Revolt against rulers’ skewed efforts to transform reality is global, opposing both fascism, which markets itself as the alternative to the disintegrating status quo, and the “return to normal” that markets itself as the only alternative to fascism. And each revolt is confronted by serious contradictions.
Readers’ Views on: This Society’s Ingrained Violence; After the Murder of Tyre Nichols; Women and Girls Face Oppression; Church Sexism and Hypocrisy; Fundamentalism vs. Women; Call to Action; Censorship Here and Now; Brexit Catastrophe; China’s Workers and U.S.; Iran Revolt Continues; Azadkar, In Memoriam
The U.S. Youth Risk Behavior Survey of 17,000 high school students revealed “America’s teen girls are engulfed in a growing wave of sadness, violence, and trauma”; women and girls in Iran are revolting against the regime by uncovering their hair and throwing out hijab; and the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team and the Canadian Women’s National Soccer Team turned their match into a labor solidarity action.
To avoid Russia’s outright defeat in its brutal war against Ukrainians, the alliance of nations–Russia, Iran, and China, now with North Korea–that for 12 years has united to suppress the Syrian Revolution for freedom and dignity seems to be firming up again.
Feminists in Armenia and Azerbaijan aim to break the cycle of violence between the countries; hundreds of acid attack survivors held a seminar in Delhi, India; Iranian women played soccer in London to support the uprising, and protested Qatar’s homophobic, sexist, and racist regime; Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter held a vigil for at least 10 women murdered by current or former male partners in British Columbia.
Here are links to a number of Farsi translations of Marxist-Humanist writings.
El régimen iraní debería tener mucho miedo. Los gritos de: “¡Mujeres, vida y libertad!” “¡Muerte al hijab!” “¡Muerte al dictador!” llenan las calles. Las mujeres iraníes han inspirado al mundo y han advertido a los oligarcas de Irán que su régimen represivo está en grave peligro.
Today’s revolt in Iran is illuminated by Raya Dunayevskaya’s March 1979 Political-Philosophic Letter, “Iran: Unfoldment of, and Contradictions in, Revolution.” The first two parts were published in the November-December 2022 issue. The concluding two parts are published here. Written shortly after the massive women’s revolt that tried to open a second chapter of the revolution, this letter was part of a series written during and after the 1979 Iranian Revolution and published in both English and Farsi.
Readers’ Views on: Iran: Woman, Life, Freedom; Election Threats and Battles; Women’s Marches and Enemies; Sexist Supreme Court; Ukrainians Fight for Freedom; Para-Transit Disservice; Mike Davis; Labor Struggles, from Amazon…to the Bank.
Today’s revolt in Iran is illuminated by Raya Dunayevskaya’s March 1979 Political-Philosophic Letter, “Iran: Unfoldment of, and Contradictions in, Revolution,” published here in two parts. Written shortly after the massive women’s revolt that tried to open a second chapter of the revolution, this letter was part of a series written during and after the 1979 Iranian Revolution and published in both English and Farsi.
Putin failed to terrorize Ukraine into submission with massive bombing of civilians and social infrastructure. Ukrainian social solidarity, resilience and massive participation of all layers of the population inspired the world that a people do not have to cave to extortion and terror.
The Iranian hard-line regime should be very afraid. The cries of: “Women, life and freedom!” “Death to the head scarf!” “Death to the dictator!” fill the streets. Iranian women have inspired the world and put Iran’s oligarchs on notice that their repressive regime is in grave danger.
The Iranian hardline regime should be very afraid. The cries of: “Women, life and freedom!” “Death to the head scarf!” “Death to the dictator!” fill the streets. Iranian women have inspired the world and put Iran’s oligarchs on notice that their repressive regime is in grave danger.
Over 1,000 people gathered at UC Berkeley to express their solidarity with the growing movement of women in Iran.
Forced veiling is a cruel means of controlling women, used by totalitarians to distract citizens from leaders’ failures like rising prices and disasters like floods, droughts, and wildfires from the heating climate.
Participant report: the San Francisco May Day demonstration addressed labor organizing, bread and butter issues, and political repression in Iran and Turkey.
Like repression in Iran, the war against Ukraine is, more than anything else, understandable on the basis of fear of revolution and the overthrow of the existing order.
After seven years of war in Yemen, the UN estimates that almost 400,000 people, primarily civilians, have died, 60% from hunger and disease, with children being 70% of the deaths. The war has become a proxy for the Saudi Arabia-Iran Middle East conflict.
Call to solidarity for the release of Iranian blogger Soheil Arabi, imprisoned for “blasphemy.”
In Daraa, the birthplace of the Syrian Revolution, resistance has continued. Fifty Syrian revolutionaries and their families were forced to leave the city to join other revolutionaries in the Free Syrian enclave in the country’s northwest.
Readers’ Views on: Solidarity with Palestinians; Attacks on Democracy; Iranian Revolt; Musicians’ Labor; Damage to Homeless; Covid-19 Killers; Trump and Taliban; Far Right in Portland; Critical Race Theory; Prisoners under Fire; Voices from Behind Bars; Only the Dialectic Can Save Us
The continuing struggle for Afghanistan is not about “tribalism,” or the past—it is an up-to-date product of world capitalism. It is about state power and wealth. This is true whether we consider the remaining influence of Ghani’s Islamic State, which did raise the educational level, and sometimes status, of women; or the continuing threat of Daesh, with its “Caliphate’s” appeal to disturbed and nihilistic urban youth; or the prospect of rule by the Taliban’s Emirate with new diplomatic recognition from China, Russia, and Iran.
