Readers’ Views on: Atlanta Racist Femicide; Women Rise in Australia; Chauvin and Racist Usa: Guilty!; Attacks on Civil Liberties; Black Lives Matter; Amazon Workers Resist; Berta Presente!; Burmese Masses Revolt; The Empire Strikes Out; Maâti Monjib Released!
Young people keep taking matters into our own hands. Our time of total crises calls for a philosophy to help us understand the problems at the root of our misery and give us hope we can create a new society. This makes Marx a contemporary for youth, looking for a way out of life under capitalism’s hopeless future.
Violence against women has worsened in the era of COVID-19. Sexism, like racism, is systemic to almost every culture. Nevertheless women fight back with creative activism and thought. What is new is the internationalization and deepening of that struggle. This year’s International Women’s Day shows women deepening our fight for full freedom and new human relationships.
The people of Burma have taken to the streets daily by the tens of thousands since the army carried out a coup on Feb. 1. This deeper, more human level of opposition is not just to the coup, but the nationalist monks as well as NLD’s positions. A new social solidarity is emerging.
Announcement and pre-publication offer for a new publication, ‘What Is Socialism? A Marxist-Humanist Symposium’
Excerpts from the Introduction to the new pamphlet on ‘What Is Socialism?’
National Human Trafficking Awareness Day; Saudi activist Loujain Al-Hathloul released but not free; Scotland becomes first country to make menstrual supplies free.
Readers’ Views on: Trumpism, Racism and the Specter of Fascism; Vaccine Inequality and Injustice; Organizing Amazon; Can Humanity Survive?; Criminal Injustice; Trust Women; Marx’s Humanism and Love; Why Read ‘N&L’?
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.
Lenn Keller, a Black Lesbian feminist activist, historian, and documentary photographer, remembered; women sue MindGeek/Pornhub and pressure credit card companies; Chile women win demand for half the seats in constitutional convention; women win reinstatement in First Nation bands in Canada.
Participant report of a seminar on ongoing abuses of women in prison, women’s organizing against the abuses, and the limitations of reforms.
Election battles, reaching for the future, and the pull of the past; Sabotage of the post office; Food recycling workers strike; Anti-labor statue downed; Oil and biden; COVID-19: where’s the vision?; Racism and fascism; Polish women’s revolutionary moment; News & Letters is back in print!
Three presentations on why Marx’s 1844 Humanist Essays are critical to meet today’s challenges, by a high school student, a former prisoner who participated in the Pelican Bay Hunger Strikes, and a long-time Marxist-Humanist looking at 1844 from a feminist perspective.
While what is happening in Poland may not be a revolution, it is revolutionary. Women are leading a movement protesting the Church’s inhuman attack on women’s freedom, and mounting a deep challenge to the fascist-leaning Polish government.
Girls revolt against discriminatory dress code at Wisconsin high school; the death of Shere Hite, author of “The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality”; the struggle against mass hysterectomies performed without informed consent on immigrant women detained in Georgia; and in Mexico City feminists seized the National Human Rights Commission building for five days, renaming it “House of Refuge Ni Una Menos.”
In an attempt to intimidate Hlengiwe Gasa for leading a peaceful march on July 25 protesting the terrifying levels of violence against women in the community of uMthwalume in South Africa, she was arrested and charged with violating Covid-19 lockdown restrictions.
Diana Russell remembered; Hawaii’s Feminist Economic Recovery Plan for COVID-19; Turkish women protest moves to withdraw from Istanbul Convention; women social health workers strike in India; women contest stolen election in Belarus; demands for release of Sanaa Seif in Egypt.
“The Power Worshippers” by Katherine Stewart explains the religious Right as a “Christian nationalist” movement. This is not a grassroots movement but one deliberately designed by ultra-rich businessmen and families to impose complete political, social, and economic control.
Readers’ views on The dialectic in thought and in liberation; labor and pandemic; pandemic and ecology; pandemic and school; women’s liberation; and voices from behind bars.
Review of ‘Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China’ by Leta Hong Fincher, which debunks the Chinese government’s propaganda that the status of women has been soaring since the introduction of corporate capitalism.
Report by two women who attended the Zapatista Second International Gathering of Women Who Fight in Chiapas, Mexico.
