Announcement and pre-publication offer for a new publication, ‘What Is Socialism? A Marxist-Humanist Symposium’
labor
Unemployed workers organize and march, demanding relief
Newly organized as Northern California Unemployed Committee, people marched to draw attention to the disparities within capitalism exacerbated by COVID-19. They demanded the federal government stop taxing unemployment benefits and that it restore the $600 per week unemployment supplement.
Thoughts from the outside: Lucky I have a job?
What is essential for capital to reinforce its authority and what is essential for people to live as human beings are very different things. Seeing through the rhetoric of the “privilege of having a job,” the reality of life under capitalism becomes clear.
Rally for Amazon workers’ union drive
Participant report of a solidarity demonstration in Oakland in front of a Whole Foods store, as part of a national day of solidarity to support Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon workers struggling for union recognition.
Karen Lewis, 1953-2021
The City of Chicago lost a powerful voice for teachers, and for workers in general, with the death of Karen Lewis, former President of the Chicago Teachers Union.
Battle for living wage
The fight for a living wage continues, after Republican and Democratic senators killed the $15 minimum wage provision in the relief bill.
The USPS is a continuing crime scene
August 28, 2020Postal workers find themselves on the frontlines of three fronts: saving their jobs under attack from the United States Postal Service under Postmaster Louis DeJoy; saving the USPS from the sabotage of DeJoy and Trump, and saving the integrity of U.S. elections.
The Gig Economy’s Highway toward Increasing Surplus Labor
July 14, 2020A veteran of working in the gig economy shares first-hand experience and analysis.
Readers’ views, May-June 2020
April 29, 2020Readers’ views on The dialectic in thought and in liberation; labor and pandemic; pandemic and ecology; pandemic and school; women’s liberation; and voices from behind bars.
Pandemic as battlefield
March 30, 2020The battle against the COVID-19 pandemic is a battle over how society will change, mirroring the battle over how to confront and adapt to the climate and extinction crisis. Strikes are erupting across the world.
Readers’ views, March-April 2020: Part one
March 17, 2020Readers’ views on climate struggles; labor struggles; racist politics; election contradictions; Modi’s Kristallnacht?; anti-abortion terror; rewriting history; and women and culture.
Workers strike Aptiv!
March 4, 2020More than 18,000 workers at the U.S. company Aptiv’s maquiladora plants in Mexico walked out because, after a 120-peso wage increase, Aptiv withheld much more than that for taxes.
Google and Amazon workers rebel
January 21, 2020Google and Amazon tech workers organize around the companies’ complicity in war, environmental destruction, and workplace safety.
Amazon workers organize cross-border solidarity
June 27, 2019Excerpts of a talk by Polish Amazon worker/organizer Agnieszka Mróz, on a U.S. tour seeking cross-border solidarity among Amazon workers worldwide.
News and Letters Committees Call for Plenum 2019
February 25, 2019Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2019-2020
Detroit celebrates Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
January 26, 2019Participant report from Detroit’s 16th Annual Martin Luther King Day Rally.
Trump aids capitalism’s attack on labor; workers strike back
January 24, 2019A Marxist-Humanist analysis of the state of the U.S. economy and the revolt of labor in the wake of country-wide teachers’ strikes, an historically long government shutdown, and an unsteady, uncertain worldwide economy.
First ever charter school teachers’ strike
December 16, 2018Teachers speak about why they struck Chicago’s Acero charter schools on Dec. 4-9, expanding the wave of teacher strikes to the first charter school strike in the nation.
‘Striking to Survive’ in China
December 14, 2018Report on a talk in Oakland by worker-activists from China, including Fan Shigang, author and editor of “Striking to Survive: Workers’ Resistance to Factory Relocations in China.”
Nurses on strike
Licensed practical nurses and supporters rallied at the University of Illinois Hospitals during their unfair labor practices strike.
Gig road to poverty
Contrary to the boosterism that we always hear from Trump, an MIT study revealed that on average an Uber-type driver’s income declined last year from $1,469 per month to $783, a drop of 47%.
Trump helps Harley-Davidson kill jobs
July 25, 2018Harley-Davidson workers found that Trump’s corporate tax cuts made it easier for the company to plan to shutter the Kansas City plant. Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum gave Harley-Davidson an incentive to move more jobs to a new plant in Thailand.
Readers’ Views, July-August 2018, Part 1
July 23, 2018Readers’ Views on: Fighting Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Hysteria; Women’s Liberation; Attacks on Gays; Support Restaurant Workers; Swords into Plowshares; Human Rights Struggles in Iraq…; …And in Russia; Arthur Gursch in Memoriam
Readers’ Views, May-June 2018: Remembering Andy Phillips, 1924-2018
May 10, 2018Rememberances of a News and Letters Committees founder, Andy Phillips, coal miner, activist, writer, thinker.
III. The reality and the myth of contemporary capitalism
May 5, 2018We 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.
II. Spreading revolt opens new doors
May 3, 2018We look at the true opposition to Trumpism: mass revolt worldwide of women, youth, Black people, labor…–the context to work for new beginnings.
Charles Denby’s life story: the story of the struggle for freedom
March 8, 2018Excerpts from the introduction to the new French edition of Charles Denby’s book “Indignant Heart: A Black Worker’s Journal.”
Editorial: China–Xi Jinping’s global power grab
Xi Jinping’s power grab in China and within the international power vacuum are a threat to the workers of China and the world.
