From immigrants to Transgender people, from workers to students to women, no one is safe. Attacks on many fronts are part and parcel of what is widely recognized as a Trump/Musk coup, but is usually portrayed as normal politics in the media. Institutions cannot be trusted to save us and they need to feel the pressure from people fighting back.
What kind of new world order is Trump heading for? Forced annexation of territories (as in Russia’s war on Ukraine), genocide (as in Israel’s war on Gaza), and neocolonialism (as in the Democratic Republic of Congo) are crucial parts of it. The word “multipolar” cannot hide its imperialist nature.
What it is about this moment of this capitalist society that brought a creature like Trump to the top? The crumbling of society goes beyond economic measures. The symptoms are everywhere of a system that increasingly does not believe in its own future.
Why did the massive resistance eight years ago not prevent Trump’s return? And what is the “Left” today? More important than the unity of the Left is the unity of the movement from theory and the movement from practice.
The 20th century revealed statist socialism to be a dead end. It is a substitute for the self-activity of the masses in motion, which is the only basis for workers’ control of the labor process. Without revolutionary humanist philosophical mediation capitalism will reconstitute around us and block the total reorganization of society. The philosophy of revolution demands an organizational expression.
The climate crisis, biodiversity, food, water, and human health are so closely linked that efforts to address one without taking the others into account often backfire. This finding from scientists reflects their hearing climate justice movements.
Facing 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.
The Syrian revolution rose again, ousting Bashar al-Assad. While the HTS played a key role, so did the people rising up. What is urgent now is solidarity with these revolutionary masses, making a category of them, helping them be heard, and opposing all efforts to subordinate them.
In the spirit of Black August Memorial, Faruq talks about the conditions of Black prisoners, the need to break race divisions between them and white prisoners, and the quest for the Idea of Freedom.
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 I of the 2024-2025 Draft Perspectives. Takes up the youth Palestine solidarity movement, as well as the genocide in Gaza, its support from the powers that be and the mass resistance from below.
Part II of the 2024-2025 Draft Perspectives. Takes up: the global retrogression that a second Trump period would mean.
Part III of the 2024-2025 Draft Perspectives. Takes up Putin’s war on Ukraine and its connection with fascism worldwide, especially seen on Israel’s war on Gaza, the ongoing genocide in Sudan and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s religious chauvinism.
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.
Part V of the 2024-2025 Draft Perspectives. Takes up the need to rediscover, for today, Lenin’s philosophical preparation for revolution, plunging into the study of Marx’s roots in Hegel’s philosophy at the time of the collapse of the Second International during the first years of World War I.
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.
Ukrainians’ self-organizing drew in all layers of the population, acting on their passion for independence and freedom from imperial overlords. The new life they have brought to the idea of democracy is deeper than political democracy. Marx’s humanist idea is a future determined by fully realizing that deeper content.
Susan Van Gelder reviews the book “A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto” by China Miéville.
Here are links to a number of Farsi translations of Marxist-Humanist writings.
Today’s divide in attitudes to technology and climate solutions is more than a political question. It is a deep divide in philosophy. As crucial as are technological advances and the “energy transition,” they are liable to turn into their opposite if they are the focus instead of struggles of people trying to take control over their own lives.
Wislanka reviews Lea Ypi’s ‘Free,’ a testimonial of experiencing both “socialism” and then a Western style of life in 1990’s Albania, and relates it to the present moment. The book asks what freedom means and the essay takes it deeper in the new context of wars, fascism, resistance from below and the self-development of the idea of freedom.
This appendix to “Society in the Grip of Genocidal Ideology” details Putin’s genocidal ideology and how prominent Left journal “Monthly Review,” its editor John Bellamy Foster, and Noam Chomsky echo Putin’s propaganda in their apologetics for Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Genocidal ideology, which was manifested differently in the Buffalo mass shooting and in Putin’s war on Ukraine, has spread throughout our society, pervading the Right but also polluting the Left. How to fight this retrogression in all its forms?
‘The 1619 Project’ tackles U.S. history since the first enslaved Africans were brought to Virginia—from multiple perspectives. Each essay is grounded in original sources, scholarly works, interviews and oral histories. Historical events, photographs of ordinary African-Americans and poetry surround each essay, adding a human touch.
Ad for the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection showing just a few examples of the many entries and correspondence relating to women’s relationships to revolution that can be found there.
Review of ‘Spinning and Weaving: Radical Feminism for the 21st Century.’ Elizabeth Miller is the Contributing Editor and created a radical feminist anthology covering multiple topics to preserve the insightful new theory women (including international women) write daily online—from articles to social media comments.
