From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: The African Revolutions and the World Economy

September 19, 2023

The contributions and contradictions of the African revolutions of the 20th century speak to today’s very different situation. These excerpts from Dunayevskaya’s ‘Philosophy and Revolution, from Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao’ aim not only to recapture the greatness of those revolutions, but also grapple with why they retrogressed after independence, so as to aid the creation of new beginnings now.

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Essay: What is Socialism? Socialism and ecology

August 31, 2019

The last of a series of essays on What is Socialism? This time, taking on the relation of anticapitalistic social transformation and climate chaos, in order to grasp what is essential to capitalism and its destructive environmental effects, and what kind of new society can transcend that.

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Hong Kong masses fight rulers’ grab for power

An account of the development of the Hong Kong protests to block a proposed extradition bill, which could send residents of Hong Kong to face pre-determined injustice before Beijing courts, tracing them back to the 1989 Tiannamen Square Massacre.

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Karol Modzelewski 1937-2019

June 26, 2019

Modzelewski‘s living legacy is that he never wavered, in theory or practice, from the principle of a freedom-filled future rooted in the self-activity of the masses of workers themselves.

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Turkey’s Erdoğan – the pious dictator

September 7, 2016

A view of what the failed coup in Turkey has wrought, including mass arrests of teachers, trade unionists, doctors, medical personnel, and others as Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, makes a grab for total power.

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From the writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Racism, war and Muhammad Ali

July 4, 2016

On the same day that General William Westmoreland waved the flag before Congress, Muhammad Ali refused to be inducted into the Army. While the general was applauded even by the doves, Ali was, within hours, stripped of his title of World Heavyweight Boxing Champion. War exposed the open nerve—”the Black Question”—which has always been the touchstone of U.S. history. It placed American civilization on trial before the world much more seriously than the “war crimes tribunal” in Stockholm.

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‘Workless’ capitalism?

Universal Basic Income is posed by some as a solution to the robotization of work and a “workless society” but this ignores Marx’s liberatory vision of a society in which labor is completely transformed so as to become life’s prime want.

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Readers’ Views, May-June 2016

May 17, 2016

Readers’ Views on Women as Reason; Harriet Tubman; Racism and Internationalism; Bisexual Health; Trans Liberation and Feminism; Chinese State vs. Workers; Nuclear Arms Threaten All; Ireland’s Red Banner; Remembering Olga Domanski; Haggard but Not Tired; Voices from Behind the Bars.

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Editorial: Putin’s retrogressionism

December 10, 2015

Putin found a formula: to participate in genocide while claiming to be fighting “terrorism.” This says everything about the nature of his retrogressive rule, and about the hypocrisy of the U.S. and Europe

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From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: The dialectic and women’s liberation

April 30, 2015

The article excerpts a summary of a talk by Dunayevskaya to a conference on Women’s Liberation in Detroit. The purpose of the meeting was to help Dunayevskaya work out the final chapter of her book then in progress, Philosophy and Revolution. That last chapter would take up the “New Passions and New Forces” for the reconstruction of society. The Conference was also the beginning of the News & Letters—Women’s Liberation Committee.

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Celebrating 60 years: Marx spoke to 1975 economic crisis

In celebrating the first 60 years of News and Letters Committees, we reprint excerpts from the Draft Perspectives for 1975-76 by Raya Dunayevskaya, the first printed in News & Letters.

THE MOVEMENT KNOWS, of course, that the class enemy is at home, within each country. It knows full well that each existing state power is weighted down with fear of revolution. And it does not fail to appreciate that, no matter how deep the intra-imperialist rivalries, capitalist class solidarity holds tightest and strongest against its own people.

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Dialectics of revolution: American roots and world Humanist concepts, Part II

September 14, 2014

From the November-December 2010 News & Letters

From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya

Editor’s note: For the centenary of Raya Dunayevskaya’s birth, we present excerpts from her March 21, 1985, lecture at the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, at the opening of a three-month exhibition of the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection (RDC). The [=>]

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Another look at Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Mind’

From the January-February 2002 News & Letters

From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya

Editor’s Note: We publish here a discussion of what Marx considered Hegel’s greatest philosophic work—The Phenomenology of Mind. The first piece is a letter written by Raya Dunayevskaya to an Iranian colleague on June 26, 1986[1] ; the original can be found in the [=>]

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On THE Philosophic Point and Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy

March 14, 2014

To understand today we must begin at the beginning, that is to say, as always, with Marx. Specifically the two periods are: the first and the last, the first being the philosophic moment, 1844 [Marx’s Humanist Essays or Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts]. That laid the ground for all future development. The last being the long hard trek and process of developments–all the revolutions, as well as philosophic-political-economic concretizations, culminating in Capital. Yet the full organizational expression of all came only then, i.e., the last decade, especially the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. Why only then?

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Readers’ Views, January-February 2013, Part 2

March 10, 2013

ARCHIVES AS LIVING

I have been following the readings for the 2012-2013 Marxist-Humanist discussions with great enthusiasm. I was especially energized by the “Women as force and reason of revolution” selections. Raya Dunayevskaya’s 1970 piece “The Women’s Liberation Movement as Reason and as Revolutionary Force” was fresh and relevant to today. This is no surprise [=>]

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Absolute Negativity, Occupy and Situationists

February 2, 2012

Essay
by Ron Kelch

[Absolute negativity] is the simple point of the negative relation to self, the innermost source of all activity, of all animate and spiritual self-movement, the dialectical soul that everything true possesses and through which alone it is true; for on this subjectivity alone rests the sublating of the opposition between concept and reality. –Hegel on second negation in [=>]

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Greeks fight austerity

December 3, 2011

From the November-December 2011 issue of News & Letters:

Greeks fight austerity

by Gerry Emmett

As Greek lawmakers passed a new austerity package on Oct. 19, rage boiled over in cities and towns throughout the country. A two-day general strike saw hundreds of thousands demonstrating against measures demanded by the European Union and [=>]

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Hungary’s red sludge tsunami

November 19, 2010

From the Nov.-Dec. 2010 issue of News & Letters:

Hungary’s red sludge

Red sludge flooded several villages in Hungary on Oct. 4, killing nine people, sending 80-90 to the hospital, destroying animals, houses and cars, and making farmland unusable. It killed all life in the Marcal River, a tributary of the Danube. The sludge, a by-product of [=>]

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Bordiga’s Marxism, no way to unite theory and practice

August 22, 2010

Bordiga’s Marxism, no way to unite theory and practice

Necessity is an evil, but there is no necessity to live under the control of necessity. Everywhere the paths to freedom are open.
–Marx, Doctoral Thesis, 1841

Loren Goldner’s 1991 article, “Communism Is the Material Human Community: Amadeo Bordiga Today” was recently the topic of discussion among a [=>]

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