We celebrate the life of Ron Kelch, a Marxist-Humanist and a revolutionary for nearly 60 years.
News and Letters Committees
Editorial: U.S. Supreme Court wallows in racism
May 6, 2026The Supreme Court gutted the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. This dismantling of one of the most important Civil Rights Movement’s achievements exposes the anti-freedom nature and the virulent racism and sexism that pervade this society.
Antiwar message
August 3, 2025News and Letters Committees’ response to the call for solidarity messages to the 63rd International Antiwar Assembly held yearly in Japan.
Draft Perspectives 2025-2026, Part I: The sound of bootheels
May 2, 2025From immigrants to Transgender people, from workers to students to women, no one is safe. Attacks on many fronts are part and parcel of what is widely recognized as a Trump/Musk coup, but is usually portrayed as normal politics in the media. Institutions cannot be trusted to save us and they need to feel the pressure from people fighting back.
Draft Perspectives 2025-2026, Part II: What new world order?
What kind of new world order is Trump heading for? Forced annexation of territories (as in Russia’s war on Ukraine), genocide (as in Israel’s war on Gaza), and neocolonialism (as in the Democratic Republic of Congo) are crucial parts of it. The word “multipolar” cannot hide its imperialist nature.
Draft Perspectives 2025-2026, Part III: Trumpism and the present moment of capitalism
What it is about this moment of this capitalist society that brought a creature like Trump to the top? The crumbling of society goes beyond economic measures. The symptoms are everywhere of a system that increasingly does not believe in its own future.
Draft Perspectives 2025-2026, Part IV: Where is the Left?
Why did the massive resistance eight years ago not prevent Trump’s return? And what is the “Left” today? More important than the unity of the Left is the unity of the movement from theory and the movement from practice.
Draft Perspectives 2025-2026, Part V: Our tasks
The 20th century revealed statist socialism to be a dead end. It is a substitute for the self-activity of the masses in motion, which is the only basis for workers’ control of the labor process. Without revolutionary humanist philosophical mediation capitalism will reconstitute around us and block the total reorganization of society. The philosophy of revolution demands an organizational expression.
Official call for convention to work out Marxist-Humanist Perspectives for 2025-2026
March 2, 2025Trump’s return is a manifestation of capitalism’s tendency toward fascism when destabilized by systemic crises. The questioning of the foundations of this decaying society is linked to a search for an alternative. We have a responsibility to help the movement set its direction by working at the concrete projection of a liberatory banner.
An Open Letter to Members of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization
July 6, 2024Focus on the real differences in ideas, in News and Letters Committees’ response to the IMHO statement “Our Differences with Other Marxist-Humanists in Light of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.”
Philosophic Essay: Meeting the challenge not alone from practice but from Karl Marx’s Idea
May 6, 2024This essay explores Marx’s Idea of Absolute Freedom as the foundation for overcoming today’s retrogression. Marx’s view of labor as “the prime necessity of life” connects with his whole dialectical view. The essay explores Dunayevskaya’s reading of this passage, and criticizes partial outlooks.
Draft Perspectives 2024-2025: Part Six, Tasks
May 4, 2024Part VI and last of the 2024-2025 Draft Perspectives. Takes up the organizational and philosophical tasks posed by News and Letters Committees for the year to come.
Call for Convention of News and Letters Committees, 2024
February 25, 2024Call for Convention of News and Letters Committees, 2024
In Memoriam Erica Rae (Erica Sufritz) 1958-2024
February 8, 2024As youth, woman, and educator, Erica Rae (Erica Sufritz) made many contributions to News and Letters Committees since she was a teenager. We will miss the comrade who loved music passionately and sang with the North Shore Choral Society and who cheerfully worked alongside us for revolution for her whole life.
In Memoriam Dan Bremer
November 14, 2023Dan Bremer passed away in October. We remember his kindness, his profound grasp of world and local politics, and his steadfast commitment to a more humane world based on the Marxist-Humanist philosophy of human liberation.
