The Left Agenda at the Maidan and After

June 30, 2014

On April 12, 2014, Kyiv hosted a conference The Left and the Maidan which brought together activists from anarchist, socialist and communist organisations that had been involved in the Maidan movement in late 2013–early 2014. The large number of participating activists who represent the various political groups and initiatives evolving as a part of the Maidan movement is clear evidence against the alleged absence of the Left in the Maidan movement. The discussion was centered on why the Left failed to take an organisational form and become as visible a factor of the Maidan as the right.

Readers’ Views, May-June 2014

May 25, 2014

LABOR AND IMMIGRATION

On April 8, about 100 people, the majority young Latinas/os, gathered in front of Los Angeles City Hall to protest the deportation of immigrants. Obama’s administration has aggressively deported 2,000,000 immigrants. We held signs reading: “Not Even One More!” and “No Separation of Family!” Separation of family members has serious adverse effects [=>]

Equal Pay Day rally

May 16, 2014

Report on a rally in Chicago for Equal Pay Day.

Women Worldwide, May-June 2014

Women’s Memorial March in Canada, and Save Wiyabi Project; premiere of docudrama film “¡PODER!” on girls in Concepcion Chiquirichapa, Guatemala; Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s “Stop Telling Me to Smile” project.

Godless Americana

May 15, 2014

Review by Adele of “Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels,” by Sikivu Hutchinson (Infidel Books, 2013).

India’s Modi: ‘free market’ authoritarian

May 14, 2014

Narendra Modi states openly that his program will be to unleash “free market” reform coupled with authoritarianism in government. Modi’s history tells us what his authority portends: the massacre of 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat.

Birth control and being human

May 12, 2014

The war against birth control is a war against the idea that women are actually human beings who have a right to control their fertility and plan when and if to have a child.

Revolt and retrogression at home

May 6, 2014

Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2014-2015: From the U.S. to Ukraine, crises and revolts call for philosophy. II. Revolt and retrogression at home. A. Women under attack. B. Many dimensions of revolt

May-June 2014 News & Letters online

May 2, 2014

May-June 2014 News & Letters online: “From the U.S. to Ukraine, crises and revolts call for philosophy”; “Unchaining the revolutionary dialectic”; much more…

Readers’ Views, March-April 2014, Part 2

April 9, 2014

Readers’ Views from the March-April 2014 issue of News & Letters, part 2.

Women Worldwide, March-April 2014

March 25, 2014

Women worldwide, March-April 2014: Sexism in chemistry profession; Shulamit Aloni; Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot.

‘Sex Workers Unite’

March 23, 2014

“Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk,” by Melinda Chateauvert, is a valuable history of the Sex Workers’ Rights Movement in the U.S. from its start in the 1960s to the present and its intersection with other social justice movements.

Court, fanatics besiege clinics

March 22, 2014

In June the U.S. Supreme Court will decide if buffer zones around clinics that offer abortion are a violation of freedom of speech. Court watchers say they look ready to rule the zones illegal. That would be a tragedy.

Ukraine and Bosnia: historic uprisings

March 16, 2014

In Ukraine, an unexpected eruption of mass struggle led to the overthrow of Ukraine’s corrupt, oligarchic, and ultimately murderous President Viktor Yanukovych. In Bosnia, at the same time, massive, nationwide discontent with the corrupt system left in place when the 1995 Dayton Accords partitioned the country has led to the equally unexpected creation of new forms of democratic organization.

Women fight for freedom against growing retrogression

March 13, 2014

While experiences in the squares of the Arab Spring, in Turkey’s Gezi Park, in the streets of Spain and Greece, and in the U.S. Occupy Movements have revealed moments of what new human relations between women and men could look like, those moments of hope and exhilaration have been followed by devastating reaction and retrogression.

March-April 2014 News & Letters online

March 12, 2014

March-April 2014 News & Letters: Women fight for freedom against growing retrogression; On THE Philosophic Point and Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy; Capitalist economy is failing; Ukraine and Bosnia: historic uprisings; more…

War against abortion is war against women (Readers’ Views)

March 8, 2014

A pedestrian walking by our clinic summed up the absurdity of anti-abortionists: “Why would you take life advice from someone screaming standing on a sidewalk corner?!”