Women worldwide column on Wet’suwet’en women fighting Coastal GasLink Pipeline; the Murang’a County Women savings and credit cooperative in Kenya; artist Jimini Hignett; dress codes for women in Japan; and Indian women demonstrating against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s new racist citizenship law.
What has become clear in 2020 is the global nature of the women’s movements. It is a new stage which has announced itself by the international fight against femicide; the Women’s Marches; and by the National Women’s Meetings in Latin America, also called Encuentros.
Readers’ Views on Capitalism and climate; Mideast upheaval; Trump the Mullah?; war crime hero; Trump’s judges; detransition debate; and women’s liberation.
Review of ‘Without Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now’, on the history of the women’s liberation movement’s struggle for full reproductive justice.
Women are deepening a global movement to combat violence against us, from violent rapes to domestic battering to outright femicide. Demonstrations have spread across the globe.
How can hearing the ideas of women’s liberation and the philosophy of human liberation enable the movement’s reorientation? How can the humanism that shone forth from the Women’s Marches help inspire the entire movement for liberation?
Women 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.
In memoriam to Deborah Morris, writer, activist and powerful thinker in the women’s liberation movement and in her participation with News and Letters Committees.
Editorial on the struggle women have in the U.S. to keep abortion legal and accessible, how the Left has mostly given lip service to the struggle, and how today when socialism is again on the agenda, it also has to mean women have control of their own bodies.
In an era where women’s right to an abortion is endangered, feminist activist and writer Terry Moon delves into the question of what is socialism when it comes to women’s liberation, looking historically, politically, and philosophically.
“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.
Readers’ Views on: Socialism and a philosophy of revolution; Sudan in revolt; Iran vs. Iranians; Flint, Mich., play captures voices; Notre-Dame and fracking on native land; gun control debate; labor strikes; debate on fascism; Trump and DeVos; and voices from behind bars.
An in-person report of the Jan, 19, 2019, “sister march”–sponsored by Women’s March Michigan, a separate organization from the National Women’s March–which brought nearly 1,000 women to a rally at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History.
An interview of Raya Dunayevskaya by Katherine Davenport which aired on WBAI radio in New York City on International Women’s Day, March 8, 1984. It brings together women’s liberation and revolution in permanence, as Dunayevskaya discusses what life might be after revolution.
In a year marked by the contradiction between deepening women’s revolt and activism and neo-fascism rising across the globe, women have been fighting back in unprecedented numbers and ways.
Readers’ Views addressing: challenging fascism across all borders; charter teachers strike; pitfalls of bourgeois politics; women on the march; prison strikes big and small; and the racist criminal injustice system.
Adele reviews “The Lesbian Revolution: Lesbian Feminism in the UK 1970–1990,” by Sheila Jeffreys, the first book documenting the history of British Lesbian feminism.
Participant report of how women in Detroit celebrated the Women’s March by highlighting diverse women fighting for fundamental changes and challenging racism, sexism, and capitalism.
An account of #MeToo in China is documented in a new book by Leta Hong Fincher, “Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China.”
Readers’ Views Part 2 takes up: the needed return to Marx’s Humanism, and Voices from behind prison bars.
Readers’ Views takes up: attacks on immigrants; Syria and the Left’s failure; Democratic Party’s selling out women; Women’s Liberation; Serena Williams; ending money bail the right way; Trump-Kim “peace”; genocide and war heroes; and a discussion on sex crimes and their fallout.
What is bringing all reactionary forces together at this moment is the recognition by creatures like Donald Trump that women are the implacable enemy of emerging fascism.
Women Worldwide column on Equal Playing Field organization; 30,000 women marching in South Korea against “molka”; and forced marriage in Sudan.
Massive demonstrations in 30 major cities of Spain occurred after the five rapists in the La Manada case were set free from prison on June 22.
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
Readers’ Views takes up: women’s liberation, youth in the battle, Blacks vs. racism, border cop thugs, Middle East struggles, and voices from behind bars.
To observe the 200th birthday of Karl Marx, we present excerpts of a speech given by Raya Dunayevskaya for the Marx centenary year, originally titled “Marxist-Humanism, 1983: The Summation That Is a New Beginning, Subjectively and Objectively.”
A participant looks at the 1968 French general strike, filled with potential to transform society, and discusses why it failed and the ramifications of that for today.
Readers’ Views on Women’s Marches; Iran in Revolt; Around the Globe; Race and Freedom; Queer Oppression; Why Read N&L?
