The March-April 2013 issue of News & Letters is available on the web.
News & Letters, Vol. 58, No. 2
March – April 2013
Lead
From India to Egypt to U.S., women fighting for freedom
Two recent events have shown the deep and seemingly intractable worldwide oppression of women and, at the same time, revealed women’s militancy and determination to [=>]
ARCHIVES AS LIVING
I have been following the readings for the 2012-2013 Marxist-Humanist discussions with great enthusiasm. I was especially energized by the “Women as force and reason of revolution” selections. Raya Dunayevskaya’s 1970 piece “The Women’s Liberation Movement as Reason and as Revolutionary Force” was fresh and relevant to today. This is no surprise [=>]
RAVAGES OF CAPITALISM SHOW NEED FOR NEW WORLD
The article on “Climate chaos and capitalism” (Sept.-Oct. 2012 N&L) is very relevant, especially the conclusion about how capitalism’s contradiction is that the growth of the economy, of capitalist production, means more global warming and climate change worldwide.
Activist for humans and environment
Los Angeles
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The technologies we [=>]
OFFICIAL CALL FOR PLENUM
to Work Out Marxist-Humanist Perspectives for 2013-2014
February 24, 2013
To All Members of News and Letters Committees
Dear Friends:
The world today is riven between the creativity of masses in revolt and the violent degeneracy of counter-revolution, whose destructiveness even extends to the revived specter of nuclear war two decades after the collapse of [=>]
by Artemis
On Jan. 2, Gerda Lerner, a founding member of the National Organization for Women and history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, died at the age of 92. She founded the first national graduate program in women’s history and a women’s studies program at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y. She wrote The [=>]
by Gerry Emmett
In the remarkable documentary film, La Toma (2012), Afro-Colombian woman activist Francia Marquez Mina is threatened by government forces and forced to spend each night sleeping in a different place for her safety. (See “Afro-Colombians Throw Off Shackles,” Nov.-Dec. 2012 N&L.) She has described the experience of people in her community this [=>]
From the January-February 2013 issue of News & Letters:
by Terry Moon
The recent rape of a 23-year-old medical student in India was brutal: a metal rod was jammed with such force into her vagina that it reached into her diaphragm, destroying her intestines and ultimately killing her. It happened in Delhi, and demonstrations–first against the [=>]
Editorial
With lightning swiftness a super-majority of Michigan lame-duck Republicans passed a series of oppressive bills at the end of December. Defying voters’ expressed views, they passed an anti-union “right-to-work” law, an anti-abortion bill and a dictatorial emergency manager act. This was accomplished despite a record number–over 12,500–of protestors who stormed and occupied the legislative chamber [=>]
Lead
by Gerry Emmett
“However partial the industrial revolt may be, it conceals within itself a universal soul: political revolt may be never so universal but it hides a narrow-minded spirit under the most colossal form.”
–Karl Marx, “On the King of Prussia and Social Reform”
The world’s rulers would like to declare an end to the earth-shaking, world-historic events of the Arab Spring, that completely unforeseen social revolt that [=>]
Lead
Uprisings in Egypt and Syria confront counter-revolution
Slightly over two years since the beginning of Egypt’s revolution, those heady days can seem distant. The current government of Mohamed Morsi was able to push through a reactionary Constitution. It includes anti-working class Articles allowing for child labor and forced labor, in certain circumstances; limits the right to [=>]
On Oct. 3 the Connecticut State Supreme Court made the inhuman and sexist decision to overturn the sexual assault conviction of a man who “had sex” with a woman who has severe cerebral palsy, with the intellectual functional equivalent to a three-year-old and who cannot verbally communicate. The Court held that, because Connecticut statutes define [=>]
Chicago—On Oct. 20 dozens of determined women and some men demonstrated against the war on women, this time spearheaded by the Catholic hierarchy in cahoots with crazy anti-abortion, anti-birth control fanatics. This was the same bunch who came out on June 8 (see “Fighting the war against women,” July- Aug. 2012 N&L) to try to [=>]
Photo for News & Letters by Terry Moon
Slutwalk participants showing off their signs at the demonstration on Sept. 16. Signs read: “The only time that my body ‘shuts that thing down’ is when I go through menopause”; “My body is a flower, not to be exploited”; and “Girls just wanna have funDAMENTAL HUMAN [=>]
La Voz de los de Abajo (Voices from Below) sponsored a delegation to Honduras in September, three years after the 2009 coup which deposed the elected President Manuel Zelaya.
