Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2023-2024: Polycrisis and the need to transform reality. Part I

June 15, 2023

Society’s crying need for radical transformation makes itself felt day after day. In response, ruling classes across the globe have split into two main factions with differing strategies for heading off the threatened transformation from below: counter-revolution spawning new flavors of fascism with rough new figureheads, or non-transformational transformation to patch up the status quo while saving the powers that be. This thesis is about what is happening in the world and what to do about it.

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Woman as Reason: Save democracy, save abortion

June 3, 2023

Republicans have to destroy democracy if they want to rule because a robust majority of the U.S. population supports legal, safe, accessible abortion; are for gay rights and don’t despise Trans people. So how do you trash their rights? You do it by destroying a government by the people and for the people. Let us count the ways.

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Part of the hundreds of concerned people from over 90 disability, aging and civil rights groups which converged on Washington, D.C., for the My Medicaid Matters rally on Sept. 21. Photo courtesy of www.ADAPT.org

Capitalism can’t deal with disability

May 9, 2023

People with disabilities make up 15% of the population. They are in every country and culture on earth. One thing that unites the disabled is that capitalism is a world not made for us, and communism is the only way to establish true freedom and equality for everyone.

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Review: ‘Policing the Womb: Invisible Women’

March 18, 2023

Adele reviews “Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood,” by Michele Goodwin, Goodwin describes the increasing wave of legislation regulating pregnancy and criminalizing miscarriages, stillbirths and supposed “endangerment” of the fetus.

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Woman as Reason: Valenti’s ‘Abortion Every Day’

March 17, 2023

So much is happening regarding abortion—since the reactionary U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, trashing women’s right to abortion, a human right we’ve had for 50 years—that it is almost impossible to keep track of. For help, you can turn to the splendid blog of Jessica Valenti, “Abortion Every Day.”

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Readers’ Views: November-December 2022, Part One

November 11, 2022

Readers’ Views on: Iran: Woman, Life, Freedom; Election Threats and Battles; Women’s Marches and Enemies; Sexist Supreme Court; Ukrainians Fight for Freedom; Para-Transit Disservice; Mike Davis; Labor Struggles, from Amazon…to the Bank.

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Handicap This!: November-December 2022

Disabled women have joined anti-U.S. Supreme Court demonstrations as they are eleven times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth; Disabled South Koreans protested in subways over lack of access to essential services, abuse in institutions, and elevated death rates; a disabled woman in Pakistan founded two organizations which manufacture and donate wheelchairs, employing mostly the disabled.

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Election shows women feel the hate

It wasn’t alone the question of abortion rights that helped Democrats do so well in the midterm elections, but also what made women and so many others furious was the extreme cruelty and sickening glee with which Republicans imposed their draconian abortion laws and bans. Women could feel the hate.

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Women organize and educate for abortion rights

November 8, 2022

The Women’s March and other groups held A Women’s Wave Day of Action on Oct. 8, 2022, demanding a nationwide right to abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted that right. Women, youth, and allies are aware of the importance of reproductive justice to our lives and democracy and are motivated to organize and creatively fight back.

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Women, youth fight back as horror of abortion bans unfolds

September 6, 2022

Now that the Supreme Court of the United States has overturned women’s right to abortion, the profound ramifications of that unprecedented decision are becoming known. Women are fighting back, from the Women’s March, to Black women, to Teens for Reproductive Rights, women will reclaim the right to control our own bodies.

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Readers’ Views: July-August 2022, Part One

July 12, 2022

Readers’ Views on: Supreme Court’s Attack on Women’s Freedom; Abortion, Healthcare and Women’s Movement; Abortion Unseparated from All Freedom Struggles; Gay Pride: Whose Bodies? Ours!; Colonizers Past and Present; Let Them Eat Rockets; Oppression of Homeless; Only 14 More Mass Shootings!; Church, State and Football

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Woman as Reason: Their target: women’s freedom

July 9, 2022

The 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.

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Nationwide marches for abortion rights

July 5, 2022

March participants report on the thousands of women, men and gender diverse people who demonstrated across the U.S., including Chicago and the Bay Area. They were protesting the Supreme Court decision that decimated women’s right to an abortion and thus to control over their own bodies.

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Editorial: Abortion bans show need for new society

With the gutting of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has taken away a human right and stripped bodily autonomy from half the population. It is a giant step towards fascism. What is the answer to such an outrage? It is not the Democratic Party, who couldn’t even rid us of the Hyde Amendment.

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Chicago marches for abortion rights

June 25, 2022

Well over 3,000 women and men overran downtown Federal Plaza in Chicago, spilling into the streets demanding abortion rights and castigating a U.S. Supreme Court whose legitimacy is no longer recognized by the citizens it oppresses.

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Abortion bans upheld: Our task–a new human society

June 24, 2022

With the gutting of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has taken away a human right and stripped bodily autonomy from half the population. It is a giant step towards fascism. What is the answer to such an outrage? It is not the Democratic Party, who couldn’t even rid us of the Hyde Amendment.

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Tens of thousands march for abortion rights

May 19, 2022

In San Francisco on May 14 over 10,000 people marched for the right to abortion and against the U.S. Supreme Court which has now lost all legitimacy. A million people marched in over 450 events across the U.S. to show their anger at the Supreme Court’s impending reversal of Roe v. Wade, which had legalized women’s right to abortion.

