In this talk on the new developments in ‘Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution’, Dunayevskaya takes up her original category of Post-Marx Marxism as a pejorative, as well as the question of the relationship of philosophy to organization
The acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse gave a green light to reactionary killings. The uprisings after George Floyd’s murder, and the associated ideas of liberation, are the ultimate target of lynchers.
Questions raised by the actions and words of the workers in today’s militant labor insurgency demand a philosophical response. Marxist-Humanism in the U.S. began with taking seriously what workers have raised since the onset of automation in the coal mines: What kind of labor should a human being do?
Workers in the U.S. have made 2021 a year that ought to panic giant corporations and small store owners alike. The wave of strikes and other job actions this fall have exploded and not just in numbers.
In conversation with Karen Ng’s book “Hegel’s Concept of Life,” Ron Kelch takes up the concept of life and “naturalism” and their relationship to freedom in Hegel, Marx, and Marxist-Humanism. Whether one takes Marx’s starting point of freedom with respect to human life activity that is inextricably part of nature or Hegel’s beginning again from Nature as mediation, the self-determination of the unifying Idea cannot be taken for granted in the face of the spontaneous self-bringing forth of liberty.
The Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan has shaken world politics and challenged the Left to respond in a revolutionary way. In the absence of truly liberatory revolutionary movements, what looms to fill the vacuum is not only a reinvigoration of fundamentalist political and military movements but the reactionary maneuvering by Russia and China, refugee-scapegoating parties, and repression of social movements on the model of Syria’s Assad and Burma’s Tatmadaw—all of which have been flourishing under the U.S. permanent “war on terror.”
This essay probes ways to make new beginnings in a period of reaction. It includes some of the themes of her work toward the book she had tentatively titled “Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy: ‘The Party’ and Forms of Organization Born out of Spontaneity.”
The urgency of crises underscores the urgency of projecting Marxist-Humanism.
The Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan has shaken world politics and challenged the Left to respond in a revolutionary way. In the absence of truly liberatory revolutionary movements, what looms to fill the vacuum is not only a reinvigoration of fundamentalist political and military movements but the reactionary maneuvering by Russia and China, refugee-scapegoating parties, and repression of social movements on the model of Syria’s Assad and Burma’s Tatmadaw—all of which have been flourishing under the U.S. permanent “war on terror.”
Readers’ Views on Covid-19 in Prisons; Labor and Capitalism; Weeds and Flowers; Censorship; Politics of Snitching, and Voices from Behind Bars.
Readers’ Views on: What Is Socialism?; What Is Marxist-Humanism?; Nuclear Socialism?; Nuclear Capitalism; Flat Earth Society; Indigenous Genocide; Indigenous Liberation; Racism Takes its Toll; Rape Culture; Coming Out in Sports; Colonialism and Liberation
The worldwide protests over George Floyd’s murder and other protests of Republican-led policies led them to erode, stifle, obfuscate, erase from memory and repress democracy, passing laws to subvert elections and teaching. Republicans decided that democracy must be destroyed so that they can rule in perpetuity, representing the 1% in the name of white Christian America.
Since the term “Marxist humanism” has once again become current, but subject to the most varying, and often sanitized, meanings, we present Raya Dunayevskaya’s 1961 writings on “Marxist Humanism in New Books and Reviews.” Once more, we face the questions she explored then: Why now, and how did these writers end up so opposite to where they seemed to be starting from?
The challenge from below has brought new attention to Marxist humanism. Defeatism and undialectical misreading, to rebury Marx as a “gradualist” and ethical utopian, deepens the separation of the intellectual both from the revolutionary ideas of Marxist-Humanism and from the concrete movements reaching for Humanism, socialism, and the creation of a new society.
Readers’ Views on: A Colombian View: What Is Socialism?; Trevor Wins!; Detroit School Fight; Suez Accident; What Prisoners Want; Voices From Behind Bars
Young people keep taking matters into our own hands. Our time of total crises calls for a philosophy to help us understand the problems at the root of our misery and give us hope we can create a new society. This makes Marx a contemporary for youth, looking for a way out of life under capitalism’s hopeless future.
Announcement and pre-publication offer for a new publication, ‘What Is Socialism? A Marxist-Humanist Symposium’
Excerpts from the Introduction to the new pamphlet on ‘What Is Socialism?’
A young revolutionary writes about participating in a protest for the first time, in solidarity with Alabama Amazon workers.
Amid COVID-19 deaths and economic decline, a fascist mob stormed the Capitol. If U.S. democracy lives to see another day, it was because of the unprecedented turnout of Black voters, reflecting the mass movement on the streets that continues to put that democracy on trial.
John Lewis, today’s struggles, and the needed philosophic dialogue; Remembering Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Putin: an opposing view; Amy Barrett’s fanaticism; Torture at Soledad; Pipeline battles.
Election battles, reaching for the future, and the pull of the past; Sabotage of the post office; Food recycling workers strike; Anti-labor statue downed; Oil and biden; COVID-19: where’s the vision?; Racism and fascism; Polish women’s revolutionary moment; News & Letters is back in print!
Three presentations on why Marx’s 1844 Humanist Essays are critical to meet today’s challenges, by a high school student, a former prisoner who participated in the Pelican Bay Hunger Strikes, and a long-time Marxist-Humanist looking at 1844 from a feminist perspective.
