After the 2001 U.S. invasion Afghanistan had a chance of becoming a place where its citizens could enjoy some freedoms, but at every opportunity the U.S. stopped it. What’s going to happen next is not because the U.S. is leaving, it is because they are leaving after damaging the country and the people’s aspirations in unfathomable and hugely destructive ways.
Gerry Emmett analyzes the meaning of the current coronavirus pandemic from the point of view of what Karl Marx called humanity’s metabolism with nature, which formed the basis of his critique of capitalism.
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.
Prisoners Faruq and Robert Taliaferro write about the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that allowed for prisoners to be enslaved, taking up different aspects of slavery as it appears in prison, in the U.S. and the world.
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.
LALIT reports on their banned protest of U.S. military base on Diego Garcia, and our statement of solidarity.
Readers’ Views: Marx’s concept of theory; we are not a game; voices from behind bars.
Mauritians get closer to reunification as the UN General Assembly Resolution for an Advisory Opinion from the UN’s International Court of Justice is approved by a wide margin, much to the disappointment of the UK and US.
The maneuvering of imperial powers to carve up Syria amid the regime’s ongoing bloodbath reveals the logic that results when the masses are not allowed their self-activity. .
Readers’ Views on: environmental and social crises; Martin Luther King Day; healthcare crisis, Donald Trump and the election; brutal “justice”; and who reads News & Letters.
Just weeks after Donald Trump claimed his Electoral College victory, he put the spotlight on U.S.-China relations by taking a call from Taiwan’s President, creating the possibility that the U.S. might abandon the “one China” policy.
A look at the situation in the Middle East in light of Donald Trump’s election that takes up Syria, Yemen and the arming by the U.S. of varying forces–some of whom are fighting each other.
What has for 50 years been a secret site in the Indian Ocean—Diego Garcia, the most beautiful atoll in the world, the site of the most hideous U.S. military base—is suddenly being exposed to public scrutiny. LALIT is calling for your support for reunification of the Republic of Mauritius and for the right to return.
Readers’ Views on: Racism and Revolt Put U.S. on Trial; Life and Death Under the Class Divide; Environmental Struggles; War and Atrocities; and Women’s Lives at Stake.
Healthcare worker Htun Lin takes up the relationship between workers in healthcare in the U.S. who are told “not everyone can be saved,” and what is happening in Syria where the Syrian government, Russia and Iran are bombing civilians including–or especially–hospitals and healthcare workers.
An expansive look at the rise of fascism worldwide beginning in the U.S. with Donald Trump and the U.S. election, and taking in European fascism, and the situations in India, the Philippines, China, Japan and the opposition by rulers worldwide to those fighting for a free existence and new human relations.
Part IV of the Draft Perspectives 2016: The renewal of Syrian demonstrations for freedom refuted the state powers’ belief that the idea of revolution can be destroyed by bombs, and highlighted a civilizational crisis and the need for international solidarity.
Contents: Introduction; I. Discontent, revolt and reaction in the U.S.; II. The worldwide war against women; III. Chinese labor in revolt; IV. Counter-revolution and revolution in the Middle East and North Africa; V. Toward organizational new beginnings. The fact that the old, crumbling order will not go away quietly explains why we print the Marxist-Humanist Draft Perspectives in the pages of the paper of News and Letters Committees. It is an open window onto the needed philosophy of revolution, without which all revolutions and freedom movements remain incomplete.
People’s suffering, no matter the price of oil, demonstrates capitalism’s inherent deep ties with climate change and economic destruction.
Putin 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
The two opponents facing off in Greece for five years have been the Greek masses vs. the European rulers and their institutions. The No vote manifested the revolt against austerity. We explore the meaning of these events.
The exchange of threats between China and the U.S. over specks of land and submerged reefs in the South China Sea has heated up as China has expanded its ambitious campaign of dredging, land reclamation, garrisoning troops and erecting military facilities in the Spratly Islands.
In celebrating the online publication of the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, we present excerpts of her Introduction/Overview to Volume XII, which takes up the Marxist-Humanist concept of archives as not only retrospective but perspective, in the quest to establish “continuity with the historic course of human development.”
In acquainting readers with coverage of the forces of revolution in News & Letters over its first 60 years, we present “Continuing Magnolia Jungle terror exposes reality of ‘Great Society,’” written by Charles Denby in February 1965, in the midst of the bloody campaign for voter registration in Selma, Alabama.
A coup overthrew the Maldives’ first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed, a long-time pro-democracy activist and an internationally recognized leader on climate issues.
The formal end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan at the end of 2014 was just in time for post-war wars to begin in Afghanistan itself, as well as in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen.
The fighting between Ukraine government troops and separatist rebels continues as Russia and the West maneuver for power.
The explosive advances of the army of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS), crossing from Syria into northern and central Iraq, have brought deeper miseries to the Iraqi people who might have expected they had already endured the worst, including the effects of U.S. imperialist policy. Atrocities from mass shootings and beheadings to systematic kidnapping and rapes of women—that the world and U.S. foreign policy ignored when IS carried them out against anti-Assad revolutionaries in Syria—in Iraq no longer remained hidden.
ISIPE; Ché Café; Lindsey Stocker; Australian students protest fee increases.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the original “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, here is what I wrote about it at the time (from the July 1992 News & Letters):
Ideological pollution at ‘Earth Summit’
by Franklin Dmitryev
The UN Conference on Environment and Development (or Earth Summit) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, began June 3 with [=>]
