Third and last part of Dunayevskaya’s presentation on “Hegelian Leninism.” Here, the author deals with the transformation into opposite of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Lenin’s seven last years (1917-1924), and what has happened with Marxism and Socialism since then, including her critique to the thought and practice of Mao Zedong.
Venezuela’s president rekindled a territorial dispute with its neighbor Guyana. Not to actually take the territory, but rather to create an issue of patriotism to use in his upcoming re-election campaign.
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.
After Cyclone Mocha devastated Rakhine State in Myanmar (Burma) on May 14, the National Unity Group representing civilian opposition and armed resistance reported 200 Rohingya Muslims had been killed as the storm hit with 130-mile-per-hour winds.
In October Xi Jinping cleared the inner circle of the ruling Communist Party of all but lackeys. In November his lifetime rule became much more precarious as protests broke out across the country over his draconian zero-COVID policies.
Readers’ Views on: Labor: Teachers Face Politician Bosses; Labor: Automation and the New Humanism; Socialism, Statism and Philosophy; Fake ‘Right to Life’; Eviction Tsunami; Agribusiness vs. Planet; Afghanistan Exploited; Taiwan Faces China and U.S.; Desmond Tutu; With the Migrant Caravan; U.S. vs. Palestinians
Remembering Jonathan Spence, a noted China scholar at Yale and the author of more than a dozen books on Chinese history spanning centuries and social classes.
Saber-rattling rhetoric, troop movements, and threats of open warfare have accompanied rounds of diplomatic meetings between Russia, the U.S., NATO, and other European powers over the future of Ukraine. These threats must be opposed, and seen for what they are—anti-working class counter-revolution on a world-historic scale.
After the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, there are mounting human rights violations. They are forcing women to disappear from public life and accept abuse but Afghanistan’s people, agents of history, are not known for capitulating long to injustice.
Cubans revolt and students speak out amid food and medicine shortages and human rights violations; and Latin America suffers under climate change.
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.
The brief, dirty war that broke out May 10-21 between the Israeli government and Hamas, the Islamist group ruling Gaza had many reactionary consequences.
The ruling class response to the pandemic was to lie, obfuscate, and manipulate the public in its own interest. The possibility that COVID-19 may have been a lab leak illustrates how capitalism can turn our deepest insights into our own nature towards our own destruction.
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.
The capitalist world remains in a deep crisis and now faces a crossroads. U.S., Chinese, and European imperialism all have aging populations and mounting debt . They need to find new sources of labor and natural resources to plunder. Africa, with the youngest population of any major region and abundant mineral wealth, is a target.
Announcement and pre-publication offer for a new publication, ‘What Is Socialism? A Marxist-Humanist Symposium’
Excerpts from the Introduction to the new pamphlet on ‘What Is Socialism?’
An estimated 250 million Indian farmers have been on strike since last September in opposition to a series of new laws, proposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
Guanajuato has 2,587 missing persons, and 3,438 intentional homicides in the first nine months of 2020; President López Obrador claims to be against neoliberalism, but combines it with state-capitalism in developmentalist projects; many states and communities are COVID-19 hot spots with high levels of deaths, particularly in maquiladoras; and the Zapatistas report on their situation vis-a-vis COVID-19, and their resistance along with CNI against developmentalist projects.
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.
A high school student, a former prisoner, and a long-time Marxist-Humanist discuss why Marx’s 1844 Humanist Essays are critical to meet the total challenges to humanity today.
‘Mexico news’ takes up the thousands of missing people in Mexico and the found clandestine graves; the resistance to Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s developmentalist capitalism; how COVID-19 affects Mexico; and how fare the Zapatistas and their future plans.
The fracking boom turned to bust and a wave of bankruptcies reveals the current operation of decaying capitalism in miniature: cannibalizing the economy, people and the planet, destroying our future, in order to funnel wealth to the favored few.
Draft thesis for discussion about where the world is heading, and what to do about it from a revolutionary standpoint. Part IV: In the absolute opposite of today’s society, one based on freely associated labor instead of slavery to capital’s production for production’s sake, we can leave behind pervasive misery, precarity and antagonism, and self-development and cooperation can flourish, as can a rational relationship to nature. We can see the beginnings in self-organization from below and the ever-growing rejection of capitalism. Against the large part of the Left that focuses on the power of the state to combat disasters, we must bring out the self-activity of masses in motion and not disarm ourselves by separating mass struggles from dialectical philosophy of revolution.
