Editorial taking up the present situation in Syria where the smoke of destroyed East Aleppo, of ravaged Free Idlib, East Ghouta, Wadi Barada, and other revolutionary communities raises Trump’s fascist banner. While President Obama is no friend to the Syrian Revolution, Trump delivered: surrender or death.
A look at the situation in the Middle East in light of Donald Trump’s election that takes up Syria, Yemen and the arming by the U.S. of varying forces–some of whom are fighting each other.
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?
Trump’s electoral victory by appealing to racism and sexism menaces all freedom movements. It is the index of this system’s crisis and bankruptcy of thought, which needs to be met with a truly revolutionary vision.
Trump’s electoral victory by appealing to racism and sexism menaces all freedom movements. It is the index of this system’s crisis and bankruptcy of thought, which needs to be met with a truly revolutionary vision.
Readers’ Views on: Racism and Revolt Put U.S. on Trial; Life and Death Under the Class Divide; Environmental Struggles; War and Atrocities; and Women’s Lives at Stake.
An appeal for funds to help keep the paper, News & Letters, going and growing; and to help us expand our subscriptions to prisoners.
The impeachment of Brazil’s President Rousseff by right-wing forces in Congress betrays longstanding divisions in Brazil along lines of race and class, but was made possible because Rousseff’s Workers Party tried to demobilize the social forces that had brought it to power, leaving street agitation to Right-wing militants.
Buddy Bell of Voices for Creative Nonviolence tells of their recent 150-mile walk across the state of Illinois on the issues of indefinite detention, solitary confinement and the racist U.S. prison system.
On the same day that General William Westmoreland waved the flag before Congress, Muhammad Ali refused to be inducted into the Army. While the general was applauded even by the doves, Ali was, within hours, stripped of his title of World Heavyweight Boxing Champion. War exposed the open nerve—”the Black Question”—which has always been the touchstone of U.S. history. It placed American civilization on trial before the world much more seriously than the “war crimes tribunal” in Stockholm.
A revolutionary critique of the “lynching” charge against Black Lives Matter activist Jasmine Richards and how it reveals the racism endemic to U.S. society and spotlights the revolutionary Black youth fighting against it.
An Editorial on how Brexit has emboldened the Far Right, not only in Britain but also in the U.S., bringing out blatant expressions of racism, homophobia, sexism and anti-immigrant hatred; and the importance of people’s own self-organization to counter this moment in history.
With Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, the Far Right has been emboldened worldwide. As the economic and social crisis deepens, so does the brutality, while the Right seeks scapegoats for the results of capitalism’s objective laws, which only have force as long as humanity’s struggle to be free is not yet complete. The only solid ground for opposing this latest stage of reactionary retrogression is that of revolution in permanence.
An anti-nuclear activist describes how plutonium has become deadly since World War II and advocates for humanity to reduce its impact.
Our era, when racist police gun down Black men, women and youth, continues a history as old as the U.S. The piece excerpted here shows some of that history and how racism can be spurred on by this country’s leaders and would-be leaders, out for power. It takes up how Left movements respond to racism and the attempt to answer the question by funneling liberatory impulses into the dead end of electoral politics. The relationships between the Black freedom movement, anti-war youth, workers, and philosophy of revolution remain as critical today as when this article was written.
Readers’ Views on Women as Reason; Harriet Tubman; Racism and Internationalism; Bisexual Health; Trans Liberation and Feminism; Chinese State vs. Workers; Nuclear Arms Threaten All; Ireland’s Red Banner; Remembering Olga Domanski; Haggard but Not Tired; Voices from Behind the Bars.
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.
At the crux of the world refugee crisis is a demand for new human relations. The will to deny any responsibility for centuries of exploitation of Latin America and Africa is at the root of inhuman attitudes toward refugees, and it becomes an opening for the most reactionary politicians.
Students protesting racism at US campuses get some wins; student movement The FeesMustFall student movement at South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand wins a temporary freeze on fees, call for campus jobs to remain on campus and making it more possible for more poor and working class students to be able to afford university; University of Georgia students arrested for calling on the university to grant in-state tuition for undocumented youth; University of Missouri students continue to agitate for racial justice by calling for more Black faculty.
The Chicago Teachers Union, Black Lives Matter, Labor and disability rights movements work together to oppose racism, government cutbacks and austerity
With Trump’s appeal to racism and reaction winning support from part of the working class, we present Dunayevskaya’s letter taking up Enoch Powell’s racist speeches and their impact on the working class.
A statement of solidarity issued by Trust Women Partnership to Black Lives Matter that highlights the importance of reproductive justice in the struggle for freedom and self-determination.
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.
The last quarter of 2015 was marked by a national campaign against racism at campuses across the U.S.
Colorado student-teacher-parent walkouts lead to recall of reactionary school board members; Oxford students campaign to remove images of racist imperialist Cecil Rhodes; student activism sweeps South Africa.