A.H., Clinic escort

Midwest

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Here’s my favorite quote from our favorite protester this morning “I bet you guys voted for that Halfrican American Obama!” What is wrong [=>]

Women Worldwide, January-February 2014

February 19, 2014

Doris Lessing; Margherita Hack; gender segregation at UK universities

Review: Sweetening the Pill

February 17, 2014

Sweetening the Pill: or How We Got Hooked on Hormonal Birth Control by Holly Grigg-Spall has provoked controversy among feminists, especially over its contention that the birth control pill and other hormonal contraception are unsafe.

Woman as Reason: Language and death in Juárez

February 12, 2014

The way we construct experience with language has effects on its transmission and on the configuration of subjectivity, not only in aesthetics and ethics, but also in understanding politics. That is the case in the crimes committed against women in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua and other states in Mexico.

Women Worldwide, Nov.-Dec. 2013

November 27, 2013

Women Worldwide: Ada Lovelace Day; Diana Nyad; FEMEN

Christian Nation

November 26, 2013

Review of “Christian Nation: a Novel” by Frederic C. Rich, a work of speculative fiction in which the religious Right takes over the U.S., turning it into a brutally totalitarian state.

Sudan’s Arab Spring

November 25, 2013

Women are not only fighters in Sudan’s battles to overthrow al-Bashir, but they are also determined to continue the great tradition of women of the Arab Spring: to make sure that their revolution does not stop until all human relationships are transformed.

Readers’ Views, September-October 2013, Part I

October 11, 2013

Readers’ Views, September-October 2013, Part I

Rise Up Texas

September 27, 2013

An overflow crowd at Bluestockings Bookstore in New York City heard Hallie Boas speak on “Come and Take It: How the Fight to Protect Wom¬en’s Healthcare Is Launching a New Wave of Feminism in Texas.”

Women Worldwide, September-October 2013

September 26, 2013

Women Worldwide: Turkey anti-fundamentalist demonstrations; Egypt sexual violence; California in vitro fertilization; Saudi Arabia segregation.

The Child Catchers

September 25, 2013

Review of The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce, which explores the religious Right’s renewed enthusiasm for domestic and international adoption.

Latin America in view, September-October 2013

September 23, 2013

Latin America in View, Sept.-Oct. 2013: Ecuador oil drilling; Brazil rapes; Mexico Escuelita Zapatista.

Egypt: Dual fascisms test women

September 8, 2013

For Egyptian women to experience freedom, the revolution has to continue, and for that to happen the revolutionaries have to oppose both Morsi and Sisi’s bloodthirsty military and fight for the vision of a new society that sustained them in Tahrir Square.

Turkey, Syria and Iran at crossroads of world revolt

July 2, 2013

The mass protests in Turkey, the presidential election in Iran and, above all, the continuing struggle for the Syrian revolution express the depth of today’s social crisis. These crises are interpenetrated and inseparable. The stakes are high.

July-August 2013 issue of News & Letters is now online

July 1, 2013

News & Letters, July – August 2013. Lead: Turkey, Syria and Iran at crossroads of world revolt; From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: ‘Russia more than ever full of revolutionaries…’; Editorial: Support striking prisoners!; Essay: Communization theory and its discontents truncate Marx’s dialectic; Workshop Talks: The boss is spying; Revolutionary from Turkey speaks; Brazil’s uprising; Teacher and school struggles; and more…

Rallies for equal pay

May 18, 2013

On April 9 rallies were held across the U.S. to mark the day women’s earnings catch up to what men’s were at the end of 2012.

Violence ‘normalized’

May 17, 2013

We are living in contradictory times, especially when it comes to women’s struggle for freedom. On the one hand you have a Women’s Liberation Movement that has never been more radical, unified and global. On the other hand there is more repression, and the violence is more brutal and deadly than ever before.

Rape and lies in Syria

May 13, 2013

It is instructive to compare the 1990s, when pretty much only the women’s movement gave vocal support to Bosnia, with Syria today. Some of the same crimes are happening now.

Arab Spring and the missing link of philosophy

May 4, 2013

Tunisia, Syria and Egypt show the determination of the masses to continue their revolutions in the face of vicious counter-revolution.

The politics of degenerate capitalism

May 2, 2013

The rulers are not about to sit back and let revolt freely develop. All sorts of reactionary ideas and attitudes have been ushered into the mainstream of politics and the media.

