Chicagoans rally: Forward on Climate

March 22, 2013

From the March-April 2013 issue of News & Letters:

Chicago–“Hey! Obama! We don’t want your climate drama!” we chanted at the Forward on Climate rally here on Feb. 17. There were at least 20 rallies that day, with 40,000 people in Washington, D.C. Most of the 400 here were college students brought out by Chicago [=>]

read the rest!

Rallies across U.S. against Keystone XL pipeline

March 21, 2013

40,000 in Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.–I drove from Memphis to Washington with three others and joined the 40,000-plus people there on Feb. 17 for the Forward on Climate Change rally, the biggest ever held on climate change in this country. Yes, the 15-hour drive was long. Yes, it was super cold. Yes, we stood for a [=>]

read the rest!

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 [=>]

read the rest!

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

***

The technologies we [=>]

read the rest!

News and Letters Committees Call for Plenum 2013

March 7, 2013

OFFICIAL CALL FOR PLENUM
to Work Out Marxist-Humanist Perspectives for 2013-2014

February 24, 2013

To All Members of News and Letters Committees

Dear Friends:

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 of [=>]

read the rest!

Hot and homeless

March 4, 2013

Chicago—Anyone who has lived through a homeless winter on the streets of a Midwestern city knows the value of a warm night. It means you die a little less. Maybe get to stay out of a shelter, or avoid the humiliation of the Mission. Maybe talk with a friend in peace.

We’ve had a lot more [=>]

read the rest!

Obama’s re-election doesn’t end clash of two worlds

November 26, 2012

by Franklin Dmitryev

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 [=>]

read the rest!

Hurricane Isaac & Haiti

September 21, 2012

World in View

by Gerry Emmet

Hurricane Isaac only skirted Haiti, but was a huge blow to 390,000 people still living in tent cities since the devastating 2010 earthquake. Only a small portion of the housing destroyed then has been rebuilt or repaired. Witnesses report homeless camps being turned to fields of mud and sewage. The [=>]

read the rest!

Climate chaos and capitalism

September 17, 2012

Climate chaos takes an ever increasing toll. In this year of extremes: the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is at a record low; July was the hottest month on record for the U.S.; almost 80% of U.S. agricultural land is in a drought comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl; this year is on track [=>]

read the rest!

September-October 2012 issue of News & Letters is online

September 9, 2012

Lead

Reactionary U.S. election shows capital’s contradictions

“We built it!” roared the delegates at the Republican Party convention in Tampa. It was the perfect expression of the presidential campaign and of capitalist thinking in general. The truth is that workers built the social wealth. Capitalists take it from the workers, and the government gets a portion.
Mitt Romney [=>]

read the rest!

Readers’ Views, July-August 2012, Part 1

August 14, 2012

REVOLUTION, COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND NEED FOR PHILOSOPHY

In the Draft of Marxist-Humanist Perspectives for 2012-2013, published in the last issue, while the global analysis is good, it is partial and emphasizes mass uprisings that may be a part of history tomorrow, i.e., Syria, while ignoring the long-term struggles that have a potential for raising a clear [=>]

read the rest!

Earth Summit 20 years on

June 2, 2012

To mark the 20th anniversary of the original “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, here is what we wrote about it at the time (from the July 1992 News & Letters):

Ideological pollution at ‘Earth Summit’
by Franklin Dmitryev

The UN Conference on Environment and Development (or Earth Summit) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, began June 3 with [=>]

read the rest!

Paths of destruction

May 14, 2012

From the May-June 2012 issue of News & Letters:

Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2012-2013
III. Paths of destruction

A. From war to war to war

War is one of the rulers’ most potent counter-revolutionary weapons when faced with economic crises and revolt. With a military stretched thin, one eye on China, and the failures of Iraq and [=>]

read the rest!

New May-June 2012 issue of News & Letters is online

May 3, 2012

Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2012-2013

Counter-revolution’s rise shows need for a total philosophy

Revolution, having forced its way to center stage over the last year and a half, cannot easily be bottled up. That explains the viciousness of the counter-revolution, whether the violent police attacks on occupations from New York to Oakland or the Syrian state’s torture [=>]

read the rest!

