Farsi translation of the lead article “The U.S. election as manifestation of counterrevolution.”
retrogression
Essay: The decades-long struggle for free universal public education
January 11, 2025Facing Trumpist attack on public schools, teacher Susan van Gelder traces history of the struggle in the U.S. for free education, from Reconstruction to the present. She highlights what we must fight for and the forces of retrogression.
Lead-editorial article: The U.S. election as manifestation of counterrevolution
December 6, 2024Counterrevolution is the guiding principle of the Trump campaign and the dominant characteristic of politics worldwide. Although revolution does not appear to be on the horizon in the U.S. or in most other countries, capitalism is stumbling through a global crisis, both economic and ecological, psychological and communal.
¡Fin a la guerra de Israel contra la población palestina!
May 19, 2024La guerra de Israel contra las masas en Gaza alcanzó proporciones genocidas. ¿Cuándo podrán los palestinos regresar a los lugares donde vivieron y podrán reconstruir? Su autodeterminación debe comenzar con sus ideas y aspiraciones.
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 Two, Trump 2.0: A global threat
May 4, 2024Part II of the 2024-2025 Draft Perspectives. Takes up: the global retrogression that a second Trump period would mean.
Draft Perspectives, 2024-2025: Part Four, The crisis in thought
Part IV of the 2024-2025 Draft Perspectives. Takes on the retrogression in Left thought, especially on the questions of Israel’s war on Gaza and Putin’s war on Ukraine.
Editorial: End Israel’s War Against Palestinian Masses!
March 11, 2024Israel’s war against the masses in Gaza reached genocidal proportions. When will Palestinians be able to return to the places where they lived, and will they be able to rebuild? Self-determination must begin with their ideas and aspirations.
Universities under far-right attack
January 26, 2024The “resignations” of presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard revealed the philosophical failings in academia, which is under attack by the far right for not suppressing criticism of Israel. Why didn’t academia know how to respond to the events in Israel/Palestine?
Editorial: Democracy under dire threat
January 25, 2024Trump and his allies are aiming at a second term. The means: taking power at all costs, even with a minority of votes. The ends: complete evisceration of human rights, democracy, and human solidarity.
Woman as Reason: The practicality of revolution
December 28, 2023Reporter Sonia Sodha asked: “Women in revolt achieved so much. Why are decades of progress now being reversed?” The struggle for freedom of all those who have been pronounced as less than human may seem impossible, but as Irish revolutionary James Connolly said: “Revolution is never practical—until the hour of the revolution strikes.”
Ni la guerra genocida israelí contra los palestinos ni el terrorismo de Hamás: sí a la revolución social
December 5, 2023Los ataques del 7 de octubre por parte de Hamás en Israel desencadenaron una nueva fase de guerra y reacción. Israel amenaza con un genocidio con el apoyo de Estados Unidos. La ocupación israelí no justifica la forma en que partes de la izquierda celebraron los ataques de Hamás, que socavan los movimientos de liberación y avivan la reacción. Levantar la bandera de la liberación no debe posponerse, mientras mantenemos nuestra solidaridad con el pueblo palestino y nos oponemos a la guerra genocida de Israel y a las acciones terroristas inhumanas. (Spanish translation of the article “No to Israeli genocidal war against Palestinians, no to Hamas terrorism, yes to social revolution!”)
Readers’ Views: November 2023
November 24, 2023Readers’ Views on: Israel/Palestine; Revolt in Iran; in Canada for 2SLGBTQIA+; Trump, Biden too old to run; Racism in Tennessee; Prisoners miss ‘N&L’; Memorial for Paul Geist and Dan Bremer; Texas targets pregnant women & refugees; Ohio targets women and democracy; Revolutionary history; and Raining on those with disabilities.
No to Israeli genocidal war against Palestinians, no to Hamas terrorism, yes to social revolution!
October 17, 2023The Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas in Israel set off a new round of war. Israel is threatening genocide with U.S. support. Israel’s occupation in no way justifies Leftists celebrating the murderous attacks by Hamas, which undermine social liberation movements and stoke reaction. Raising the banner of liberation is critical as we engage in solidarity with Palestinians and oppose Israel’s genocidal war and Hamas’s terrorist actions.
Woman as Reason: Their target: women’s freedom
July 9, 2022The overturning of abortion rights is worse than before it was legal because of the hatred of women for creating a movement that challenged men’s ownership of our bodies, lives and minds, and many are determined to get that power and control back no matter what the body count.
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Hegel’s Third Attitude today
May 18, 2022Thought disjointed from objective truth is running amok today—even including self-described Marxists who oppose self-determination of Ukraine and side with Putin, the avowed enemy of Lenin. This compels a new look at Hegel’s category philosophically comprehending that phenomenon, which he called “The Third Attitude of Thought toward the Objective World.”
Essay: Marx’s Humanism under Marxology’s knife
May 8, 2021The challenge from below has brought new attention to Marxist humanism. Defeatism and undialectical misreading, to rebury Marx as a “gradualist” and ethical utopian, deepens the separation of the intellectual both from the revolutionary ideas of Marxist-Humanism and from the concrete movements reaching for Humanism, socialism, and the creation of a new society.
III. The reality and the myth of contemporary capitalism
May 5, 2018We look at the world economic situation that must be changed: the role of state-capitalism, labor, climate change, the law of value, exploitation, alienation, and revolution and counter-revolution in Syria.
Readers’ Views: January-February 2017, Part I
January 31, 2017Readers’ Views on: environmental and social crises; Martin Luther King Day; healthcare crisis, Donald Trump and the election; brutal “justice”; and who reads News & Letters.
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Why Phenomenology? Why now?
January 30, 2017Because of the urgency of the question of how to make new beginnings in such a reactionary world situation, we excerpt two of Dunayevskaya’s last philosophical writings, which confront “where to begin” as part of her work on dialectics of philosophy and organization.
Workshop Talks: Roots of Trumpism in swamps of history
January 26, 2017Htun 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.
Help keep News & Letters going and growing
September 7, 2016An appeal for funds to help keep the paper, News & Letters, going and growing; and to help us expand our subscriptions to prisoners.
Editorial: Putin’s retrogressionism
December 10, 2015Putin found a formula: to participate in genocide while claiming to be fighting “terrorism.” This says everything about the nature of his retrogressive rule, and about the hypocrisy of the U.S. and Europe
Editorial: Syriza’s many challenges
March 7, 2015The electoral victory of Greece’s Syriza party was an important first step in resisting austerity imposed on the Greek and European working classes as capitalism’s response to its own intractable crisis. Nothing could be in greater contradiction to the movement that lifted Syriza to prominence than the parliamentary alliance with the racist, theocratic Independent Greeks party.
Another look at Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Mind’
September 14, 2014From the January-February 2002 News & Letters
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya
Editor’s Note: We publish here a discussion of what Marx considered Hegel’s greatest philosophic work—The Phenomenology of Mind. The first piece is a letter written by Raya Dunayevskaya to an Iranian colleague on June 26, 1986[1] ; the original can be found in the [=>]
‘On political divides and philosophic new beginnings’
September 7, 2014From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya
From the May-June 2012 issue of News & Letters.
Editor’s Note: “On political divides and philosophic new beginnings,” written 25 years ago, is the last writing of Raya Dunayevskaya, who died on June 9, 1987. It was first published in the In Memoriam special issue of News & [=>]