May-June 2013 issue of News & Letters is out

April 29, 2013

News & Letters, Vol. 58, No. 3
May – June 2013

Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2013-2014
Capitalism’s violence, masses’ revolt show need for total view

The world today is riven between the creativity of masses in revolt and the violent degeneracy of counter-revolution, whose destructiveness even extends to the revived specter of nuclear war two decades after the collapse [=>]

Handicap This! March-April 2013

April 11, 2013

Disability rights movement on growth attenuation, One Billion Rising, police killing of Robert Saylor, TSA outrage.

Iranian girls learn bodies not sinful

April 2, 2013

In Iran, after the Islamic Revolution the whole issue of sexual health education was forgotten. Years later, a law made it compulsory for all marrying couples to attend a one-hour session at a local clinic on family planning and genetic diseases, including thalassemia— a serous inherited blood disorder.

We hypothesized that offering sexual health education to [=>]

Women Worldwide, March-April 2013

April 1, 2013

Russian repression of Pussy Riot supporters; Ethiopian Jewish refugee women in Israel given Depo-Provera without their consent; Danica Patrick

Past time to stop rape in South Africa

March 31, 2013

We do not believe that the state is taking the rape and murder of Thandiswa Qubuda seriously. The state holds poor people in contempt. We are just voting fodder to them. We are not human beings to them. It is clear that the leadership in the struggle against rape will have to come from below. It is time for real action against rape.

Left still can’t fathom Women’s Liberation

March 30, 2013

Women’s struggle for freedom has continued to develop into a worldwide movement with revolutionary content (see page 1). Unfortunately, much of the Left seems unable to hear this radical dimension of women’s struggles. A recent example is Sharon Smith’s essay,

Lincoln and ‘The Abolitionists’

March 23, 2013

The 150th anniversary of the Civil War, and of the Emancipation Proclamation in particular, has a lot of people talking about that history and race relations today. Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln is less the cause than the effect of this surge in popular interest. Lincoln is very moving and beautifully made, with excellent acting and shrewd writing.

Tony Kushner’s screenplay [=>]

The Black dimension and Women’s Liberation as revolutionary reason

March 18, 2013

From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya:

Editor’s note: For Women’s History Month, we present excerpts from “An Overview by Way of Introduction; the Black Dimension,” Chapter 6 of the book Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution. The chapter serves as an introduction and overview for the book’s Part Two, “The Women’s Liberation Movement as Revolutionary [=>]

From India to Egypt to U.S., women fighting for freedom

March 17, 2013

From the March-April 2013 issue of News & Letters
by Terry Moon

Two recent events have shown the deep and seemingly intractable worldwide oppression of women and, at the same time, revealed women’s militancy and determination to change their oppressive reality. First was the vicious gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey at the end of [=>]

March-April 2013 issue of News & Letters is available on the web

March 16, 2013

The March-April 2013 issue of News & Letters is available on the web.

News & Letters, Vol. 58, No. 2
March – April 2013

Lead

From India to Egypt to U.S., women fighting for freedom

Two recent events have shown the deep and seemingly intractable worldwide oppression of women and, at the same time, revealed women’s militancy and determination to [=>]

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 [=>]

Readers’ Views, January-February 2013, Part 1

March 9, 2013

RAVAGES OF CAPITALISM SHOW NEED FOR NEW WORLD

The article on “Climate chaos and capitalism” (Sept.-Oct. 2012 N&L) is very relevant, especially the conclusion about how capitalism’s contradiction is that the growth of the economy, of capitalist production, means more global warming and climate change worldwide.
Activist for humans and environment
Los Angeles

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The technologies we [=>]

Women Worldwide, January-February 2013

February 16, 2013

by Artemis

On Jan. 2, Gerda Lerner, a founding member of the National Organization for Women and history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, died at the age of 92. She founded the first national graduate program in women’s history and a women’s studies program at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y. She wrote The [=>]

Afro-Colombian Women: Defeating invisibility

February 10, 2013

by Gerry Emmett

In the remarkable documentary film, La Toma (2012), Afro-Colombian woman activist Francia Marquez Mina is threatened by government forces and forced to spend each night sleeping in a different place for her safety. (See “Afro-Colombians Throw Off Shackles,” Nov.-Dec. 2012 N&L.) She has described the experience of people in her community this [=>]

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