Women World Wide: July 2024

July 8, 2024

Takes up: Protest in Brazil against a bill that equates abortion after 22 weeks with homicide; the 4th World Congress for the Abolition of Prostitution in Montreal; women outdo fundamentalists in Turkey’s local elections; and the cancellation of a state-sponsored mass wedding of 100 orphaned girls and young women in Nigeria.

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Mujeres en lucha contra el feminicidio

May 19, 2024

El feminicidio (el asesinato de una mujer por ser mujer) está aumentando en todo el mundo, al igual que las manifestaciones en su contra. En esta lucha se puede ver algo de la visión de futuro implícita en este movimiento: una sociedad en la que las mujeres sean comprendidas como seres humanos libres. La clave está en la “totalidad y profundidad del necesario arrancar de raíz”.

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Women worldwide fight femicide

March 16, 2024

Femicide—the murder of a woman because she is a woman—is on the rise across the world, as are demonstrations against it. In this struggle can be seen some of the vision of the future implicit in this movement: a society in which women are comprehended as free human beings. Key is “the totality and depth of the necessary uprooting.”

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An atrocity: Assad welcomed back

June 7, 2023

It is an atrocity that Bashar al-Assad was welcomed back to the Arab League Summit on May 19. This is one more attempt to bury the Syrian Revolution, which has heard its obituary pronounced again and again since the first mass demonstrations of Arab Spring, March 15, 2011.

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World in View: Turkey’s president

June 2, 2023

Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, after 20 years in power—first as Prime Minister, and then with a constitutional change as President—faced a challenging election and failed to receive a majority in the first round, before winning the second round runoff.

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Editorial: Earthquake deaths are not a natural disaster

March 17, 2023

Twin earthquakes on Feb. 6 decimated a vast area of Turkey and Syria. They produced a catastrophe with human tragedies over hundreds of square miles. But it was the man-made disaster on top of the natural one that killed more than half of the over 50,000 victims accounted for so far.

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Turkish women challenge Erdoğan

May 11, 2022

In April Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, had his public prosecutors demand that We Will Stop Femicide, Turkey’s largest women’s rights group, be disbanded for “activity against law and morals.” Protests immediately broke out across the country with hundreds marching in Istanbul and Ankara.

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Women demonstrate against Erdoğan’s closing of WWSF

April 30, 2022

In April Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, had his public prosecutors demand that We Will Stop Femicide, Turkey’s largest women’s rights group, be disbanded for “activity against law and morals.” Protests immediately broke out across the country with hundreds marching in Istanbul and Ankara.

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Women WorldWide

December 10, 2021

Women WorldWide takes up: Afghan women MPs set up an organization in exile to help other activist women escape; the thousands who marched in Istanbul, Turkey demanding action against widespread violence against women; women in Poland marching again against restrictions on abortion; and the 7,000 women who gathered in Madrid, Spain, protesting male violence against women.

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Youth in Action: January-February 2021

January 31, 2021

Massive youth demonstrations oppose military rule in Thailand and dictatorship of their schools; students at Bogazici University in Istanbul march to oppose Prof. Melih Bulu’s elevation to rector by Turkey’s President Erdoğan; and rural Pakistani youth pedal 100 miles in protest of a rise in the price of flour.

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Editorial: Caucasus war concerns all of humanity

November 26, 2020

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.

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International Women’s Day 2020

March 26, 2020

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.

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Women worldwide, September-October 2019

August 31, 2019

Feminists in Iran call on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to resign; huge demonstrations against police rapes in Mexico; removal of the “Girl of Peace Statue” in Japan; and the trial of Canan Kaftancioğlu, the Istanbul chief of the secularist Republican People’s Party.

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Turkey on the brink?

September 27, 2018

Under the whip of global capitalism, so-called emerging economies, like Turkey’s, have little real independence, and their masses live under a no-exit sign.

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Turkey’s Erdoğan tightens authoritarian rule

July 21, 2018

With his victory in the June 24, 2018, presidential election, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has consolidated his one-man rule of Turkey’s 80 million-plus population. He had already eliminated the office of prime minister and created a powerful executive presidency.

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#MeToo, Women’s Marches show the resistance deepens

March 8, 2018

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.” .

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Iranian workers, youth reach for new radical beginnings

January 28, 2018

The recent uprisings in Iran start where the 2009 revolt left off. This analysis focuses on the rebellious working-class youth as well as the interconnections to the Arab Spring, Vladimir Putin’s interference, Donald Trump’s racist agenda, and the philosophic-historic significance of the Bosnian and Syrian struggles against genocide.

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Women Worldwide, November-December 2017

November 15, 2017

Women Worldwide Column on: the Black Women’s March on Washington; Meltem Cumbul in Turkey refusing to shake the hand of a director who supported right-wing President Erdogan; and a class-action lawsuit against coerced sterilization procedures in Canada against indigenous women.

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Turkey’s Erdoğan – the pious dictator

September 7, 2016

A view of what the failed coup in Turkey has wrought, including mass arrests of teachers, trade unionists, doctors, medical personnel, and others as Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, makes a grab for total power.

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Workshop Talks: Bleak future if no labor solidarity

July 3, 2016

Workshop Talks columnist Htun Lin looks at the world situation from the massacre of LGBTQ people in Orlando to the murder of Jo Cox in Britain to Brexit and to how workers are reacting, suggesting that there is no exit from global capitalism without international labor solidarity.

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Britain’s hate-driven referendum a victory for the Far Right

June 26, 2016

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.

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II. The worldwide war against women

May 7, 2016

Part II of the Draft Perspectives 2016: The worldwide war against women includes attacks on abortion rights, counter-revolution in Egypt, attacks on women by UN troops. Women celebrated International Women’s day in Turkey and other countries.

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Counter-revolution in Middle East shows crisis of humanity

August 28, 2015

From the signing of a nuclear weapons agreement by the U.S. and Iran, to the ongoing war in Syria including the roles of Turkey and of the Left, this wide-ranging article delves into the Middle East situation with an emphasis on the forces fighting for genuine freedom and a multi-ethnic society.

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From Turkey to USA, women as force & reason fight inhumanity

March 5, 2015

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.

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Rojava & Syria’s revolution

November 21, 2014

Today the heroic struggle of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, along with allies of the Free Syrian Army, to defend Kobane from the IS deserves all support. This means first the support of the people, the workers, women, and all who struggle for a better life.

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Put miners in charge

August 29, 2014

From the September-October 2014 issue of News & Letters

Detroit—A mid-May fire killed 301 miners by carbon monoxide poisoning due to mine owners’ negligence in the worst coal mine disaster in Turkey’s history (see “Turkish miners killed,” July-August N&L). First reports indicated that the fire started when a transformer blew up. A subsequent investigation revealed that [=>]

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Revolutionary from Turkey speaks

July 7, 2013

Events in Turkey appeared spontaneous, but are a continuation of a long history. It was not the psychology of Prime Minister Erdogan that created opposition, but the institutionalized fascism within a “deep state.”

Turkey is capitalist, but not like Europe, the U.S., or Canada. It did not have a series of bourgeois revolutions. Capitalism in Turkey [=>]

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