Under his successor President Lobo, violence escalated. Seventy Aguán campesinos (peasants) were murdered in three years.
Honduras’ homicide rate is the highest in the world. Lawyers, politicians, human [=>]
Woman as Reason
Meredith Tax, a women’s liberationist and political activist since the late 1960s, author of The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917, and now U.S. Director of the Centre for Secular Space, a think tank formed to oppose fundamentalism and promote universality in human rights, has recently written an important and [=>]
by Franklin Dmitryev
The two worlds of the rulers and the ruled shone through the suffocating blanket of propaganda surrounding the election in which Barack Obama won a second term. A pronounced gender gap and long lines at the polls in African-American and Latino areas reflected the determination to defeat the reactionary Republicans and retain the [=>]
Lead
Obama’s re-election doesn’t end clash of two worlds
The two worlds of the rulers and the ruled shone through the suffocating blanket of propaganda surrounding the election in which Barack Obama won a second term. A pronounced gender gap and long lines at the polls in African-American and Latino areas reflected the determination to defeat the [=>]
CAPITALIST CRISIS AND REVOLT
I appreciated Franklin Dmitryev’s Lead article in the July-August N&L, on “Spain, Greece, Europe: Capitalist crisis and revolt,” for showing how the so-called “radical Left” is not really so radical. They think they can solve things through managing the economy and redistributing wealth, and channel energy into politics.
The boldfaced paragraph in the [=>]
The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, by Elisabeth Badinter
The Conflict is a brief overview of its subject that occasionally makes poorly supported generalizations, but it has sparked an important debate within feminism. Badinter criticizes not motherhood itself, but the new trend of “attachment parenting” (AP) which involves spending as much time [=>]
You’re invited to a nationwide series of five Marxist-Humanist discussions on:
Global Crises, Global Rebellion, and the Needed Philosophy of Revolution
Central to today’s reality is the worldwide capitalist economic crisis, the deepest since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the context for occupations and revolutions across the globe. We will explore the meaning of this [=>]
by Artemis
In July, Cairo, Egypt, launched a new TV channel called Maria employing only niqab-clad women. The employees use the rhetoric of empowerment, stating this is a response to discrimination in hiring women who wear the fundamentalist garments covering all but the eyes. However, the channel’s owner, Abu Islam Abdallah, stated he founded it [=>]
LALIT supporters at a March 6 ceremony for Sharonne and photographicjournalist Marie-Noelle, two mothers who died from illegal abortions. Photo: LALIT, Sealia Thevenaud.
Port Louis, Mauritius—LALIT is the only political party that has, over the decades, campaigned for abortion decriminalization, and finally, in June, Parliament passed a new Abortion Law to replace the 1838 [=>]
Bok-dong Kim. Photo by Won Choi wonchoi.weebly.com/comfort-women.html
Los Angeles—Bok-dong Kim, an 87-year-old Korean “comfort woman,” came here as part of her U.S. speaking tour on the fifth anniversary of House Resolution 121, which acknowledged Japan’s war crimes against the comfort women. She met with Congressional representatives in Washington, D.C., spoke to 300 students at [=>]
by Terry Moon
Everyone has heard—and a great many rightly condemned—the unconscionable statement by Missouri Republican Congressman and Senate hopeful Todd Akin: “from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare,” he said, referring to pregnancy from rape. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing [=>]
RICH AND DUNAYEVSKAYA: A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP
Thanks for your In Memoriam to Adrienne Rich. It revealed a dimension that many who were appreciative of her poetry and feminism may not have known—Rich’s exploration of Marx’s ideas through her reading of Raya Dunayevskaya. One piece Rich wrote was titled “Dunayevskaya’s Marx.” It was crucial how you [=>]
The fracturing of Mali and the demand for self-determination of the Tuareg people in the north continue (see May-June N&L), but with grave contradictions. The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), the coalition that has fought for independence and a new country, Azawad, joined forces with Ansar Dine, a Tuareg-led militant Islamist group [=>]
Chicago—On June 18, Occupy Chicago held the first of a series of discussions on “The Elephant in the Room: A workshop about dismantling racism in the Occupy Movement.”