Interview with Melda Yaman, the Turkish translator of Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution.
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.
Ours is an age of total crises and pervasive angst about humanity’s future. Marx’s recreation of Hegel’s freedom Idea, a humanism that is directly part of life and nature, is a unifying pull of the future in freedom movements and presages “the new society” Dunayevskaya saw in Hegel’s Idea.
Workers are key in the fight for freedom of speech as is the need for theory grounded in a philosophy of freedom.
Finzel and Kelch review “Satan and Apocalypse,” the latest work by the “Death of God” theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer, which explores the intersection between William Blake’s revolutionary vision and Hegel’s dialectic of Manifest Religion. What makes Hegel so contemporary, the reviewers argue, is that his absolute Idea as new beginning never bows to any given reality but holds fast to the positive in the ongoing creative power of the negative.
In ‘Reproductive Rights as Human Rights: Women of Color and the Fight for Reproductive Justice,’ Zakiya Luna discusses how SisterSong, the reproductive justice organization, was based and operates on the concept of human rights.
Ed Pavlić’s ‘Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes’ is the first critical book to appear after Rich’s Collected Poems (2016) and thus the first covering all of Rich’s poetry. The book is especially welcome because Pavlić attends to the latter half of Rich’s career, and acknowledges her Marxism, largely unexplored territory even now.
As part of the ongoing Fridays for Future, on Aug. 27 several hundred, mostly youth, gathered in San Francisco to call attention to environmental racism, the climate crisis, and public health.
In conversation with Karen Ng’s book “Hegel’s Concept of Life,” Ron Kelch takes up the concept of life and “naturalism” and their relationship to freedom in Hegel, Marx, and Marxist-Humanism. Whether one takes Marx’s starting point of freedom with respect to human life activity that is inextricably part of nature or Hegel’s beginning again from Nature as mediation, the self-determination of the unifying Idea cannot be taken for granted in the face of the spontaneous self-bringing forth of liberty.
Adele reviews the book “They Didn’t See Us Coming: The Hidden History of Feminism in the Nineties” by Lisa Levenstein.
Susan Van Gelder reviews the book “The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart” by Alicia Garza.
The Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan has shaken world politics and challenged the Left to respond in a revolutionary way. In the absence of truly liberatory revolutionary movements, what looms to fill the vacuum is not only a reinvigoration of fundamentalist political and military movements but the reactionary maneuvering by Russia and China, refugee-scapegoating parties, and repression of social movements on the model of Syria’s Assad and Burma’s Tatmadaw—all of which have been flourishing under the U.S. permanent “war on terror.”
The Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan has shaken world politics and challenged the Left to respond in a revolutionary way. In the absence of truly liberatory revolutionary movements, what looms to fill the vacuum is not only a reinvigoration of fundamentalist political and military movements but the reactionary maneuvering by Russia and China, refugee-scapegoating parties, and repression of social movements on the model of Syria’s Assad and Burma’s Tatmadaw—all of which have been flourishing under the U.S. permanent “war on terror.”
May Day and its celebrations became a good moment to explore the relationship between theory and the movement from practice by revisiting Marx’s intimate connection to the issues that led to May Day.
The 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.
Excerpts from the Introduction to the new pamphlet on ‘What Is Socialism?’
A feminist review of “Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.” The author, Charlene Carruthers, sees it as “a book for all people who are curious about and committed to the struggle for Black liberation.”
Three presentations on why Marx’s 1844 Humanist Essays are critical to meet today’s challenges, by a high school student, a former prisoner who participated in the Pelican Bay Hunger Strikes, and a long-time Marxist-Humanist looking at 1844 from a feminist perspective.
In light of the Zapatistas’ Forum in Defense of Territory and Mother Earth, Héctor explores the search for unity by diverse movements in relation to Hegel’s dialectic of the whole and the parts.
Review-essay (longer version) on the book ‘Syria After the Uprisings: The Political Economy of State Resilience’ by Joseph Daher. With a combination of ruthless criticism and consistent solidarity, the author situates the Assad regime and Syria’s three counter-revolutions into a broader trend of global neoliberalism.
Franklin Dmitryev explores the limitations of how “ecosocialism” rethinks, partially, post-Marx Marxism, focusing on theoreticians Michael Lowy and Joel Kovel.
Review from Mexico of the book ‘La filosofía de la revolución en permanencia de Marx en nuestros días’ (Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution in Permanence for Our Day. Selected Writings by Raya Dunayevskaya).
In the spirit of Black August Memorial, Faruq talks about the conditions of Black prisoners, the need to break race divisions between them and white prisoners, and the quest for the Idea of Freedom.
