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.
Wislanka reviews Lea Ypi’s ‘Free,’ a testimonial of experiencing both “socialism” and then a Western style of life in 1990’s Albania, and relates it to the present moment. The book asks what freedom means and the essay takes it deeper in the new context of wars, fascism, resistance from below and the self-development of the idea of freedom.
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.
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.
Feminists in Iran call on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to resign; huge demonstrations against police rapes in Mexico; removal of the “Girl of Peace Statue” in Japan; and the trial of Canan Kaftancioğlu, the Istanbul chief of the secularist Republican People’s Party.
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.
A Marxist-Humanist analysis of the history and meaning of the rising of the right-wing neo-Nazi white supremacist movement, its relationship to President Donald Trump and his administration, and its challenge to the freedom forces arrayed against it who are fighting for a humanist world. .
Readers’ Views on Hegel’s dialectic and today’s retrogression; Why read N&L?; La Raza unida; Education and freedom; Racism in Burma and U.S.; Voices from behind the bars
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.
Raya Dunayevskaya gives a revolutionary history of the war for independence of Biafra from Nigeria while commenting on Conor Cruise O’Brien’s article published in the New York Review of Books, Dec. 21, 1968.
Eugene Gogol explores the point that the radical heart of Hegelian dialectics is the negation of the negation–the positive within the negative that constructs the new society. He traces this idea in Marx and Lenin and then how Raya Dunayevskaya saw this dialectic expressed in her breakthrough on Hegel’s Absolutes, where she ascertained a dual movement: a movement from practice that is itself a form of theory and the movement from theory to philosophy.
On the same day that General William Westmoreland waved the flag before Congress, Muhammad Ali refused to be inducted into the Army. While the general was applauded even by the doves, Ali was, within hours, stripped of his title of World Heavyweight Boxing Champion. War exposed the open nerve—”the Black Question”—which has always been the touchstone of U.S. history. It placed American civilization on trial before the world much more seriously than the “war crimes tribunal” in Stockholm.
With Trump’s appeal to racism and reaction winning support from part of the working class, we present Dunayevskaya’s letter taking up Enoch Powell’s racist speeches and their impact on the working class.
A remembrance of Olga Domanski by Kevin O’Brien, who felt that Olga knew what revolution meant and strove persistently, tirelessly and cheerfully for it.
A look at women’s activity and thought worldwide including women comics acting against harassment in their industry; the Toronto Newsgirls Boxing Club coming out strongly against violence against women; and Filipina women used as sexual slaves by Japan in WWII demanding that government acknowledge and apologize for what they had done.
Article outlining the seriously flawed agreement between the governments of Japan and South Korea regarding the so-called “comfort women,” actually women kidnapped into sexual slavery to serve Japanese Soldiers during World War II. The article includes the list of demands of the surviving women who were left out of the agreement’s negotiations.
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: “Black masses, youth and the needed U.S. revolution: philosophy and reality” looks at the possibility of revolution in the U.S. and the importance of Black masses as vanguard.
In celebrating the online publication of the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, we present excerpts of her Introduction/Overview to Volume XII, which takes up the Marxist-Humanist concept of archives as not only retrospective but perspective, in the quest to establish “continuity with the historic course of human development.”
In celebrating the first 60 years of News and Letters Committees, we reprint excerpts from the Draft Perspectives for 1975-76 by Raya Dunayevskaya, the first printed in News & Letters.
THE MOVEMENT KNOWS, of course, that the class enemy is at home, within each country. It knows full well that each existing state power is weighted down with fear of revolution. And it does not fail to appreciate that, no matter how deep the intra-imperialist rivalries, capitalist class solidarity holds tightest and strongest against its own people.
Review of the book “Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Steelworkers” by Anne Balay.
ENVIRONMENT UNDER THREAT
Recently I attended a talk near Berkeley, Calif., by a retired professor about the effect of environmental damage on political instability in the Middle East. He spoke disparagingly of Arab countries, but was full of praise for Israeli technology and “adaptive science.” He stated that autocracy was the best way to confront [=>]
Readers’ Views, September-October 2013, Part I
Why did the Huffington Post print a piece of pure hate speech against Quebecers, and why are some Canadian leaders promoting its views?
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 the USSR. Such is the degeneracy of the globalized capitalist system, laden with destructive forces and sunk into structural crisis. The deep crisis is seen in the U.S. and abroad, economically, in unemployment and poverty, homelessness and hunger. It is seen politically, in new laws attacking workers and women, and new outbursts of racism. It is seen environmentally, with the advance of climate disruption and fake capitalistic solutions. It is seen in thought, as the lack of philosophy, of a total view, hampers the development of struggles from the U.S. to the revolutions of the Arab Spring facing counter-revolutions.
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 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 [=>]
From the March-April 2012 issue of News & Letters:
World in View
Bosnian genocide 20 years after
by Gerry Emmett
News & Letters pamphlet, “Bosnia-Herzegovina: Achilles Heel of Western ‘Civilization’
April 2012 marks 20 years since the start of the genocide in the former Yugoslavia, 1992-1995. This was a deliberate, state-sponsored attempt by Serbian President [=>]
This is the statement that News and Letters Committees issued after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks:
A Statement from the National Editorial Board of News and Letters Committees
Against the Double Tragedy:
Say no to terrorism and Bush’s drive to war!
September 16, 2001
A double tragedy descended upon the world with the barbaric, cruel and inhuman terrorist attack [=>]
From the Jan.-Feb. 2011 issue of News & Letters:
Editorial:
Back to the nuclear brink
The continuing threat of war on the Korean Peninsula, the nature of debate over the just-ratified New START nuclear arms reduction treaty, and the “wisdom” Homeland Security has shared with us on surviving a nuclear attack, all underscore the urgency of the [=>]
Part of the classic American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard, written by Raya Dunayevskaya, has been posted on the web at the Marxists Internet Archive. The entire book can be obtained from News and Letters Committees.
This was excerpted from Part V, “From Depression Through World War II.”
Source: American Civilization on Trial, Part V “From Depression Through [=>]
Capital on strike
Today capital is on strike even as it wages a two-pronged war against workers: automation and forcing cuts in living standards. In the U.S., 500 of the largest non-financial firms are sitting on a cash hoard of over a trillion dollars, yet capitalists have refused to invest in the real economy ever since [=>]