Angela Terrano, 1929-2023
October 17, 2023Angela Terrano died on Oct. 1. She was the managing editor of ‘News & Letters’ from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s and the co-editor of the 1976 Marxist-Humanist pamphlet ‘Working Women for Freedom’. She made an important contribution to Charles Denby’s 1960 pamphlet ‘Worker’s Battle Automation’.
To the 61st International Antiwar Assembly
August 4, 2023Message in solidarity with the annual international antiwar assembly
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2023-2024: Polycrisis and the need to transform reality. Part I
June 15, 2023Society’s crying need for radical transformation makes itself felt day after day. In response, ruling classes across the globe have split into two main factions with differing strategies for heading off the threatened transformation from below: counter-revolution spawning new flavors of fascism with rough new figureheads, or non-transformational transformation to patch up the status quo while saving the powers that be. This thesis is about what is happening in the world and what to do about it.
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2023-2024: Polycrisis and the need to transform reality. Parts VI & VII
Where will even the greatest movements from below lead so long as they lack a philosophy of revolution that would give these revolutionary struggles a direction? Any mass movement and any organization can regress and even transform into its opposite. This historic problem cannot be solved by the right program, leadership, or even form of organization. It highlights the indispensability of the need for a philosophy of revolution, the need for the organization of thought and its demand to be embodied in organizations based on the movement from theory.
Boycott ‘Rage Against the War Machine’
March 21, 2023News and Letters Committees is one of many signatories to this statement. More such events are sure to be held, and it is vital to be aware of their reactionary “red-brown” nature.
Call for Convention, 2023
February 26, 2023Call for Convention of News and Letters Committees, 2023
Azadkar (Tooraj Haji Moradi), 1952-2022
January 25, 2023Tooraj Haji Moradi (1952-2022), whose pen name was Azadkar, was a revolutionary to his core and remained so throughout his life. Upon his return from the Iranian Revolution, he influenced a whole generation of Iranian youth who became Marxist-Humanists.
60th International Antiwar Assembly
November 11, 2022Excerpts of the appeal from the Executive Committee for the 60th International Antiwar Assembly, together with the message of solidarity sent to the Assembly from News and Letters Committees. Against Putin’s war and for revolutionary new beginnings!
‘Women, Life, Freedom!’ The transformation of Iran
September 28, 2022The Iranian hardline regime should be very afraid. The cries of: “Women, life and freedom!” “Death to the head scarf!” “Death to the dictator!” fill the streets. Iranian women have inspired the world and put Iran’s oligarchs on notice that their repressive regime is in grave danger.
Kei ‘Basho’ Utsumi (1935-2022)
September 6, 2022A remembering of the revolutionary life of Kei ‘Basho’ Utsumi (1935-2022), written by Buddy Bell, who knew Basho and worked with him in the last years of his life.
Kei “Basho” Utsumi (1935-2022): in remembrance
August 24, 2022Kei Utsumi touched many lives before his death on July 15, a few days shy of his 87th birthday. In conversations with friends, in being present at countless demonstrations, or in putting pen to paper, his was a passionate, unyielding voice for freedom movements, which will be sorely missed.
Johnny Rogers (Robert Ellery), in memoriam
March 15, 2022Johnny Rogers (Robert Ellery), was one of the founding members of News and Letters Committees. The way he exemplified the immediate post-World War II generation of youth as a revolutionary force speaks to all generations.
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2021-2022: Part VI. Tasks
September 1, 2021The urgency of crises underscores the urgency of projecting Marxist-Humanism.
Need for a Total Uprooting: Down with the Perpetrators of the Palestinian Slaughter
June 12, 2021In light of the ongoing Israel-Palestine crisis, we present a piece that takes up the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the connected slaughter of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. This piece goes beyond exposé to explore the treacherous nature of halfway revolutions, which set the stage for counter-revolution. It thus illuminates today’s crisis.
Rally for Amazon workers’ union drive
March 11, 2021Participant 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.
Ray Bazmore 1926-2020
January 31, 2021Raymond Bazmore, who died Nov. 4 at the age of 93 in Detroit, was active and engaged all his life in numerous social justice struggles.