Durban climate summit: sellout, revolt

February 7, 2012

“2020 is too late to wait!” rang out the words of Abigail Borah, a 21-year-old college student/activist from Vermont. She was interrupting U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern’s speech at the latest yearly UN climate summit, held this time in Durban, South Africa, Nov. 28 to Dec. 11. Her passionate intervention, drawing applause from many delegates, [=>]

read the rest!

January-February 2012 issue of News & Letters now available on the web

January 29, 2012

Lead

Protests began in September in Wukan, a village of 20,000 people in Guangdong province on the South China Sea, against seizure of more than 100 acres of Wukan’s common land to be sold to those with insider ties to the village Communist Party leadership. Village authorities escalated the conflict by identifying protest leaders and hauling [=>]

read the rest!

Climate change: Durban’s emptiness echoes Copenhagen’s disaster

December 7, 2011

As yet another UN conference on climate change dissolves into meaninglessness (no surprise there), a barrage of news underscores the urgency of the problems that are being given little more than lip service.  Examples:

New perils seen to even modest warming

Hotter, drier, meaner: Trends point to a planet increasingly hostile to agriculture

Carbon dioxide emissions show record [=>]

read the rest!

Tar sands pipeline vs. human future

November 6, 2011

Tar sands pipeline vs. human future

The battle over the Keystone XL pipeline reveals two opposite futures. The push to complete the pipeline, which is to carry tar sands oil 1,980 miles from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico, represents capital’s drive to keep expanding production for production’s sake, no matter how disastrous it may be [=>]

read the rest!

Somalia famine, climate and capitalism

September 18, 2011

The famine in the Horn of Africa is finally getting attention, though it has been years in the making, now that shocking pictures of starving Somali children have become a regular feature on the nightly news. So far tens of thousands of people have died, half of them children under the age of five.

The suffering [=>]

read the rest!

New September-October 2011 issue of News & Letters now available online

September 10, 2011

News & Letters, Vol. 56, No. 5
September-October 2011

Lead

Political spectacles cannot hide reality of deranged capitalism

At the end of a months-long political spectacle in Washington–manufactured over irrelevancies concerning what should have been a routine raising of the national debt limit before the Aug. 2 deadline–reality struck with a bombshell: the anemic “jobless” recovery in the U.S. [=>]

read the rest!

Big nations fiddle while climate heats up, poor starve

July 26, 2011

You don’t need a weatherman to know the wind has blown in another year of disasters: record flooding of the Lower Mississippi River, a record Texas drought, a record Arizona wildfire, the worst fire season in U.S. history. This comes after 2010, the planet’s hottest year in history, which brought record flooding in Pakistan and [=>]

read the rest!

McKibben’s Eaarth: ‘decline,’ not liberation

March 13, 2011

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, by Bill McKibben (Times Books, 2010).

Bill McKibben made up the word Eaarth to relabel a planet that is no longer the one where his Baby Boom generation was born. Modern societies have unintentionally engineered the planet’s exit from a 10,000-year period marked by a relatively stable climate [=>]

read the rest!

Readers’ Views (Jan.-Feb. 2011)

February 28, 2011

THE OPPOSITE OF WAR IS NOT PEACE BUT REVOLUTION

Your Statement, War threat over Korea,” issued on your website on Dec. 9 had it just right! “The continuing threat of war on the Korean Peninsula underscores the urgency of the Marxist-Humanist perspective that the opposite of war is not peace but revolution.”

And you had it right [=>]

read the rest!

World food crisis, still

January 26, 2011

The world food crisis, which was hot in 2008 and then subsided temporarily, is getting worse again. It was one of the factors in Tunisia’s revolution, along with recent revolts in Algeria. The piece below, published in the June-July 2008 issue of News & Letters, is still quite germane.

World food crisis stirs revolt
by Franklin Dmitryev

In [=>]

read the rest!