; Racism in Canada; Detroit and “Detroit”; Labor and Robots; Haitian Revolt; Why Read N&L?; and a Correction.
Puerto Rico is devastated by hurricanes, with climate change a factor, and by the administration’s racist malign neglect, atop an existing debt crisis the masses did not create. Real solidarity came from below. .
A participant reports on a series of protests, rallies and marches of thousands taking place in September in Los Angeles against President Donald Trump’s attacks on youthful immigrants called Dreamers by ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival Program.
We condemn the racist response of the Trump administration to the desperate situation in Puerto Rico. What we are seeing there is nothing less than a physical and moral apocalypse.
An in-person report of the recent devastating earthquakes in Mexico and how social conditions including capitalism, government corruption, etc., negatively affect rescue efforts; how everyday people’s self-organization makes a significant difference.
On Aug. 27 in Berkeley, Calif., thousands came out to protest an “alt-right,” “No to Marxism,” demonstration including Black Lives Matter, feminists, Muslims, immigrants, leftists, and ordinary citizens against “hate.”
Readers’ Views: Marx’s concept of theory; we are not a game; voices from behind bars.
A Marxist-Humanist analysis of the history and meaning of the rising of the right-wing neo-Nazi white supremacist movement, its relationship to President Donald Trump and his administration, and its challenge to the freedom forces arrayed against it who are fighting for a humanist world. .
Readers’ Views on Cooperative Form of Labor vs. Abstract Labor; Marx vs. Trump-Putin; Voices From Behind Bars
Through the study of theory and philosophy and by solidarizing and striking, prisoners seek a humanist society that rejects Donald Trump, his plutocratic regime and the U.S. criminal injustice system. .
As the Trump administration ramps up deportations and related abuses, strikes, protests, and sanctuary cities are proliferating. The oppression of a lower caste of workers and the discrimination and violence faced by immigrants present a challenge to the Left, labor and the rest of humanity.
Trump’s barbarism in power is a crisis for bourgeois democracy and revolutionary thought. Opposition from below is far deeper than bourgeois opposition to Trump. To have efficacy today, Marx’s body of ideas must be grasped and projected as a whole. The movement from theory needs to meet the challenge of history, of freedom struggles and revolution.
An 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.
Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2017-2018
Prisoner 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reports from the huge Women’s March from participants in Chicago, Ill., Detroit, Mich., Oakland, Calif., Nashville, Tenn., Memphis, Tenn., Los Angeles, Calif., and New York City.
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 of what is to replace it, and with full knowledge that a large majority of Americans oppose the repeal of its most important provisions—gave a sign of how far the new single-party government intends to roll the clock back, with dizzying speed.
A woman ex-Uber driver details how they exploit their drivers with late fees, turning off your car, and their desire to get rid of their drivers altogether.