Humanity needs to take head of the warfare that broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan in late September, over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh which took the lives of thousands of soldiers, and hundreds of innocent civilians, on both sides.
You can help us recover after a fire near our office caused extensive damage.
Nationwide Black-led revolt and white supremacist backlash, class struggles and the ravages of a pandemic and economic collapse are taking place amid election battles and attacks on democracy.
Readers’ Views takes up: Black revolt and racism; dialectics of liberation; school battles; election victories; history and freedom; class struggles; and fighting the Right wing.
Draft thesis for discussion about where the world is heading, and what to do about it from a revolutionary standpoint. Introduction: Even after the pandemic subsides, society will be very different. We are already in the midst of a battle over how society will change in responding and adapting to the pandemic. That calls for the deepest solidarity, internationally as well as at home, participation in liberatory social movements and battles of ideas, and theoretical preparation for the battles ahead, including revolution, counter-revolution and the question of what happens after the revolution.
Draft thesis for discussion about where the world is heading, and what to do about it from a revolutionary standpoint. Part IV: In the absolute opposite of today’s society, one based on freely associated labor instead of slavery to capital’s production for production’s sake, we can leave behind pervasive misery, precarity and antagonism, and self-development and cooperation can flourish, as can a rational relationship to nature. We can see the beginnings in self-organization from below and the ever-growing rejection of capitalism. Against the large part of the Left that focuses on the power of the state to combat disasters, we must bring out the self-activity of masses in motion and not disarm ourselves by separating mass struggles from dialectical philosophy of revolution.
Abortion bans during the COVID-19 pandemic are cruel, based on lies, and constitute torture against women, causing not only more deaths, but also revealing the contempt with which women are held and the danger in forcing women to give birth against their will at this time.
Neither the coronavirus nor the ongoing climate changes are merely “acts of nature.” Rather both have emerged at this moment because humanity is grounded—entrapped—in the economic-social-political system(s) of capital/capitalism. It is the behemoth that we must examine: the monster we must free ourselves from.
POSTPONED: Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2020-2021
The death of counter-revolutionary Qassem Soleimani, together with Donald Trump’s war moves, illuminate this changed world.
An Editorial in News & Letters taking up who General Qassem Soleimani was, what he did in aiding counter-revolution in the Middle East, and ramifications of his death.
Editorial on the struggle women have in the U.S. to keep abortion legal and accessible, how the Left has mostly given lip service to the struggle, and how today when socialism is again on the agenda, it also has to mean women have control of their own bodies.
What does it mean to be paroled from prison? Before release, all I had was time. It was all torture. Now, I don’t have time. The effort to sustain myself takes most of my time and energy. Freedom, for me, means having time to work out who I am, how I want to relate to others.
In an era where women’s right to an abortion is endangered, feminist activist and writer Terry Moon delves into the question of what is socialism when it comes to women’s liberation, looking historically, politically, and philosophically.
There is no question that women are a vital part of the movement in Algeria since it erupted on Feb. 22, fighting to bring down le pouvoir—the power structure—that has been running the country and their lives since 1999.
The retreat from even modest efforts to control nuclear weapons has brought humanity closer than ever to annihilation. President Donald Trump’s suspension of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) with Vladimir Putin’s Russia gins up an already accelerating new arms race.
In a year marked by the contradiction between deepening women’s revolt and activism and neo-fascism rising across the globe, women have been fighting back in unprecedented numbers and ways.
This is the first in a series of four presentations on “What is Socialism?” Shorter versions will be published in News & Letters. The second essay is “Socialism, labor and the Black dimension”; the third is “Socialism and ecology”; and the last is “Socialism and Women’s Liberation.”
Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2019-2020
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.
On the occasion of the publication of the new book “Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution in Permanence for Our Day: Selected Writings by Raya Dunayevskaya,” this essay explores Marx’s ideas on the basis of Dunayevskaya’s writings on them as a philosophy of revolution needed for our age.
The Oct. 27 massacre of 11 Jewish congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue is the single deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history. The motive, as stated by the terrorist himself, was a hatred of Jewish support for Middle Eastern and Latin American immigrants through the organization HIAS.
A Marxist-Humanist view of the 2018 U.S. midterm elections that highlights the illegitimacy of Trump’s rule, showing how it is the rule of a minority won because of anti-democratic voter suppression, gerrymandering, racism, sexism, extreme anti-immigration rhetoric, hate speech and lies. It highlights the other America that opposes such neo-fascism.
The Oct. 27 massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue was a modern pogrom, with assault weapons, social media presence, and poisoned roots in the current stage of world counter-revolution represented by Trump, Putin, and their like.
News and Letters Committees statement on Donald Trump’s latest attack on Trans people by trying to claim that the word “sex” in Title IX does not include them. Trump has chosen to dehumanize a group of people whose whole lives have often been fraught with brutal violence and discrimination, those who are Transgender.
Given the moral bankruptcy of Congress and Donald Trump, it was no surprise that Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court was pushed through Congress. The surprise was the vibrancy, strength and determination of the fight against that nomination…
Editorial that takes up the evil that the Catholic Church has imposed on children and women; how movements from below, especially by women, have challenged it; and how future church crimes will be revealed, signaling the beginning of the end of the Catholic Church.