California prisoners battle barbaric ‘justice’ system; Against ISIS attacks; Women under attack; Support Maati Monjib; The Burmese Way; Race, class & politics.
Remembrances of Olga Domanski by comrades and friends.
On the deadly racism of the Chicago and U.S. police and the creative response from those struggling against it.
readers views nov dec 2015 part 1
Review of Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman.
In California the ongoing struggle of prisoners against the U.S.’s barbaric criminal justice system reached a milestone in the effort to totally transform a society in which millions of poor, unemployed and people of color end up in an inhuman gulag.
On Aug. 12, Hugo “Yogi” Pinell (1945-2015) was killed in the California State Prison-Sacramento. Pinell was a comrade of George Jackson, W.L. Nolen, James Carr, and other founders of the modern prison movement.
Excerpts of videos of Sandra Bland speaking for herself. She made the videos in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Bland died in Waller County, Texas, after being thrown in jail there for a manufactured traffic violation.
A prisoner speaks about the murders in South Carolina, President Obama’s reaction to them, and the needed philosophical direction for those still yearning for freedom.
Readers’ thoughts on “Srebrenica, Bosnia, 1995; Europe and the World, 2015”; “Struggles against Racism”; “After Cecil, People Are Next”; “Teachers and Children”; “Workers, Customers Pay.”
A Black prisoner looks at the meaning of U.S. racism and the struggle to remove the Confederate flag from the capitol grounds of South Carolina.
One year after the murder of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson, the Black Lives Matter movement continues to challenge racist U.S. society. In doing so, it deepens itself in both content and thought.
The racist murder of nine people at the historic Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C., is the characteristic U.S. form of terrorism, directed against the expression of Black self-determination.
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
Demonstrations in Chicago, Oakland, Calif., and Los Angeles show the ongoing militant character of the Black Lives Matter movement as mostly young Black protesters take their anger and demands to the streets.
The video of Cpl. Eric Casebolt’s June 5 attack on Dejerria Becton and other kids at a pool party in McKinney, Texas, went viral because it was simultaneously shocking and commonplace. In 2015 USA, protests were inevitable and were heard around the world.
Now there is the convening in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on May 7 of the Women’s Court on war crimes against women during the war in the 1990s. Women came together from all corners of the former Yugoslavia to demand justice for the crimes committed against them during the wars and the suffering that followed.
ACT UP Chicago grew out of an organization that began in 1984 of Dykes and Gay Men Against Racism and Repression. We became an AIDS activism organization, first called Chicago For Our Rights, then by spring Chicago for AIDS Rights. We pushed for lowering the prices of AIDS drugs, and the release of more of them. By October and the national action in Washington, D.C., we had become ACT UP Chicago. AIDS is a global issue today. This time around, I’d like to see an AIDS activist movement that’s organized by poor, working-class, mostly people of color.
In reading Charles Denby’s “Continuing Magnolia Jungle terror exposes reality of ‘Great Society,’” one is struck by how poignant and presciently modern Denby’s thoughts were and how very little has changed today.
Several hundred people of all races marched from the Union Rescue Mission in Skid Row, where a homeless Black man with mental problems known as Africa, was killed by six Los Angeles police officers.
Tulsa: Eric Harris murdered by Sheriff’s “reserve” cop; North Charleston: cop murder of Walter Scott videoed; Chicago: meager reparations for victims of police torture.
On April 28, hundreds gathered outside Chicago Police Department headquarters, at 35th and Michigan, to show love and respect for Rekia Boyd, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and all the others whose Black lives matter. The crowd was largely young and multicultural. What is the truth about Freddie Gray’s death? The truth is that he was murdered by the notoriously racist and brutal Baltimore Police. Baltimore has exploded in anger because of the attempt to obscure this obvious fact, to pretend that the basic life experience of Black people over the last five decades, if not the entirety of U.S. history, can be dissolved into a social mystery. This generation serves notice: that shell game is over.
Letters and comments sent in by readers or taken down, to and about the articles in News & Letters or current events.
A roundup of women’s actions worldwide including: feminists jailed in China before International Women’s Day; the unfair and punitive jailing of Purvi Patel for having a miscarriage; the fightback against the increase in sexist, racist, homophobic and classist harassment in Sci-Fi fandom; and the women’s hunger and work strike against terrible conditions at the Karnes Detention Center in Texas for migrant women and children.
She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry is a documentary of the women’s liberation movement (WLM) in the U.S., from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Filmmaker Mary Dore used a wealth of historical news coverage to give a sense of the breadth of organizations and depth of demands in the explosive growth of the WLM. Activists, identified within archival footage—including women like Fran Beal of the Civil Rights Movement’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lesbian rights activist Karla Jay, and Judith Arcana of the abortion underground organization Jane—gave contemporary interviews interspersed in the film.
