The measures adopted in the face of the spread of COVID-19 in the world have caused billions of people to suddenly have excess “free time.” But this is not a full “free time,” conducive to the enjoyment and development of new skills, but a “time without work” that is exacerbating the enormous economic contradictions already existing in our society. Is it possible to imagine and bring about a form of free time that is truly human time?
What was new this International Women’s Day was larger marches, greater militancy of women participants, the new places where they took place, and the attacks against them which escalated significantly from previous years.
Más allá de la mayor o menor eficacia de la respuesta de uno u otro gobierno ante la pandemia, es el capitalismo en su conjunto el que muestra su incapacidad para darle solución a los problemas que amenazan la vida humana.
Beyond the greater or lesser effectiveness of the response of one or the other government to the pandemic, it is capitalism as a whole that shows its inability to solve the problems that threaten human life.
Despite Mexican President López Obrador’s sweet words about humanitarian treatment of Central American immigrants entering Mexico, the truth is horribly different.
Report by two women who attended the Zapatista Second International Gathering of Women Who Fight in Chiapas, Mexico.
Participant report of women’s strike in Mexico City, March 9, 2020.
What has become clear in 2020 is the global nature of the women’s movements. It is a new stage which has announced itself by the international fight against femicide; the Women’s Marches; and by the National Women’s Meetings in Latin America, also called Encuentros.
Report from Mexico on the three Days of Action “In Defense of Territory and Mother Earth,” by a participant in Mexico City.
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.
In the 5th anniversary of the forced disappearance of 43 students in Mexico. Can the fight against the “corruption” of the new administration change anything fundamental?
Laws against abortion and sex outside of marriage in Morocco; violence against women in South Africa; Ontario’s Provincial Police will no longer release the genders of crime suspects and victims, and abortion laws in Mexico.
A U.S. teacher reflects on the article “Teachers debate how to oppose ‘reform’” in Mexico and its connections with the world-historic movement of an education for freedom.
Teachers in a study circle on the book “México: represión, resistencia y rebeldía” speak on teachers’ resistance in Mexico. Translated from Praxis en America Latina.
We women In Morelos, Puebla and Tlaxcala are fighting the Integral Morelos Project [construction of a thermoelectric plant] and giving another direction to this centuries old struggle of the defense of the land.
Solidarity is needed with Central Americans seeking refuge and targeted by criminal policies of the Trump administration, with Mexico’s president knuckling under to Trump’s pressure.
Praxis en América Latina organizer J.G.F. Héctor takes up the revolutionary legacy of Emiliano Zapata, and resistance to the president and his attempt to appropriate Zapata.
The horrendous tragedy in Tlahuelilpan, Mexico, when an oil pipeline explosion killed over 100 people, has shaken all of Mexico.
Migrants on the immigrant caravan to the U.S. speak for themselves about why they left their home countries, which have experienced problems due to a history of U.S. imperialism.
On Sept. 5, 2018, a march of tens of thousands of students and other social groups flooded the UNAM campus in Mexico City to demand an end to porrismo, or pro-government thugs, used against students’ movements. Voices of several striking students are featured.
Since leftist López Obrador won the Presidency of Mexico, the masses will watch him and raise their voices if he fails in his promises for workers and Indigenous and against violence and corruption.
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
Women have changed the world through an incredible and sustained activism based on a humanism that runs like a revolutionary red thread through an amazing array of actions, demonstrations and statements. This development is based on over 50 years of a movement that the founder of Marxist-Humanism, Raya Dunayevskaya, characterized as “Woman as Revolutionary Force and Reason.” .
At the second gathering of “ConSciences for Humanity,” scientists shared with the Zapatista Indigenous communities their views of “Science in the face of the wall [capitalism].”
An in-person report of the recent devastating earthquakes in Mexico and how social conditions including capitalism, government corruption, etc., negatively affect rescue efforts; how everyday people’s self-organization makes a significant difference.
