Femicide—the murder of a woman because she is a woman—is on the rise across the world, as are demonstrations against it. In this struggle can be seen some of the vision of the future implicit in this movement: a society in which women are comprehended as free human beings. Key is “the totality and depth of the necessary uprooting.”
women
Review: Deep Care: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions…
February 28, 2024Adele reviews a fascinating history of three interconnected projects of the radical feminist community in the Oakland, Calif., area over the past 40 years: an underground self-help abortion network, clinics run on feminist principles, and clinic defense organizations.
On the Anniversary of the 1871 Paris Commune: Women, youth and education in revolutionary Paris
February 12, 2024In this essay, originally published in the March 1985 N&L, Erica Rae takes up the new kind of education arising in the 1871 Paris Commune. She focuses on the role of women during this historic turning point, especially the revolutionary educator Louise Michel.
World in View: Thousands protest Argentina’s Milei
February 6, 2024Argentine President Javier Milei aims to privatize state institutions; eliminate regulations on businesses; prevent strikes; and seek full executive powers. Less than two months after taking office, he was confronted by a one-day mass general strike. What kind of society do Argentinians want to create?
Women World Wide: January 2024
January 15, 2024Takes up: In memoriam to Dale Spender, Australian radical feminist activist, author, and broadcaster; a report on U.S. maternal death rates by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and medicine’s #MeToo movement exposing the culture of sexual harassment and assaults by higher ranking male doctors.
World in View: Can Poland overcome its reactionary history?
January 7, 2024After eight years of ultra-nationalist, reactionary rule, Poland’s Law and Justice Party was defeated in parliamentary elections. However, the country’s future direction is by no means assured. Two areas are key: women’s and LGBTQ+ rights.
Woman as Reason: The practicality of revolution
December 28, 2023Reporter 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.”
World in View: Argentina’s president imposes austerity
December 21, 2023Argentina’s new President Javier Milei quickly imposed social welfare cuts, while threatening protests. Still, mass resistance from below is developing. Is that enough to break out of the political-economic-social straitjacket that Argentine masses have been living through for decades?
Readers’ Views: November 2023
November 24, 2023Readers’ Views on: Israel/Palestine; Revolt in Iran; in Canada for 2SLGBTQIA+; Trump, Biden too old to run; Racism in Tennessee; Prisoners miss ‘N&L’; Memorial for Paul Geist and Dan Bremer; Texas targets pregnant women & refugees; Ohio targets women and democracy; Revolutionary history; and Raining on those with disabilities.
Woman as Reason: Authoritarians try to nullify Ohio vote for abortion
November 22, 2023Ohio citizens voted in a landslide to enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution. Fanatics in power tried and failed to derail the vote and are now maneuvering to nullify it, destroying democracy in the process.
Handicap This!: November 2023
November 14, 2023Takes up: The right of disabled people to be part of the reproductive justice discussion; Indigenous Disability Awareness Month in Canada; and European Union countries requiring people to prove their percentage of disability in order to have free access to culture.
Review: American Women and the Fight for Equality
October 31, 2023Adele reviews ‘Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality: 1920 to 2020’ by Elizabeth Griffith, a history of the U.S. feminist movement from the years leading up to the achievement of women’s right to vote to 2020.
Evanston rallies for abortion rights
October 18, 2023In person report of the Oct. 15 Pro-Choice Rally and March in Evanston, Illinois.
Angela Terrano, 1929-2023
October 17, 2023Angela Terrano died on Oct. 1. She was the managing editor of ‘News & Letters’ from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s and the co-editor of the 1976 Marxist-Humanist pamphlet ‘Working Women for Freedom’. She made an important contribution to Charles Denby’s 1960 pamphlet ‘Worker’s Battle Automation’.
Editorial, August 2023: Abortion bans—cruelty is the point
August 19, 2023The stories told by 12 women who bravely sued Texas over its draconian so-called “exception” in its abortion ban, show that the point of the ban is to cruelly strip women of the right to control our own bodies and lives. Freedom is the enemy of the anti-abortion fanatics.
Tomorrow We Will Celebrate Women’s Day: A statement from: Abahlali baseMjondolo Women’s League
August 8, 2023On Aug. 9 we honor women who gave their lives in struggle. We cannot continue to accept the violence that is all around us. We need to build a peaceful society in which there is full equality between men and women, a society in which land, wealth and power are shared.
Solidarity with Iran: Woman, Life, Freedom
September 25, 2022Over 1,000 people gathered at UC Berkeley to express their solidarity with the growing movement of women in Iran.
Tigray war and famine
A critical update after the collapse of the five-month “truce” between Ethiopian government troops and the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front. Even before the ceasefire breakdown, the specter of mass starvation loomed over the people of Tigray.
Readers’ Views: September-October 2022, Part One
September 13, 2022Readers’ Views on Abortion Rights Struggles; Ukraine, Russia and the Left; Marx and Transgender; World Food Crisis; Normalized Domestic Violence, and Ecuador’s Uprising
For revolutionary women’s history explore the Archives of Raya Dunayevskaya
March 19, 2022Ad 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.
World in View: Victory for #MeToo
March 15, 2022A new federal law renders binding arbitration clauses in contracts void in cases of sexual assault and harassment. Women’s rights activists and national organizations worked for five years to get legislation introduced to stop the practice. This year it passed by a wide margin in February, and took effect March 3.
Agony of Afghanistan
February 7, 2022Half a year after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the Taliban purges women from public life, brutally murders its opponents and has forced thousands to go underground or leave their country. Women have been especially creative in the widespread, multidimensional resistance.
