Editorial: Democracy under dire threat

January 25, 2024

Trump and his allies are aiming at a second term. The means: taking power at all costs, even with a minority of votes. The ends: complete evisceration of human rights, democracy, and human solidarity.

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Woman as Reason: The practicality of revolution

December 28, 2023

Reporter Sonia Sodha asked: “Women in revolt achieved so much. Why are decades of progress now being reversed?” The struggle for freedom of all those who have been pronounced as less than human may seem impossible, but as Irish revolutionary James Connolly said: “Revolution is never practical—until the hour of the revolution strikes.”

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From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Need for a Total Uprooting: Down with the Perpetrators of the Palestinian Slaughter

November 29, 2023

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.

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War on teachers is a war on students

September 10, 2022

In school districts across the nation all eyes are on 4,500 striking teachers in Columbus, Ohio, who agreed to return to the classroom after a three-day strike under a “conceptual agreement.” This army in red T-shirts sparked widespread parent refusal to log in to remote classrooms set up while the teachers were out.

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From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Need for a Total Uprooting: Down with the Perpetrators of the Palestinian Slaughter

July 1, 2021

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.

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China out of Burma, support revolution!

June 29, 2021

China’s dictatorship insists we stay out of other countries’ affairs, yet they are the main backers of the coup regime in Myanmar and of other authoritarian states. Today there is no such thing as non-interventionism—the only question is whether intervention will take the form of solidarity with the oppressed or support for the oppressors.

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China’s deadly role in Myanmar must stop!

June 16, 2021

China’s dictatorship insists we stay out of other countries’ affairs, yet they are the main backers of the coup regime in Myanmar and of other authoritarian states. Today there is no such thing as non-interventionism—the only question is whether intervention will take the form of solidarity with the oppressed or support for the oppressors.

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Biden’s broken immigration policy

May 8, 2021

The number of people who cross the border without documents is rising and has been for many years. This trend has remained steady through the transition from Trump to President Biden, notwithstanding the self-promotional lies and distortions of professional smugglers and ultraconservative members of the U.S. Congress.

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Woman as Reason: U.S. in Afghanistan: 20 years of betrayal

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.

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The USPS is a continuing crime scene

August 28, 2020

Postal workers find themselves on the frontlines of three fronts: saving their jobs under attack from the United States Postal Service under Postmaster Louis DeJoy; saving the USPS from the sabotage of DeJoy and Trump, and saving the integrity of U.S. elections.

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COVID-19: A world-historic threat

March 7, 2020

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.

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World in View: Trump-Kim summit

March 13, 2019

The second summit meeting between Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, in Hanoi on Feb. 27, ended without any new agreement. But it achieved what it aimed for as theater.

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World in View: Arctic ice meltoff

March 12, 2018

Some climate scientists estimate that the Arctic may be ice-free in summer within a few decades. Nations are already assuming this will happen, as seen by their competition for mineral rights.

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Iranian workers, youth reach for new radical beginnings

January 28, 2018

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.

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World in View: Venezuela’s human toll

The social crisis in Venezuela has taken a toll and earlier this year, Health Minister Antonieta Caporale was fired for releasing statistics showing that the number of women dying in childbirth had increased by 65% and children’s mortality increased 30%.

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The struggle in Diego Garcia continues

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.

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Trump and unrest confront China

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.

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Freedom for the Chagos Archipelago!

September 20, 2016

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.

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Workshop Talks: Why allow Assad to kill the sick?

September 7, 2016

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.

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The need for new beginnings in thought and in action

April 25, 2016

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.

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Oil: bad both ways

March 12, 2016

People’s suffering, no matter the price of oil, demonstrates capitalism’s inherent deep ties with climate change and economic destruction.

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Editorial: Putin’s retrogressionism

December 10, 2015

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

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South China Sea dispute

June 29, 2015

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.

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World in View: Obama meets Castro

Real possibilities for social transformation in Latin America, and with it an end to U.S. domination with iron fist or velvet glove, lie not in the choreographed dance between the U.S. and the Latin American governments, including “Leftist” or progressive ones, inside or outside the “Summit of the Americas.”

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The todayness of Selma, USA, 1965

March 8, 2015

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.

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Maldives coup defied

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.

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Editorial: Never-ending U.S. wars

January 28, 2015

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.

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Editorial: Islamic State, U.S. both savage Iraq

August 29, 2014

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.

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