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Reactionary Supreme Court attacks freedom

May 17, 2022

Having control over what happens to your own body is the difference between fascism and freedom. A woman’s right to control her own body is inherently a fight for a universal freedom. Contempt and hate have worked so well for Republicans that they will go after birth control and LGBTQ+ people.

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Freedom vs. the war against women

April 27, 2022

The Republican attack against women won’t stop with trashing our right to control our bodies. Hate has worked so well for them that they will also come down harder on LGBTQ+ people, especially Trans people who trample every notion the Right has of “how things are supposed to be.”

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Woman as Reason: The abortion pill is not magic

January 29, 2022

While the U.S. Supreme Court is set to either gut or overturn Roe V. Wade, women cannot depend on the abortion pill alone. The fight for women to control our own bodies is a fight for freedom and should be waged as such. It is time to make that luminously clear.

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Nationwide marches for reproductive justice

November 11, 2021

In Chicago, four to five thousand rallied and marched downtown to make it clear that women in the U.S. are continuing to fight back against the inhuman anti-abortion legislation that has been surging across Republican-dominated statehouses for years.

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Tens of thousands march for reproductive justice nationwide

October 3, 2021

In Chicago, four to five thousand rallied and marched downtown to make it clear that women in the U.S. are continuing to fight back against the inhuman anti-abortion legislation that has been surging across Republican-dominated statehouses for years—this, despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Woman as Reason: Abortion rights at crossroads

July 1, 2021

Paxton Smith’s valedictorian speech against a new extremist anti-abortion bill signed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott illuminates how this assault on women’s freedom can open the gates for women–especially young women–to flood the streets and demonstrate that control of one’s own body is something so fundamental to being human that they are willing to overthrow a government to create it.

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Anti-abortion violence

March 11, 2021

Women needing abortions face violence, from harassment by fanatics to oppressive laws. Countless deaths, misery and increased poverty caused by forced pregnancy have forced some countries to abandon anti-abortion laws.

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From the writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Remembering John Lewis and Bloody Sunday–Racist barbarity spawned new forms of revolt

August 29, 2020

In the wake of the March 7, 1965, “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama, where the recently deceased John Lewis was one of the freedom marchers clubbed and beaten, News & Letters issued this statement highlighting both the new revolt that was sparked and the contradictions between the leaders and ranks in the Freedom Now movement in a way that speaks powerfully to today’s movement.

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Trump threatens DACA, ignores court

Trump subverted the Supreme Court decision upholding Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“dreamers”). It must be “upheld” by ordinary people who recognize and reject the actions of a president who poses imminent danger to their freedom.

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Freedom has to mean we control our own bodies

May 30, 2019

“Woman as Reason” columnist Terry Moon writes about the state of abortion rights in the U.S. in light of the draconian attacks against it and relates women’s struggle to control their bodies to the thingification of women, the poor response of the U.S. left, Karl Marx’s devastating critique of capitalism, and what revolution must come to mean.

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Queer Notes: May-June 2019

May 6, 2019

International Transgender Day of Visibility; Puerto Rico bans gay reparative conversion therapy administered to minors; a Catholic hospital’s discrimination against Oliver Knight; and Chuck Kramer’s exhibit, “Faces Out & Proud.”

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Readers’ Views, November-December 2018

December 14, 2018

Readers’ Views on: Capitalism vs. the Planet; Anti-Semitism’s Inhumanity; Kavanaugh Travesty; Youth Rock!; Freedom Movements vs. Fascism across the Globe; Catholic Church Crisis; Voices from behind Bars

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Queer Notes: November-December 2018

December 2, 2018

“The Orlando Traveling Memorial” commemorates those murdered and those who aided the victims of the 2016 Orlando Pulse shooting; Transgender woman Aimee Stephens’ successful employment discrimination lawsuit; protesters decry Trump administration proposal to define gender as fixed at birth; Romania’s referendum defining a family as composed on one man and one woman fails.

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Readers’ Views, July-August 2018, Part 1

July 23, 2018

Readers’ Views on: Fighting Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Hysteria; Women’s Liberation; Attacks on Gays; Support Restaurant Workers; Swords into Plowshares; Human Rights Struggles in Iraq…; …And in Russia; Arthur Gursch in Memoriam

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Editorial: Alabama Blacks beat Trump-Moore

January 28, 2018

Black voters in Alabama, led by Black women, overcame blatant voter suppression—including discriminatory voter ID laws—to flood the polls and block Roy Moore from the Senate seat he expected that God would anoint him to.

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Handicap This!: January-February 2017

January 29, 2017

India: fight for institutionalized women with disabilities; England: cuts to the personal budgets of disabled people; U.S.: standard of education for many disabled children could be raised if Supreme Court rules that they should receive “meaningful benefit” in education; and Transgender African-American woman Kayla Moore, who had schizophrenia, is killed by police.

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Women battle war, terrorism and anti-abortion fanatics

March 8, 2016

Foregrounding the new formal solidarity between Trust Black Women with Black Lives Matter, we explore the thought and actions of women worldwide, including the struggle for reproductive justice in the U.S.; women fighting war and terrorism in places like South Sudan and Syria, the successful fight of domestic workers to organize, and the need to make the revolutionary content of such actions explicit.

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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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