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.
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.”
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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?
In celebration of International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, we present excerpts from Dunayevskaya’s “Luxemburg as Feminist; Break with Jogiches.”
Michigan State students marched in protest of the enablers of sexual abuser Dr. Larry Nassar, and demanded immediate, deep-rooted changes in campus culture.
A review of the Lifetime TV movie “Flint,” which brings to life the ongoing four-year battle by four women who became activists against the State of Michigan in the face of serious water pollution in Flint, Michigan.
Readers’ Views on Women’s Liberation struggle continue and voices from behind bars.
New collection of writings by Raya Dunayevskaya on the 100th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution titled: Russia: From Proletarian Revolution to State-Capitalist Counter-Revolution. .
Readers’ Views on: Puerto Rico:Trump’s Katrina; LGBTQ in Australia; Transgender in Texas; Women’s Liberation; Racism in Canada; Detroit and “Detroit”; Labor and Robots; Haitian Revolt; Why Read N&L?; and a Correction.
Readers’ Views: facing far right’s threat; don’t scapegoat; Canadian strike; Transgender troops; women’s liberation; homeless in Los Angeles; defend dissidents; why read N&L.
On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, a new book collects writings by Raya Dunayevskaya on the Revolution, counter-revolution, and their consequences, aiming to help create new revolutionary beginnings today. .
Analysis of the violent invasion of Charlottesville, Va., the significance of the broader advance of fascism, and the opposite to it in human forces and reason.
The unprecedented Women’s March on Washington the day after Trump’s inauguration revealed the blossoming of a universal movement with many particulars, from women’s demand to control their own bodies, to Black Lives Matter, to the struggle at Standing Rock.
Terry Moon writes of the meaning of the 2017 International Women’s Day strike, including its origins in the Ni Una Menos movement in Argentina, the October 2016 strike of women in Poland and the Jan. 21 Women’s March on Washington. .
A reflection on the question “Where are all the women?” posed by a speaker at one of the several recent and massive immigrants’ rights marches in downtown L.A.
In-person report of a rally in New York’s Washington Square Park on International Women’s Day denouncing the anti-woman steps of Trump’s administration.
Women World Wide column reporting women´s actions in Tunisia and Turkey, as well as the development of a male contraceptive by a university start-up in rural India.
Reader’s Views on Women vs. Reaction; Women and Philosophy; Syria and Humanity; Support Trans Children!; Animals and Us; Repression vs. Justice; Why Read “N&L”; Voices from Behind the Bars
Report of the pro-choice Feb. 10 rally in Chicago, a day before anti-abortion fanatics planned to mob Planned Parenthood clinics across the U.S.
Raya Dunayevskaya on the first and second women’s movements, the Black dimension, working women, and a total philosophy of liberation.
Readers’ 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.
An in-depth Marxist-Humanist view of the state of the women’s movement in the U.S. and worldwide as it responds to the rising fascism of U.S. President Trump and other world leaders.
Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2017-2018
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.
Because of the urgency of the question of how to make new beginnings in such a reactionary world situation, we excerpt two of Dunayevskaya’s last philosophical writings, which confront “where to begin” as part of her work on dialectics of philosophy and organization.
In person report of the demonstration against the anti-abortion fanatics so-called March for Life in Chicago.
Prisoner Baridi continues a dialogue about humanism with Urszula Wislanka sparked by California prisoners’ struggle to end the torture of long-term solitary confinement.
Reports 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.
From the December 1998 issue of News & Letters
Column: Woman as Reason
by Maya Jhansi
This past year, there has been much discussion on Marx inspired by the 150th anniversary of THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, from journalistic discourses on Marx’s prescient descriptions of globalized capitalism to more scholarly meditations on its rich history. What is troubling, however, [=>]
