“Men Explain Things to Me” by Rebecca Solnit is a book of seven essays that eloquently describe how patriarchy attempts to distract us from the fact that seemingly isolated incidents and seemingly separate oppressions are part of a system of profound and devastating violence.
Protests erupted after the cops who murdered Michael Brown and Eric Garner were let off. They mark a new moment of rebellion against a social order in which Black youth are made to live continuously suspended over an abyss of non-existence.
The passion to tear up this deeply racist society by the roots calls for the fullest development in activity and thought.
The confrontation between differing classes and worldviews has been most intense in Syria, making it the test of world politics—and of philosophy and revolution. The Syrian Revolution has pushed thought about revolution to a new level.
Raya Dunayevskaya’s May 12, 1953, letter on Hegel’s Absolutes needs to be read in the context of how what is embryonic is developed, and of the continuity and discontinuity in relationship to her earlier thinking and to the Johnson-Forest Tendency.
Today’s vital debate about revolutionary organization is illuminated by Marx’s concept of organization in his “Critique of the Gotha Program.”
Review of the book “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza,” by Gloria Anzaldúa, 25th anniversary 4th edition.
Revolution in Grenada caught the world’s attention in 1979. The New Jewel Movement, which linked itself to the Black Power movement, had upset Britain’s neo-colonialist succession (though Grenada stayed in the British Commonwealth) and appeared to be a beacon for revolutions to follow in the Caribbean.
What happened on one tiny island 30 years ago raised issues at the time that transcended the borders of Grenada to the idea of revolution throughout the Caribbean, the Third World and beyond.
Raya Dunayevskaya’s sublimely researched American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard (ACOT) deserves a place among the U.S.’s most honest historical treatises.
Now off the press:
Excerpts from the Foreword:
Nobody, least of all Marxists, foresaw the great historic divide which would be opened by the Arab Spring beginning in 2010. When Mohammed Bouazizi and Hussein Nagi Felhi killed themselves to protest the miserable conditions of life for Tunisian youth, they set off a year of revolutionary struggle that [=>]
Essay
by Ron Kelch
All revolutions, in the sciences no less than in general history, originate only in this, that the spirit of man, for the understanding and comprehension of himself, for the possessing of himself, has now altered his categories, uniting himself in a truer, deeper, more intrinsic relation with himself.
–Hegel
Today’s global search for a new [=>]
Philosophic dialogue
It was good to have Ron Kelch’s Essay, “Absolute Negativity, Occupy and Situationists,” in the Jan.-Feb. News & Letters open an overdue philosophic dialogue. As someone who discovered the work of Guy Debord and Raya Dunayevskaya at about the same time, I’ve given a lot of thought to their relation.
I consider Debord’s work, especially [=>]
When Terry Moon in her column in the last issue asks, “How deep does the dialectic need to become when the subject is woman, is Black woman?” she calls for more discussion of Fanon and Women’s Liberation.
Fanon, in breaking with Sartre’s Existentialist Marxism—which acknowledged only one Subject, labor, and consigned the Black dimension to a [=>]
Essay
by Eugene Walker
István Mészáros, Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness. Volume I, The Social Determination of Method. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010.
Global depression conditions have once again brought to the fore capitalism’s grave contradictions, and with it, new interest in the work of Karl Marx. This is not alone a theoretical question. The massive protests in [=>]
Essay
by Ron Kelch
[Absolute negativity] is the simple point of the negative relation to self, the innermost source of all activity, of all animate and spiritual self-movement, the dialectical soul that everything true possesses and through which alone it is true; for on this subjectivity alone rests the sublating of the opposition between concept and reality. –Hegel on second negation in [=>]
As Others See Us
This review by Abe Cabrera is excerpted from a Sept. 20, 2011, post on his blog, The Rose in the Crosshttp://elblogdelpelon.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/the-masses-as-reason/
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Raya Dunayevskaya’s book, Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 Until Today, is the founding document of a small political movement, Marxist-Humanism. Opposed equally to the tyranny of “ordinary” capitalism and its counterpart in the [=>]
From the July-August 2011 issue of News & Letters:
On socialism and freedom in Morocco
by Richard Greeman
Morocco, where the Arab Spring has opened up a space of relative freedom to discuss and demonstrate, is an exciting place to be, where every day new groups are getting organized and putting forward their grievances. The Feb. [=>]
Essay
by Robert Taliaferro
The history of the U.S. is a quagmire of facts and near fictions; conflicting thoughts and ideas; established truths and myths, and nowhere is this more evident than when one discusses the causes and effects of the Civil War. This is especially evident on its 150th anniversary as some try to rewrite history, [=>]
Now available at the News and Letters Committees website as a pdf file:
New Arabic translation of Marxism and Freedom by Raya Dunayevskaya
Raya Dunayevskaya’s classic explication of Marxism is finally available in Arabic. The first book on Marxist-Humanism, it was originally published in 1958 and has been in continuous publication. It has been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese, [=>]
Essay
Woman as Reason
by Terry Moon
The contemporary nature of Marxist-Humanism is evident when one views the theory and practice of women’s liberation. Today that involves both an unprecedented attack on women’s rights–especially reproductive rights–now taking place in the U.S., and women’s creative activism in the revolutionary developments in the Middle East, where they are fighting repressive [=>]
Essay
by Raha
Recollecting Raya at the end of the Dunayevskaya Centenary is intertwined with the Iranian Revolution at its 1979 high point and as it suffered through three decades of counter-revolution, and now, as it searches for a new beginning.
One year ago, the unprecedented turnout of millions throughout Iran on the 31st anniversary of the 1979 Revolution [=>]
From the Nov.-Dec. 2010 issue of News & Letters:
Essay: Dunayevskaya’s place in the history of the Left
by Kevin Michaels
Raya Dunayevskaya deserves a prominent place in the historical self-understanding of the U.S. Left. She was acknowledged in her lifetime not only as a leader in theory by working-class militants like Charles Denby, author of Indignant Heart: A [=>]
Bordiga’s Marxism, no way to unite theory and practice
Necessity is an evil, but there is no necessity to live under the control of necessity. Everywhere the paths to freedom are open.
–Marx, Doctoral Thesis, 1841
Loren Goldner’s 1991 article, “Communism Is the Material Human Community: Amadeo Bordiga Today” was recently the topic of discussion among a [=>]
Setting the historic record straight in response to the attack of the “Marxist-Humanist Tendency” on News and Letters Committees.
