Focus 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.”

Focus 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.”
This 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.
Part 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
As 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.
Dan 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 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’.
Message in solidarity with the annual international antiwar assembly
Society’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.
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.
News 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 of News and Letters Committees, 2023
Tooraj 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.
Excerpts 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!
The 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.
A 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 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), 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.
The urgency of crises underscores the urgency of projecting Marxist-Humanism.
In 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.
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.
Raymond Bazmore, who died Nov. 4 at the age of 93 in Detroit, was active and engaged all his life in numerous social justice struggles.
The movement lost a powerful voice for workers’ liberty, self-development and freedom when Sarah White died of a heart attack on Oct. 5, 2020.
You can help us recover after a fire near our office caused extensive damage.
Excerpt 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.”
POSTPONED: Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2020-2021
In 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 fight the dystopian reality of these extreme times!
Bay Area youth exuberantly join in a global march for the climate, raising awareness of climate change.
Marxist-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 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.
Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2019-2020
Readers’ 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
A 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.
A U.S. activist in Syria solidarity criticizes the broad Left’s failure to practice revolutionary solidarity and outlines the dangerous political consequences.
Readers’ Views Part 2 takes up: the needed return to Marx’s Humanism, and Voices from behind prison bars.
It is a question of working out how to actualize for this moment the relationship of philosophy, spontaneity, organization. We look at concrete tasks.
We 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.”
OFFICIAL 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 [=>]
Excerpt 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.
LALIT reports on their banned protest of U.S. military base on Diego Garcia, and our statement of solidarity.
Basho, S.B., and Terry Moon remember their Marxist-Humanist comrades, Judy Tanzawa and Dan Perron.
News and Letters Committees lost a wonderful comrade when Dan Perron (Oct. 12, 1959-Sept. 7, 2017) died. Dan was a lifelong activist for freedom and justice.
In Memoriam for Judy Tanzawa who was a radical union organizer, Los Angeles Local Organizer for News and Letters Committees, fighter for human liberation in all its dimensions. .
An appeal for funds to keep Marxist-Humanism alive and to help News and Letters Committees continue to grow. .
Although we do not have a daily newspaper, this crisis-ridden period compels us to strive to act as if we do. Organizational tasks as always are meant to include, not exclude, friends and new contacts who are not yet Marxist-Humanists.
Readers’ Views on: Practical and Theoretical Intervention; Syria and Humanism; International Crises; and Prisoners Speak.
On Aug. 23, California’s Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition leafletted the staging area for trips to Alcatraz prison raising discussions with locals and tourists about how solitary confinement is torture.
The retreat of former Marxist-Humanists into post-Marx Marxism is analyzed by Franklin Dmitryev through the books “Marx at the Margins” by Kevin Anderson and “Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism” by Peter Hudis, which appropriate some of Raya Dunayevskaya’s conclusions while quietly dismantling their philosophical framework.
An appeal for funds to help keep the paper, News & Letters, going and growing; and to help us expand our subscriptions to prisoners.