Young people keep taking matters into our own hands. Our time of total crises calls for a philosophy to help us understand the problems at the root of our misery and give us hope we can create a new society. This makes Marx a contemporary for youth, looking for a way out of life under capitalism’s hopeless future.
A wildfire that broke out April 18, 2021, forced the evacuation of the University of Cape Town, South Africa’s campus and destroyed a major part of the library. The Jagger Reading Room housed thousands of historic African films, letters, and manuscripts, many relating to the anti-apartheid struggle. Also lost were thousands of indigenous artworks and over 85,000 books.
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.”
Detroit activists reviews the film, “Detroit,” and finds it insulting to actual history and a “brilliantly filmed wasted opportunity.”
Black prisoner Faruq looks critically at Fidel Castro’s legacy, especially his turn to a one party state and the importance of freely associated labor for a true revolutionary process.
A revolutionary critique of the “lynching” charge against Black Lives Matter activist Jasmine Richards and how it reveals the racism endemic to U.S. society and spotlights the revolutionary Black youth fighting against it.
Article outlining the seriously flawed agreement between the governments of Japan and South Korea regarding the so-called “comfort women,” actually women kidnapped into sexual slavery to serve Japanese Soldiers during World War II. The article includes the list of demands of the surviving women who were left out of the agreement’s negotiations.
Letters and comments sent in by readers or taken down, to and about the articles in News & Letters or current events.
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.
She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry is a documentary of the women’s liberation movement (WLM) in the U.S., from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Filmmaker Mary Dore used a wealth of historical news coverage to give a sense of the breadth of organizations and depth of demands in the explosive growth of the WLM. Activists, identified within archival footage—including women like Fran Beal of the Civil Rights Movement’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lesbian rights activist Karla Jay, and Judith Arcana of the abortion underground organization Jane—gave contemporary interviews interspersed in the film.
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya
Why Hegel’s Phenomenology now?
Editor’s Note: 2012 is marked by potential historic turning points and the search for new beginnings. It also marks the 25th anniversary of Raya Dunayevskaya’s last writings. We present part of her unfinished “Why Hegel’s Phenomenology? Why Now?” which was an important aspect of her work on Dialectics of [=>]
When Gil Scott-Heron passed on May 27, we lost one of the great artists of our time. As the “Winter In America” of which he sang stretches on, cold and brutal, his voice remains as relevant as his presence is missed.
Coming out of the Black Power movement, he had a keen understanding of where Black [=>]
Rulers & Rebels: A People’s History of Early California, 1769-1901 by Laurence H. Shoup.
Laurence H. Shoup presents the history of California from the European incursion of Native America by the Spanish to the Great San Francisco Waterfront Strike of 1901. His interest is agency from below in the form of direct action: “The stories told in [=>]
From the new issue of NEWS & LETTERS, May-June 2011:
Readers’ Views
Contents:
A CALL FROM SOUTH AFRICA
A call by Abahlali baseMjondolo for Madikizela to step down as MEC [Member [=>]
March 25, 2011, marks the centennial of the Triangle Waist Company factory fire where 149 workers, most of them young Jewish immigrant women, jumped to their death from a ten-story building. The fire doors were locked to keep the women from stealing a bit of cloth or thread; the building had no fire escapes, and [=>]
Part of the classic American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard, written by Raya Dunayevskaya, has been posted on the web at the Marxists Internet Archive. The entire book can be obtained from News and Letters Committees.
This was excerpted from Part V, “From Depression Through World War II.”
Source: American Civilization on Trial, Part V “From Depression Through [=>]
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Tomorrow will be the 70th anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky, one of the most important leaders of the Russian Revolution, by an agent of Stalin. For this occasion, News & Letters reprinted Raya Dunayevskaya’s “Some Memories of Trotsky,” written in 1965, in the July-August 2010 issue.
The signature from the [=>]