Draft thesis for discussion about where the world is heading, and what to do about it from a revolutionary standpoint. Part III: The Great Recession intensified the crises but also the revolt and, because of that, the counter-revolutionary trends that led to the Tea Party, Trumpism, and their analogues internationally.
As a healthcare worker in a community setting, I see that the response from clinic administration to COVID-19 has been but a microcosm of Trump’s: rooted in denialism, optimism, and the capitalist-realist ethos (fetishizing production while denying the possibility of an alternative world).
Franklin Dmitryev explores the limitations of how “ecosocialism” rethinks, partially, post-Marx Marxism, focusing on theoreticians Michael Lowy and Joel Kovel.
The spread of the coronavirus cannot be viewed in isolation from the corruption of China’s state-capitalism and the danger the virus poses especially to the poor, homeless and refugees.
Readers’ Views on permanent revolution and the dialectic, and voices from behind bars
In an era where women’s right to an abortion is endangered, feminist activist and writer Terry Moon delves into the question of what is socialism when it comes to women’s liberation, looking historically, politically, and philosophically.
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?
This is the first in a series of four presentations on “What is Socialism?” Shorter versions will be published in News & Letters. The second essay is “Socialism, labor and the Black dimension”; the third is “Socialism and ecology”; and the last is “Socialism and Women’s Liberation.”
The Syrian Revolution has been the physical and intellectual battlefield that defines our time. As early as 2012 it was clear that what happened in Syria would determine the next stage of world history.
The Left press and many others have been commenting on this important date: Jan. 1, 1959, the day that Fulgencio Batista was overthrown. The great difficulty is that the focus has been far too narrow…
Calls for a “green new deal” risk the kind of state/party co-optation of movements from below that was involved in the 1930s New Deal.
With hate crimes, anti-Semitism, racism and anti-immigrant xenophobia on the rise, Israel’s “Jewish nation-state” law and fascism brewing globally, we excerpt two pieces addressing roots of these phenomena in capitalism’s crises.
Special offer for the book “Russia: From Proletarian Revolution to State-Capitalist Counter-Revolution: Selected writings by Raya Dunayevskaya.”
We 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.
A participant looks at the 1968 French general strike, filled with potential to transform society, and discusses why it failed and the ramifications of that for today.
The dialectic and the meaning of the Russian Revolution.
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.
New collection of writings by Raya Dunayevskaya on the 100th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution titled: Russia: From Proletarian Revolution to State-Capitalist Counter-Revolution. .
Puerto Rico is devastated by hurricanes, with climate change a factor, and by the administration’s racist malign neglect, atop an existing debt crisis the masses did not create. Real solidarity came from below. .
On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, a new book collects writings by Raya Dunayevskaya on the Revolution, counter-revolution, and their consequences, aiming to help create new revolutionary beginnings today. .
Whatever lip service is paid to the Russian Revolution’s 100th anniversary, its significance as a historic event and as a link to the thought and practice of Marx has been obscured because of the abandonment of revolutionary perspectives. It is high time to push to the forefront the role of the philosophy of revolution in permanence in facing the reality of dialectics of liberation, 1917 and 2017.
The administration’s war against truth and reason, such as climate change denial, calls for more than fact-checking. What is needed is to establish a totally opposite ground, that of liberation.
During this time of economic, political and societal crisis, including shortages of food and medicine, can Venezuela’s people build a society that is truly human, thus showing the way for the rest of the world?
As the Trump administration ramps up deportations and related abuses, strikes, protests, and sanctuary cities are proliferating. The oppression of a lower caste of workers and the discrimination and violence faced by immigrants present a challenge to the Left, labor and the rest of humanity.
Raya Dunayevskaya on the first and second women’s movements, the Black dimension, working women, and a total philosophy of liberation.
Trump’s barbarism in power is a crisis for bourgeois democracy and revolutionary thought. Opposition from below is far deeper than bourgeois opposition to Trump. To have efficacy today, Marx’s body of ideas must be grasped and projected as a whole. The movement from theory needs to meet the challenge of history, of freedom struggles and revolution.