Discussion was lively, and comradely, among the majority Black, Latino and Native American participants, but represented just the beginning of an effort to “voice the unvoiced.” One Latino [=>]
by Artemis
In May, delegations of Japanese officials came to Palisades Park, N.J., where more than half the community is of Korean descent, to request the removal of a memorial to the Korean “comfort women.” They shockingly claimed that the more than 200 women, who were forced to be sex slaves for the Japanese military [=>]
In blogs and podcasts, feminists have been discussing the perennial problem of having to explain that feminism means the struggle for gender equality, not female supremacy. Now many third wave and younger feminists have found the courage to reclaim not only the original meaning of “feminism,” but “radical feminism.” During the 1960s and early 1970s, [=>]
World in View
by Gerry Emmett
Arab spring continues
Egypt
Egypt’s first presidential election presented voters with two bad choices: Ahmed Shafiq, a Mubarak ally, or Mohammed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood. Neither candidate has any connection to the working women, the youth, or the mass self-organization that have been at the heart of Egypt’s revolution.
This election showed [=>]
by Terry Moon
Mona Eltahawy, an American-Egyptian journalist, wrote an eloquent essay published in the May/June edition of Foreign Policy titled “Why Do They Hate Us? The real war on women is in the Middle East.” The myriad negative responses to it reveal serious examples of counter-revolution from within the revolution in the wake of Arab Spring.
ARAB [=>]
Chicago–On June 8 about 30 determined activists for reproductive justice faced off around 800 anti-abortion, anti-birth control fanatics. The fanatics acted like thugs, sending people to our demonstration with their signs to try and block us from view and to start arguments, or try to record pro-choice demonstrators. Many times police had to order them [=>]
News & Letters, Vol. 57, No. 4
July-August 2012
Lead: Spain, Greece, Europe: capitalist crisis and revolt
When the bailout of banks in Spain was announced on June 9, the immediate reactions revealed the two worlds that exist in every country. The Spanish masses intensified their protests, marching directly on both banks and government, while Greek and Spanish [=>]
To mark the 20th anniversary of the original “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, here is what we 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 [=>]
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2012-2013
Counter-revolution’s rise shows need for a total philosophy
Revolution, having forced its way to center stage over the last year and a half, cannot easily be bottled up. That explains the viciousness of the counter-revolution, whether the violent police attacks on occupations from New York to Oakland or the Syrian state’s torture [=>]
by Artemis
Pakistan’s first Academy Award nomination, the documentary Saving Face, follows the successful struggle by the Acid Survivors Foundation to introduce a law ensuring a minimum 14-year prison sentence for perpetrators of acid attacks. There are 150 such attacks, mostly on women and children, reported each year in Pakistan. This type of violence is [=>]
When Terry Moon in her column in the last issue asks, “How deep does the dialectic need to become when the subject is woman, is Black woman?” she calls for more discussion of Fanon and Women’s Liberation.
Fanon, in breaking with Sartre’s Existentialist Marxism—which acknowledged only one Subject, labor, and consigned the Black dimension to a [=>]
Chicago—On Feb. 23 women’s health advocates gathered at 230 S. Dearborn downtown at 12:45 PM, in front of Senator Richard Durbin’s office to demonstrate support for women’s access to health insurance that covers birth control, regardless of where we work.
