Announcement and pre-publication offer for a new publication, ‘What Is Socialism? A Marxist-Humanist Symposium’

Announcement and pre-publication offer for a new publication, ‘What Is Socialism? A Marxist-Humanist Symposium’
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.
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.
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.
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.
The fight for a living wage continues, after Republican and Democratic senators killed the $15 minimum wage provision in the relief bill.
Postal 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.
A veteran of working in the gig economy shares first-hand experience and analysis.
Readers’ 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.
The 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 on climate struggles; labor struggles; racist politics; election contradictions; Modi’s Kristallnacht?; anti-abortion terror; rewriting history; and women and culture.
More 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 tech workers organize around the companies’ complicity in war, environmental destruction, and workplace safety.
Excerpts of a talk by Polish Amazon worker/organizer Agnieszka Mróz, on a U.S. tour seeking cross-border solidarity among Amazon workers worldwide.
Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2019-2020
Participant report from Detroit’s 16th Annual Martin Luther King Day Rally.
A 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.
Teachers 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.
Report 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.”
Licensed practical nurses and supporters rallied at the University of Illinois Hospitals during their unfair labor practices strike.
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%.
Harley-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 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
Rememberances of a News and Letters Committees founder, Andy Phillips, coal miner, activist, writer, thinker.
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.
Excerpts from the introduction to the new French edition of Charles Denby’s book “Indignant Heart: A Black Worker’s Journal.”
Xi Jinping’s power grab in China and within the international power vacuum are a threat to the workers of China and the world.
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.
Prisoners 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 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.
In 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.
A 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. .
Days 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
A striker speaks from one of the auto mechanics’ picket lines at 140 car dealerships in the Chicago area. .
Mechanics went on strike at Foothill Transit in Pomona, Calif., and were joined on the picket line by bus drivers.
Trump’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. .
Women workers at O’Hare Airport spoke out on their conditions of labor working for private contractors.
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.
The 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.
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.
As 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.
Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2017-2018
Just 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.
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.
Because 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 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.
Htun 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.
The 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.
Latina 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?”