Fight for $15 and labor’s full potential
On Feb. 12, workers across the country marched in Fight for $15 demonstrations held to commemorate the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike and Dr. King’s visionary, multi-racial Poor People’s Campaign. It is a struggle to realize labor’s full potential.
Voices from the inside out: Prisoners discuss impact of 13th Amendment
January 29, 2018Prisoners Faruq and Robert Taliaferro write about the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that allowed for prisoners to be enslaved, taking up different aspects of slavery as it appears in prison, in the U.S. and the world.
Readers’ Views: November-December 2017, Part 1
November 12, 2017Readers’ Views on: Puerto Rico:Trump’s Katrina; LGBTQ in Australia; Transgender in Texas; Women’s Liberation; Racism in Canada; Detroit and “Detroit”; Labor and Robots; Haitian Revolt; Why Read N&L?; and a Correction.
Picket line solidarity shuts bus yard
September 5, 2017In person report of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) mechanics at the Foothill Transit operations yard in Pomona going on strike on the morning of Aug. 7.
Rising U.S. racism challenges all freedom movements
September 2, 2017A Marxist-Humanist analysis of the history and meaning of the rising of the right-wing neo-Nazi white supremacist movement, its relationship to President Donald Trump and his administration, and its challenge to the freedom forces arrayed against it who are fighting for a humanist world. .
KC labor fights
August 31, 2017Days before the “right-to-work” bill enacted by the Republican-controlled state government was due to go into effect on Aug. 28, Missouri unions and civil rights groups turned in more than 300,000 signatures that postponed its taking effect
Chicago mechanics on strike!
August 14, 2017A striker speaks from one of the auto mechanics’ picket lines at 140 car dealerships in the Chicago area. .
Workers join ranks against Keolis Transit Service
August 8, 2017Mechanics went on strike at Foothill Transit in Pomona, Calif., and were joined on the picket line by bus drivers.
Editorial: Trump’s attack on climate and labor
July 6, 2017Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change is an attack on labor, not, as he claims, for the good of workers. The solution is not to spread illusions about international negotiations. What is needed is to confront capitalism’s suicidal path both in immediate battles and in raising the banner of a new society of freely associated labor. .
O’Hare workers push for union rights
May 18, 2017Women workers at O’Hare Airport spoke out on their conditions of labor working for private contractors.
Time Warner Cable (Spectrum) workers striking for three months and counting
When Time Warner Cable became Spectrum, the company promised a new deal for consumers and small businesses. But the new corporation launched an assault on its employees; and now, three months into the strike, the union is hanging tough.
III. U.S. forces of revolt as reason; philosophy as force of revolution
May 17, 2017The unprecedented Women’s March on Washington the day after Trump’s inauguration revealed the blossoming of a universal movement with many particulars, from women’s demand to control their own bodies, to Black Lives Matter, to the struggle at Standing Rock.
I. Trumpism as an excrescence of world capitalism’s crises
Trumpism’s self-perpetuating disorder is based on negation of social movements, trying to stifle the positive in their negation of this exploitative society. His deceit and power grabs express capitalism’s disintegration, exuding racism, sexism, and fascism.
Immigrants and allies challenge Trump’s inhumanity
April 22, 2017As the Trump administration ramps up deportations and related abuses, strikes, protests, and sanctuary cities are proliferating. The oppression of a lower caste of workers and the discrimination and violence faced by immigrants present a challenge to the Left, labor and the rest of humanity.
News and Letters Committees Call for Plenum 2017
February 26, 2017Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2017-2018
Trump and unrest confront China
January 31, 2017Just weeks after Donald Trump claimed his Electoral College victory, he put the spotlight on U.S.-China relations by taking a call from Taiwan’s President, creating the possibility that the U.S. might abandon the “one China” policy.
As Others See Us: The new French edition of Marxism and Freedom ‘To retake the historical initiative’
Frédéric Monferrand introduces the new French edition of Marxism and Freedom. This excerpt concentrates on how the work reconstructs the Hegelian philosophical consistency of Marx’s Marxism so that it comes to life–from the 1844 Manuscripts to “Capital,” through the idea that history is the history of the efforts of humanity to make itself free.
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Why Phenomenology? Why now?
January 30, 2017Because of the urgency of the question of how to make new beginnings in such a reactionary world situation, we excerpt two of Dunayevskaya’s last philosophical writings, which confront “where to begin” as part of her work on dialectics of philosophy and organization.
Review: Wombs in Labor
January 29, 2017Review of “Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India,” by Amrita Pande. Pande references divergent feminist viewpoints but studies surrogacy as a form of labor so that she goes beyond moral questions to the question of how a labor market in wombs is created and how the laborers experience this market.
Workshop Talks: Roots of Trumpism in swamps of history
January 26, 2017Htun Lin’s Workshop Talks column takes up his experience as a refugee from Burma to the U.S. and today’s plight of the Rohingya, who are experiencing ethnic cleansing at the hands of the state and Buddhist nationalists in Burma today.
Inauguration of neo-fascism faces widespread revolt
January 23, 2017The lightning move by Republicans in Congress to prepare to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or Obamacare—before Donald Trump even took office, with only the vaguest idea of what is to replace it, and with full knowledge that a large majority of Americans oppose the repeal of its most important provisions—gave a sign of how far the new single-party government intends to roll the clock back, with dizzying speed.
Union betrayals
November 30, 2016Latina union activist in Detroit questions how working people lost out in the school board elections and the ballot measures in the recent election and, noting that the AFL-CIO supported the Dakota Access Pipeline, asks, “Which side are you on?”