The gathering was organized by the Illinois Choice Action Team, the all-volunteer group representing NARAL Pro-Choice [=>]
Woman as Reason
by Terry Moon
Our Bodies Ourselves, 1971 first edition and 2011 40th anniversary edition
Over 40 years ago, 12 Boston women got together to talk about women’s health. This was in 1969, when no one talked about women’s sexuality. Abortion was illegal and birth control had been legalized nationally—for married couples—only in 1965. [=>]
Editorial
The depths of this society’s inhumanity have been laid bare by the intensity of the war on women’s bodies, minds and lives. Poor women are taking the brunt as those in power in state and federal governments mount an assault so reactionary that birth control, something considered a settled fact of life, is actually in [=>]
Editor’s Note: For International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, we print below brief excerpts from Raya Dunayevskaya’s 1975-76 lectures on “Women as Thinkers and as Revolutionaries,” which were also excerpted in Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution: Reaching for the Future.
* * *
I. Mass Creativity and the Black Dimension
What today we call Women’s [=>]
Lead
Syrian revolution fights Assad’s genocide, world powers watch
The Syrian Revolution is a serious challenge to the order in the region and beyond. Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia all have much to lose from the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s Baathist family dynasty, as do their imperialist patrons.
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya
Women as thinkers and revolutionaries
Working-class [=>]
OFFICIAL CALL FOR CONVENTION
to Work Out Marxist-Humanist Perspectives for 2012-2013
February 26, 2012
To All Members of News and Letters Committees
Dear Friends:
Where we must begin is with the world in upheaval, from Occupy Wall Street to Arab Spring, still going after more than a year.
Nothing better shows the old order’s bloody desperation to prevent a [=>]
In Chicago on Dec. 31, well over 100 demonstrators came to show solidarity with Palestinians by releasing 300 black balloons in downtown Grant Park—one balloon for each child killed during Israel’s 22-day assault on the Gaza Strip three years ago.
On the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian people, Nov. 29, we reflected on [=>]
by Suzanne Rose
After six days of 24-hour-a-day activism, LGBT occupiers, activists, and human rights groups in Seoul, South Korea, won the Seoul Student Rights Ordinance, with all clauses in the original draft included. The draft that calls for non-discrimination against LGBT students as well as their active protection passed the council with a vote [=>]
Readers’ Views (part 1)
THE STATE OF THE WORLD AS WE BEGIN 2012
I’m deeply enamored of the contents of every issue of N&L. This is because the articulation of the various issues addressing the multitude of socioeconomic crises, brought on by economic contraction affecting capital relations, points to how deep the revolution must go. In [=>]
Women Worldwide
by Artemis
In December, Ina May Gaskin was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for pioneering the modern midwifery and home birthing movements and for calling attention to the U.S. maternal death rate—one of the highest in the industrialized world, especially for Black and Hispanic [=>]
Deadly breast implants
The 40,000 British women who received defective breast implants at private clinics are being betrayed by their government, which refuses to require the clinics to provide free consultation, removal and replacement. Only about 3,000 women who received the implants under the National Health Service can receive free removal and replacement of the Poly [=>]
‘A Survivor’s Story’
Reform at Victory: a Survivor’s Story by Michele Ulriksen (Pizan Media, 2008, 300 pages)
Reform at Victory is the memoir that sparked the creation of Survivors of Institutional Abuse (SIA), an organization of adult survivors of abuse at facilities that purport to help troubled teens. The organization’s main focus is fundamentalist Christian “treatment” programs. [=>]
Woman as Reason
by Terry Moon
Blogger L Boogie has written part one of “Fanon, Alienation and Sexual Harassment,” exploring Frantz Fanon’s 1952 Black Skin White Masks in an exciting way for feminism, by relating his thought to street harassment. (See http://nothingbutahuman.wordpress.com/2011/12/04/fanon-alienation-and-sexual-harassment/)
She begins by relating several incidents of harassment, noting that recollecting them reminded her of “how violent street harassment of [=>]
