In the absence of successful social revolution, today’s total crisis is shown in a world capitalist order that is falling apart economically, politically, environmentally, and in thought. That does not mean that we can wait for capitalism to collapse and step aside for a new society. On the contrary. Its desperation makes it that much more vicious, and it threatens to doom all of humanity with it.
Revolt and Counter-Revolution, from Greece to Syria; Here Come the Reformers; Women’s Freedom; Against Racism
Protests erupted following the decision by a St. Louis County grand jury not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for the cold-blooded murder of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Thousands marched under the slogan “Black Lives Matter!” These demonstrations grew in the wake of the equally outrageous decision of a Staten Island grand jury not to indict NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo for the murder of Eric Garner.
Protests erupted after the cops who murdered Michael Brown and Eric Garner were let off. They mark a new moment of rebellion against a social order in which Black youth are made to live continuously suspended over an abyss of non-existence.
The passion to tear up this deeply racist society by the roots calls for the fullest development in activity and thought.
Some are calling this Burkina Faso’s Revolution 2.0, referring back to Thomas Sankara’s 1983-1987 rule.
Brazil’s President, Dilma Rousseff, barely won a runoff election against the conservative free-marketeer Aécio Neves. With her election to a second term, the Workers’ Party, first under Lula Da Silva and now under Rousseff, has won its fourth consecutive presidential election. While Lula’s first election was greeted with great hope for a sweeping change in Brazil’s developmentalist trajectory, Rousseff’s cliffhanger illustrated the grave disappointment that much of Brazil’s masses felt recently….
Hundreds of people in Hong Kong marched to People’s Republic of China government offices on Nov. 9 to demand direct negotiations with the government of China and to oppose sham democratic elections planned for 2017. Marchers began from encampments of thousands of protesters who had been maintaining blockades of major thoroughfares for more than six weeks….
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 [=>]
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 [=>]
From the September-October 2014 issue of News & Letters
Regarding “New York City and Ferguson, Missouri, police show pattern of violence against Black people” (Aug. 11 N&L web statement): In 2009 in the UK we saw something similar. Police officers killed a man in the vicinity of a political protest, then told the press [=>]
As with the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, how imperialist oppression is tied to domestic repression in the U.S. was shockingly apparent in the heavily militarized police presence in Ferguson, Mo.
A lightning offensive saw Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, fall to the insurgents. The pattern extended itself to Tikrit, farther south, then Samarra, and the battle spread to the oil refining center of Baiji. Most of this was first attributed to ISIS. The question was asked, then: Why and how could a well-armed force of 20,000 Iraqi troops, armed and trained by the U.S., dissolve in the face of 800 terrorists?
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.
Three years ago, the Egyptian Revolution was fighting for its life in Tahrir Square. For 18 days and nights, the women and men of the Square faced off against President Hosni Mubarak’s security forces and thugs. In the end Mubarak was forced to follow Tunisia’s President-for-life, Ben Ali, into retirement and shame. The light of freedom spread–Square to Square, occupation to occupation. It was a historic turning point.
It was this global struggle that the military coup that ousted Morsi, and led to the massacre of over 800 of his supporters, was meant to stop short. Now, revolution continues, and the freedom idea lives, but the old world has tried hard to destroy it. Egypt’s newest new Constitution, passed Jan. 15 under the military rule of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, evokes only faint echoes of Tahrir. As artist Hanaa Safwat said, “The referendum is stained in innocent people’s blood. It has been built on the dead bodies of 800 people in Rabaa al-Adawiya.”
Lead
by Gerry Emmett
“However partial the industrial revolt may be, it conceals within itself a universal soul: political revolt may be never so universal but it hides a narrow-minded spirit under the most colossal form.”
–Karl Marx, “On the King of Prussia and Social Reform”
The world’s rulers would like to declare an end to the earth-shaking, world-historic events of the Arab Spring, that completely unforeseen social revolt that [=>]
The reelection of Hugo Chávez as president is an important moment in Venezuela and Latin America as a whole. After more than a decade in power—during which his administration practically eliminated illiteracy, drastically reduced misery and poverty, including far greater access to food and healthcare, and improved housing—the majority of the population continues to support [=>]
Woman as Reason
Meredith Tax, a women’s liberationist and political activist since the late 1960s, author of The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917, and now U.S. Director of the Centre for Secular Space, a think tank formed to oppose fundamentalism and promote universality in human rights, has recently written an important and [=>]
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya
Editor’s note: On the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, we present Raya Dunayevskaya’s analysis of how it tested not only the rulers’ rash folly but the anti-war movement’s short-mindedness–a lesson still urgent today. She wrote this piece as a Political Letter on Oct. 25, 1962, titled “Marxist-Humanism vs. [=>]
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 [=>]
Bok-dong Kim. Photo by Won Choi wonchoi.weebly.com/comfort-women.html
Los Angeles—Bok-dong Kim, an 87-year-old Korean “comfort woman,” came here as part of her U.S. speaking tour on the fifth anniversary of House Resolution 121, which acknowledged Japan’s war crimes against the comfort women. She met with Congressional representatives in Washington, D.C., spoke to 300 students at [=>]
Chicago–“Some of us killed innocents. Some of us helped in continuing these wars from home. Some of us watched our friends die. Some of us are not here because we took our own lives. We did not get the care promised to us by our government. All of us watched failed policies turn into bloodshed. [=>]
From the May-June 2012 issue of News & Letters:
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2012-2013
Counter-revolution’s rise shows need for a total philosophy
This special issue carries our Draft Perspectives Thesis, part of our preparation for the national gathering of News and Letters Committees. We publish it because our age is in such total crisis, facing a [=>]
London—Since 2009, the first wave of revolutions in the Middle East was started by the marching of millions in Iran. For many years, the Middle East has been run by the capitalist dictatorial regimes in which the working class is exploited to the maximum. People live in misery while the less than 1% swim in [=>]
In Chicago on Dec. 31, well over 100 demonstrators came to show solidarity with Palestinians by releasing 300 black balloons in downtown Grant Park—one balloon for each child killed during Israel’s 22-day assault on the Gaza Strip three years ago.
On the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian people, Nov. 29, we reflected on [=>]
Two years after the devastating earthquake, Haiti’s disaster continues:
More than half a million Haitians live in displacement camps, primarily in tents and plastic tarps. Vast numbers, particularly women, live in great insecurity. Only a little over 10,000 new homes have been constructed; barely several thousand old homes restored.
Cholera has infected 500,000, killing close to 7,000. [=>]
From the November-December 2011 issue of News & Letters:
Bolivia’s two roads
Indigenous protestors from the Bolivian Amazon won a victory when they forced President Evo Morales’ government to cancel a road-building project through the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS), a supposedly protected region in eastern Bolivia. The victory [=>]
World in View
by Gerry Emmett
The arrest of former President Laurent Gbagbo by NATO and Ivorian opposition forces will not solve the problems that plague Ivory Coast. Gbagbo’s rise and fall does represent, in microcosm, the long tragedy of Africa’s unfinished revolutions.
Gbagbo’s fall began in earnest when he falsely claimed victory in last year’s long-delayed presidential [=>]
Solidarity with the people of the Chagos Islands! Read the Declaration of Grande Riviere after LALIT Diego Garcia Conference
The declaration begins this way:
“The Conference on Diego Garcia & Chagos held at Grande Riviere, Port Louis, Mauritius, bringing together 150 participants from 30 October to 2 November 2010, reached consensus that we will keep the following struggles [=>]