Readers’ Views: facing far right’s threat; don’t scapegoat; Canadian strike; Transgender troops; women’s liberation; homeless in Los Angeles; defend dissidents; why read N&L.
Around 800 Native people from all over Mexico met May 26-28 in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, to create an Indigenous Governing Council (IGC) and name its spokeswoman.
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.
Readers’ Views on: Practical and Theoretical Intervention; Syria and Humanism; International Crises; and Prisoners Speak.
The National Indigenous Congress in Mexico announced that 430 communities had created an Indigenous Governing Council to prepare for selecting a woman to contest the presidential election in 2018, not with the goal of taking power through the ballot box, but to elicit the voices and actions from below.
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.
Readers’ Views on Election Stirs Battles in Thought and in Life; Deep Racism in the USA; Women Fight Back; Indigenous Struggles; Global (In)Humanity; Why Read N&L?
Participant report of a cross-border protest at Nogales, Mexico, and Nogales, Arizona.
Despite police murders of teachers, surviving teachers and their supporters carry on inspiring protests against so-called “educational reforms” in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Part I of the Draft Perspectives 2016: Discontent is seething in the U.S. among workers, youth, Blacks, women, LGBTQ, including elements of the new society. Fear of revolution is powering neo-fascism opposing the revolt.
The Pope has a partial, limited critique of certain transgressions of industrial capitalism. In some areas of human rights, the Pope and the Catholic Church as an institution is not only silent, but in opposition.
Foregrounding the new formal solidarity between Trust Black Women with Black Lives Matter, we explore the thought and actions of women worldwide, including the struggle for reproductive justice in the U.S.; women fighting war and terrorism in places like South Sudan and Syria, the successful fight of domestic workers to organize, and the need to make the revolutionary content of such actions explicit.
Workers in four maquiladoras in Ciudad Juarez began organizing to form an independent union and for higher wages, better working conditions and against sexual harassment.
Universality of the movement for Ayotzinapa’s disappeared students
Mexico takes millions of dollars from the U.S. to stop Central American immigrants from crossing Mexico’s southern border. Gangs prey on those who make it into Mexico.
A roundup of the situation of people with disabilities and how they are fighting for their rights including in Mexico, a prison in Carlisle, Penn., outrage against the shackling of two young students with disabilities in Covington, KY, the banning of a child with cerebral palsy and autism in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, and disabled people in Iraq who face neglect and isolation.
The 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.
Black lives as Subject; Russia in crisis; Nothing about us without us; Homelessness in L.A.; Central Canada Alliance; Perspectives and philosophy; Elderly to the streets?; Women and Yemen half-peace; Labor and climate justice; Dialectic and women’s liberation; Voices from behind the bars
An 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.
Spelling out the philosophical breakthrough on Hegel’s Absolutes as the total uprooting of the old and the creation of new human relations, in concrete relationship to struggles for freedom in practice and in theory, is at the heart of projecting Marxist-Humanism, and therefore of its organizational life.
Letters and comments sent in by readers or taken down, to and about the articles in News & Letters or current events.
“Caravana 43” includes some of the parents of 43 students who were “disappeared” in September from the Normal Rural School Raúl Isidro Burgos in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, Mexico, and are touring the U.S. Here are in-person reports from their trips to Berkeley, Calif., and Detroit, Mich.
The thoughts of News & Letters readers on: MARXIST-HUMANIST PHILOSOPHY IN THE WHIRLWIND OF EVENTS; SAVING THE PLANET; and VOICES FROM BEHIND THE BARS.
Another savage sexual assault and murder—this time in Turkey—brought forth thousands of demonstrators, mostly women, throughout the country and beyond. Özgecan Aslan was a student taking a bus home. Worldwide, women are not only railing against sexism and challenging men to change what is often deadly behavior and when not deadly, deeply oppressive; they are as well explicitly extending their critique to the state itself.
