A participant looks at the 1968 French general strike, filled with potential to transform society, and discusses why it failed and the ramifications of that for today.
Marx
Reader’s Views: November-December 2015, Part 2
December 16, 2015readers views, nov dec 2015, part 2
Workshop Talks: Workers not robots
October 26, 2015The workplace at Amazon.com is making employees physically and mentally ill which is a hallmark of production under capitalism. What happens at Amazon.com is not unusual and can be seen even in areas like healthcare, for example, at Kaiser.
Letter from Mexico: CNTE teachers’ goal: autonomous learning
August 31, 2015The National Coordination of Education Workers (CNTE) has been struggling for autonomy, new labor relationships and a non-capitalist educational model. In September 2013, tens of thousands of people—teachers outside the CNTE, students, parents and activists—demonstrated throughout Mexico to show their rejection of the government’s privatizing educational reforms.
Counter-revolution in Middle East shows crisis of humanity
August 28, 2015From the signing of a nuclear weapons agreement by the U.S. and Iran, to the ongoing war in Syria including the roles of Turkey and of the Left, this wide-ranging article delves into the Middle East situation with an emphasis on the forces fighting for genuine freedom and a multi-ethnic society.
Letter from Mexico: The Zapatistas and Critical Thought
July 4, 2015An appreciative and critical look at the Zapatistas’ seminar held in Chiapas, Mexico, May 3-9 on “Critical Thought in Face of the Hydra of Capitalism,” by a participant.
Readers’ Views, May-June 2015
May 3, 2015Letters and comments sent in by readers or taken down, to and about the articles in News & Letters or current events.
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: The dialectic and women’s liberation
April 30, 2015The 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.
Reader’s Views, March-April 2015, Part 2
March 8, 2015The thoughts of News & Letters readers on: MARXIST-HUMANIST PHILOSOPHY IN THE WHIRLWIND OF EVENTS; SAVING THE PLANET; and VOICES FROM BEHIND THE BARS.
Editorial: Syriza’s many challenges
March 7, 2015The electoral victory of Greece’s Syriza party was an important first step in resisting austerity imposed on the Greek and European working classes as capitalism’s response to its own intractable crisis. Nothing could be in greater contradiction to the movement that lifted Syriza to prominence than the parliamentary alliance with the racist, theocratic Independent Greeks party.
Philosophic Dialogue on Dunayevskaya’s May 12, 1953, Letter on Hegel’s Absolutes and Gramsci’s “organic party”
January 31, 2015Unlike vanguard parties, our goal is not the incorporation of a cadre into a certain fixed structure that Lenin advocated for in 1902 and rejected in 1905, but the development of “organic intellectuals,” thinkers and philosophers from the ranks of the Black masses as vanguard, women, youth, and workers.
Women as Reason: 60 years of News & Letters, the women’s dimension
January 28, 2015As we celebrate 60 years of publishing News & Letters, a look back at the Women’s Liberation Movement encountering Marxist-Humanism and how the women’s movement was anticipated as well as documented in its pages. It is an ongoing perspective.
Dialectics of revolution: American roots and world Humanist concepts, Part II
September 14, 2014From 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 [=>]
Another look at Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Mind’
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, 19861It was written to Janet Afary, author of The [=>]
‘On political divides and philosophic new beginnings’
September 7, 2014From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya
From the May-June 2012 issue of News & Letters.
Editor’s Note: “On political divides and philosophic new beginnings,” written 25 years ago, is the last writing of Raya Dunayevskaya, who died on June 9, 1987. It was first published in the In Memoriam special issue of News & [=>]
Tiananmen Square Massacre 25 years later
July 8, 2014From the July-August 2014 issue of News & Letters
Crowds filled Hong Kong’s Victoria Park on June 4 to remember the massacre in Tiananmen Square 25 years ago. Under Hong Kong’s separate administration they bore witness to the two-month-long mass movement of students and workers that spread to city after city across China, and [=>]
New biographies reflect Karl Marx’s todayness
September 14, 2013We can learn a lot from the way Karl Marx is presented in contemporary biographies, even if the particular writer has his/her own ax to grind. This is certainly the case with the two recent widely reviewed works, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution, by Mary Gabriel; and Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life, by Jonathan Sperber.
Now off the press: The Crossroads of History: Marxist-Humanist Writings on the Middle East by Raya Dunayevskaya
February 5, 2013Now off the press:
Excerpts from the Foreword:
Nobody, least of all Marxists, foresaw the great historic divide which would be opened by the Arab Spring beginning in 2010. When Mohammed Bouazizi and Hussein Nagi Felhi killed themselves to protest the miserable conditions of life for Tunisian youth, they set off a year of revolutionary struggle that [=>]
Post-election Venezuela
December 4, 2012The 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 [=>]
Marx’s Humanism today
May 15, 2012From the May-June 2012 issue of News & Letters:
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2012-2013
(continued from Part III)
IV. Marx’s Humanism today
“The commodity form of the products of labor became a fetish because of the perverse relationship of subject to object–of living labor to dead capital. Relations between men appear as the relation between things because [=>]
Situationists and Absolute Negativity
April 13, 2012Philosophic dialogue
It was good to have Ron Kelch’s Essay, “Absolute Negativity, Occupy and Situationists,” in the Jan.-Feb. News & Letters open an overdue philosophic dialogue. As someone who discovered the work of Guy Debord and Raya Dunayevskaya at about the same time, I’ve given a lot of thought to their relation.
I consider Debord’s work, especially [=>]
Fanon and Marx
April 8, 2012When Terry Moon in her column in the last issue asks, “How deep does the dialectic need to become when the subject is woman, is Black woman?” she calls for more discussion of Fanon and Women’s Liberation.
Fanon, in breaking with Sartre’s Existentialist Marxism—which acknowledged only one Subject, labor, and consigned the Black dimension to a [=>]
István Mészáros and the Dialectic
March 19, 2012Essay
by Eugene Walker
István Mészáros, Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness. Volume I, The Social Determination of Method. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010.
Global depression conditions have once again brought to the fore capitalism’s grave contradictions, and with it, new interest in the work of Karl Marx. This is not alone a theoretical question. The massive protests in [=>]
Women as thinkers and revolutionaries
March 18, 2012Editor’s Note: For International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, we print below brief excerpts from Raya Dunayevskaya’s 1975-76 lectures on “Women as Thinkers and as Revolutionaries,” which were also excerpted in Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution: Reaching for the Future.
* * *
I. Mass Creativity and the Black Dimension
What today we call Women’s [=>]
March-April 2012 News & Letters is online
March 13, 2012Lead
Syrian revolution fights Assad’s genocide, world powers watch
The Syrian Revolution is a serious challenge to the order in the region and beyond. Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia all have much to lose from the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s Baathist family dynasty, as do their imperialist patrons.
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya
Women as thinkers and revolutionaries
Working-class [=>]