Readers’ Views: November-December 2021, Part One
November 19, 2021Readers’ Views on Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives 2021-2022; Labor shortage?; Workers as reason; Support El Milagro workers!; Detroit women’s march; Chapelle’s sexism; Afghans dead and buried; Betrayal of Haitians; and Which side are you on?
Readers’ Views: November-December 2021, Part Two
November 17, 2021Readers’ Views on Philosopher-revolutionaries; Youth, climate and the freedom idea; Climate crisis; California fires, FDA fails women, and Voices from behind bars.
Review: Reproductive Rights as Human Rights
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.
Afghans resist Taliban and the world
November 12, 2021After the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, there are mounting human rights violations. They are forcing women to disappear from public life and accept abuse but Afghanistan’s people, agents of history, are not known for capitulating long to injustice.
Women of color brought R. Kelly to justice
Rapper R. Kelly was convicted of racketeering. Ultimately, Black women, most notably Dream Hampton, the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter brought him down.
Women Worldwide: September-October 2021
September 12, 2021Women Indigenous leaders in Canada; forced sterilization of Indigenous women in Canada; organic farming collective Green Girls in Gaza; dangers of prenatal sex selection.
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2021-2022: Part III. Economic contradictions
September 1, 2021The pandemic and the climate and ecological crisis struck when the world capitalist system had shown its inability to extricate itself from a prolonged economic slump. They deepened it. Despite the happy face that government and corporate economists paint, the opposite story is told by people’s lives.
A Review: ‘Men Who Hate Women…’
July 4, 2021Adele favorably reviews “Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists: The Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All by Laura Bates. The book exposes the extreme damage caused to society by online misogynist communities, or the “manosphere.”
Review: ‘Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America’
February 2, 2021In her book, Ijeoma Oluo discusses the serious damage caused when we expect white men to have all the leadership roles in a society. The damage is not only to women and people of color whose voices are not heard, and to society, which loses their input, but to white men themselves.
World in View: Historic mass strike of India’s farmers
January 30, 2021An estimated 250 million Indian farmers have been on strike since last September in opposition to a series of new laws, proposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
Review of ‘Full Surrogacy Now’
April 30, 2020Adele’s critical review of the book “Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family” by Sophie Lewis as “a disappointing attempt to find a radical path to a just society of new human relationships by way of commercial surrogacy.”
II. The true pandemic war
April 29, 2020Draft thesis for discussion about where the world is heading, and what to do about it from a revolutionary standpoint. Part II. The true pandemic war: A. The capitalists’ class war; B. Subjects of revolution fight back; and C. Pandemic class war reveals the social structure.
The Power of Women’s Liberation in Mexico
March 10, 2020Participant report of women’s strike in Mexico City, March 9, 2020.
Letter from Mexico: Women fight violence
November 17, 2019Women who demonstrated against the escalating gender violence in Mexico City are aiming for a society where being a woman would no longer mean being an object.
Illinois NOW Meets
Report on a conference by the Illinois National Organization for Women, and on the status of the Violence Against Women Act.
Readers’ Views, September-October 2019, Part 2
September 1, 2019Readers’ Views on What is socialism?; Surviving the prison system; Women fight back; and Exploiting prisoners
Review: ‘Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men’
June 27, 2019Adele reviews Caroline Criado Perez’s book, “Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men,” which explains how the notion that all of humanity can be represented as “man” or “mankind” has caused devastating, worldwide harm to all women and all of society.
Algerians in revolt
June 26, 2019The creative presence of women, youth, workers and national minorities in the Algerian freedom movement promises much for the future.
World in View: The genius of the Sudanese revolution
May 6, 2019The brilliant Sudanese revolution is another in a line of rebellions against reactionary rule.
Review: How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics
September 27, 2018Adele reviews “How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosures to Trump,” by Laura Briggs, which discusses “reproductive labor,” “the work necessary to the reproduction of human life.”
Iranian workers, youth reach for new radical beginnings
January 28, 2018The 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.
Editorial: Abuser-in-chief trashes women
November 12, 2017The Trump administration’s attack on both abortion rights and birth control panders to their anti-abortion fanatical base–in the process torturing a 17-year-old immigrant who tried to get an abortion after being locked up for illegally crossing the border. .
Essay: Marx’s Marxism vs. Trump-Putin’s barbarism
March 21, 2017Trump’s barbarism in power is a crisis for bourgeois democracy and revolutionary thought. Opposition from below is far deeper than bourgeois opposition to Trump. To have efficacy today, Marx’s body of ideas must be grasped and projected as a whole. The movement from theory needs to meet the challenge of history, of freedom struggles and revolution.
Reader’s Views: March-April 2017, Part 1
March 16, 2017Readers’ Views on Trumpism and the many facets of resistance; Fear of immigrants; Specters of internment; War on Queers; Women Fight Back; Women´s Liberation Debates.
Democracy in the streets votes Trump out!
January 23, 2017Reports from the huge Women’s March from participants in Chicago, Ill., Detroit, Mich., Oakland, Calif., Nashville, Tenn., Memphis, Tenn., Los Angeles, Calif., and New York City.
Inauguration of neo-fascism faces widespread revolt
The lightning move by Republicans in Congress to prepare to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or Obamacare—before Donald Trump even took office, with only the vaguest idea of what is to replace it, and with full knowledge that a large majority of Americans oppose the repeal of its most important provisions—gave a sign of how far the new single-party government intends to roll the clock back, with dizzying speed.
Readers’ Views: September-October 2016, Part 1
September 14, 2016Readers’ 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.
‘We defend the earth’
July 6, 2016Indigenous people, mostly women, respond to a video about their community, the ejido of Tila, which struggled against the government who tried to take their land and are now an independent community.