The brief, dirty war that broke out May 10-21 between the Israeli government and Hamas, the Islamist group ruling Gaza had many reactionary consequences.
Iranians protesting “honor killing” of Gay man Alireza Fazeli Monfared; students at Pendleton Heights High School in Indiana protest administration’s demand that Pride flags be removed from classrooms; nonbinary genderqueer Tryfan Morys Eibhlyn Llwyd, fighter for Gay liberation and the end of racism, died at age 70.
Iranian nuclear physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated as his car convoy passed through the town of Absard on Nov. 27. No suspect was apprehended. Speculation fell on Israel, the U.S., and Iranian oppositionists.
This Political-Philosophic Letter of Raya Dunayevskaya speaks to the need to return to philosophical roots at times of deep crisis, including addressing the question of how to maintain independence when fighting counter-revolution.
The regional war devastating Yemen is a counter-revolution against its Arab Spring revolution and its humanism.
Review-essay (longer version) on the book ‘Syria After the Uprisings: The Political Economy of State Resilience’ by Joseph Daher. With a combination of ruthless criticism and consistent solidarity, the author situates the Assad regime and Syria’s three counter-revolutions into a broader trend of global neoliberalism.
In the aftermath of Trump’s impeachment trial, impunity and purges rage while checks and balances failed. Armed with a philosophy of freedom, the opposition to Trump and to the capitalist system that spawned him would give Trump the challenge that fellow politicians could not.
The death of counter-revolutionary Qassem Soleimani, together with Donald Trump’s war moves, illuminate this changed world.
Abbas Goya denounces the incarceration of Esmaeil Bakhshi, leading figure of the Haft Tapeh Sugar Cane factory strike, along with Ali Nejati and worker-journalist Sepideh Gholyan and the editors of Gaam, a pro-worker paper in Iran.
Feminists in Iran call on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to resign; huge demonstrations against police rapes in Mexico; removal of the “Girl of Peace Statue” in Japan; and the trial of Canan Kaftancioğlu, the Istanbul chief of the secularist Republican People’s Party.
Donald Trump’s threats to Iran analyzed in light of his use of capitalism’s lifeblood commodity, oil, and the continuity and discontinuity of U.S. imperialism.
“Woman as Reason” columnist Terry Moon writes about the state of abortion rights in the U.S. in light of the draconian attacks against it and relates women’s struggle to control their bodies to the thingification of women, the poor response of the U.S. left, Karl Marx’s devastating critique of capitalism, and what revolution must come to mean.
Readers’ Views on: Socialism and a philosophy of revolution; Sudan in revolt; Iran vs. Iranians; Flint, Mich., play captures voices; Notre-Dame and fracking on native land; gun control debate; labor strikes; debate on fascism; Trump and DeVos; and voices from behind bars.
The brilliant Sudanese revolution is another in a line of rebellions against reactionary rule.
Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2019-2020
Yemen’s civil society organizations, representing the revolutionary hopes of 2011, have presented humane terms for a peace agreement. The state powers and non-state actors dependent upon them have their own ideas.
The Syrian Revolution has been the physical and intellectual battlefield that defines our time. As early as 2012 it was clear that what happened in Syria would determine the next stage of world history.
Iranians gathered in Santa Monica in remembrance of the victims of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1979-1989 regime.
Workers at Haft Tappeh Sugar Cane in Iran have been on strike for most of November. This is the latest of their walkouts this year over unpaid wages.
Yemeni civil society organizations have released a statement that should become the basis for peace negotiations.
In OPEC powers’ participation in the counter-revolutionary attacks on the revolutions in Syria and Yemen, and in the anti-immigrant reactionary reshaping of European politics, we see the next stage of bourgeois politics taking shape.
A U.S. activist in Syria solidarity criticizes the broad Left’s failure to practice revolutionary solidarity and outlines the dangerous political consequences.
News & Letters editorial taking up how in Syria, attacks are intensifying upon the three million Syrians, mostly civilians, trapped in Idlib province and how so many in the Left have failed them.
Syria’s Idlib province faces imminent slaughter by Russia, Iran, and Assad regime forces, which have already made it into the model of the 21st century concentration camp. We call upon all of humanity to oppose this and to demand protection for these millions whose only “crime” was to fight for freedom against a fascist regime.
Marxist-Humanist analysis of the Trump-Kim summit and G7 summit shows Trump is not charting a path to world peace but rather toward a more openly brutal world order. .
The pretenses of Iran’s greedy and murderous ruling class continue to be exposed by political prisoners like Esmail Abdi, teachers’ union activist, and Narges Mohammadi, engineer and women’s rights proponent.
We look at the world economic situation that must be changed: the role of state-capitalism, labor, climate change, the law of value, exploitation, alienation, and revolution and counter-revolution in Syria.
We look at the true opposition to Trumpism: mass revolt worldwide of women, youth, Black people, labor…–the context to work for new beginnings.
