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News and Letters, April 2004

Lead Article

Fight the Christian Right's attacks on women's lives

Under Bush's reign the quality of women's lives has been undermined in many concrete ways. Also being destroyed is what it means to be a woman--women's humanness is being devalued. And one of the most retrogressive acts of Bush's presidency has been his support for a new Constitutional amendment to outlaw same-sex marriages. One reason women have been singled out is their opposition to this stage of capitalism. This will be seen in the outpouring at the March for Women's Lives, that, despite the contradictions of those who called it, will show hundreds of thousands of women's anger and determination to end Bush's attacks on women.


Editorial

The departure of Aristide: The tragedy of Haiti

It was a sad day for Haiti and for all those who have supported this Black republic's two centuries of struggle for independence and liberation. On Feb. 29, the elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide was deposed by an unholy alliance. The truth is, though, that popular support for Aristide, who rode into office on the ferment of the 1986 revolution, had sharply fallen following abuses of power. What are the lessons for freedom lovers everywhere?


From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Marxist-Humanist Archives

Can the law of value be uprooted?

During the second world war, Stalin's state economists proposed that the mainspring of capitalist production relations, the law of value, could be found in a socialist country. They were in fact attempting to square the reality, state-capitalism, with a label, socialism, and needed to pervert Marx's theories to do so. In her path-breaking rejoinder, Dunayevskaya pulled the shroud from their distortions with an historical survey of Marx's Capital and his views on the lower phase of communism and of the new society in his Critique of the Gotha Program.


Philosophic Dialogue

Negativity, dialectics, and desire

Ben Watson reviews The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx in the British left journal, Radical Philosophy. He is critical of the absence of pychosexual themes and asserts there's an unspoken aversion to Surrealism. Nevertheless "for socialists, The Power of Negativity will provoke soul-searching about party instrumentalism and freedom of thought."

Consciousness and revolution: A response to Ben Watson

In a response to Ben Watson's review of The Power of Negativity, Dave Black reminds us that Dunayevskaya's support for freedom movements was never uncritical. And for many, despite their anti-Stalinism, Hegelianism of the kind Dunayevskaya practiced was not an acceptable entry into consciousness. Theorizing an organizational expression of humanist Marxism was her passion always.


Quebecor drive for union and respect

What you can't see between the covers of a Victoria's Secret catalog is the sweat and blood and aspirations of the workers who print and bind it. The employees of catalog publisher Quebecor have staged marches on the company office in Mississippi to reverse favoritism, racism, poor health insurance coverage, and bad working conditions.


Our Life and Times

Spain's voters repudiate Bush, Al Qaeda

In a stunning electoral upset, Spanish voters returned the Socialist Party to power on March 14. It won a solid parliamentary majority after voters repudiated the way the rightist government of Jose Maria Aznar had attempted to manipulate public opinion in the wake of a horrific terrorist attack.


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