Woman as Reason: Sarah White (Sarah Hamer) 1958-2020
January 30, 2021The movement lost a powerful voice for workers’ liberty, self-development and freedom when Sarah White died of a heart attack on Oct. 5, 2020.
News and Letters Committees office damaged
August 29, 2020You can help us recover after a fire near our office caused extensive damage.
From the writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: From Black mass revolt to Freedom
July 1, 2020Excerpt from the pamphlet ‘Black Mass Revolt,’ issued in October 1967 following uprisings in Detroit and Newark: “Has Whitey got the message?” asked one of the Black militants. “Have our own leaders? The system has got to go.”
News and Letters Committees Call for Convention 2020
March 2, 2020POSTPONED: Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2020-2021
Deborah Morris 1946-2019
August 31, 2019In memoriam to Deborah Morris, writer, activist and powerful thinker in the women’s liberation movement and in her participation with News and Letters Committees.
Help ‘News & Letters’ survive and thrive
Help News & Letters fight the dystopian reality of these extreme times!
San Francisco Youth Climate Strike
May 3, 2019Bay Area youth exuberantly join in a global march for the climate, raising awareness of climate change.
Essay: What is socialism? Socialism, labor, and the Black dimension
May 1, 2019Marxist-Humanist Bob McGuire looks through history to Marx’s relationship to labor and the Black movement for freedom and then to our day and the relationship of Marxist-Humanism to labor and the Black struggle for freedom in speaking to the question many are asking today: What is socialism?
Readers’ Views: March-April 2019, Part 1
March 11, 2019Readers’ Views on: workers strike back, genocide and Facebook, Mauritius victory, Syrian Revolution under fire, “55 Steps,” debating yellow vests, women’s struggles, and why read News & Letters.
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
Readers’ Views, November-December 2018
December 14, 2018Readers’ Views on: Capitalism vs. the Planet; Anti-Semitism’s Inhumanity; Kavanaugh Travesty; Youth Rock!; Freedom Movements vs. Fascism across the Globe; Catholic Church Crisis; Voices from behind Bars
Frantz Fanon warns Ali Shariati
December 2, 2018A new book, “Frantz Fanon: Alienation and Freedom,” reveals that Frantz Fanon warned leftist Islamist Ali Shariati that, despite Islam’s anticolonialist potential, without the spirit of emancipation it risked diversion to sectarianism, approaching the past rather than future, like African nationalisms.
Discussion article: The Left’s response to Syrian genocide
October 7, 2018A U.S. activist in Syria solidarity criticizes the broad Left’s failure to practice revolutionary solidarity and outlines the dangerous political consequences.
Readers’ Views, September-October 2018: Part 2
September 29, 2018Readers’ Views Part 2 takes up: the needed return to Marx’s Humanism, and Voices from behind prison bars.
V. Organizational Tasks
May 14, 2018It is a question of working out how to actualize for this moment the relationship of philosophy, spontaneity, organization. We look at concrete tasks.
In Memoriam: Andy Phillips (1924-2018)
May 1, 2018We mourn the loss of a founding member of News and Letters Committees, who participated in the first national strike against automation in the coal mines and later co-wrote its history in “The Coal Miners’ General Strike of 1949-50 and the Birth of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S.”
Call for Convention 2018
February 25, 2018OFFICIAL CALL FOR CONVENTION
to Work Out Marxist-Humanist Perspectives for 2018-2019
February 25, 2018
To All Members of News and Letters Committees
Dear Friends:
The deeply ingrained rape culture, already widely known but often hushed up, has been exposed in the broadest way yet by the #MeToo movement. How deep and total is the needed uprooting [=>]
From the writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Iran–Unfoldment of, and contradictions in, revolution
January 30, 2018Excerpt from Dunayevskaya’s March 25, 1979, Political-Philosophic Letter “Iran: Unfoldment of, and Contradictions in, Revolution” that gives a history of revolt and speaks to today’s rebellions in that country by workers, women and youth.
Mauritius demonstration prohibited
December 16, 2017LALIT reports on their banned protest of U.S. military base on Diego Garcia, and our statement of solidarity.