News and Letters, May-June 2010

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NEW! Preview of articles in the July-August issue of News & Letters:
Gulf oil rig explosion kills workers, devastates environment, exposes capitalist "development"

News & Letters, Vol. 55, No. 3
Raya Dunayevskaya Centenary Year 1910 - 2010
May-June 2010

Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2010-2011

Capital devours lives, labor, land; masses seek paths to freedom

We publish our Draft Perspectives Thesis as part of our preparation for the national gathering of News and Letters Committees. We have published every one since 1975, breaking new ground for the Marxist movement. We do it because our age is in such total crisis, facing a choice between absolute terror or absolute freedom, that a revolutionary organization can no longer allow any separation between theory and practice, philosophy and revolution, workers and intellectuals, "inside" and "outside." Join us in discussing these Perspectives.

Contents:

 


In Memoriam

Mary Joan Schmidt (Mary Jo Grey)

The shockingly sudden, tragic death of Mary Joan Schmidt on April 10 made the talk she had given at News and Letters Library on Feb. 8 seem like a completely unintentional autobiographical epitaph to her long history of active participation in all the freedom movements of our day.


For mine bosses, 29 dead just the cost of digging coal

Before the Upper Big Branch mine explosion in Montcoal W. Va. Massey CEO Don Blankenship instituted a reign of terror in the 15 Massey mine communities in West Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania.... If any miner expressed sympathy for a union, objected to unsafe conditions or criticized Blankenship, that miner was fired on the spot....


From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya

Marxist-Humanism's original contribution

This excerpt from a transcript of Dunayevskaya's April 18, 1976, speech titled, "Our Original Contribution to the Dialectic of the Absolute Idea as New Beginning: In Theory, and Leadership, and Practice" is an explicit discussion of what Marxist-Humanism's original contribution is. It is central to our projected new work of selected writings by Dunayevskaya on Marx.


Essay by Narihiko Ito: A Japanese Marxist's view

Rosa Luxemburg, Raya Dunayevskaya and 21st century socialism

When [Raya Dunayevskaya] sent me her new book Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution in 1982, I was deeply impressed. I wanted to talk with her directly and sent her an invitation to the Third International Rosa Luxemburg Association Conference in Paris in May 1983....


Black/Red View

The New Jim Crow

On April 15 Michelle Alexander gave a talk in Berkeley, Calif., on her new book, The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, London: The New Press, 2010). We print a summary of Ms. Alexander's talk.


World in View

People's Climate Summit and protests in Bolivia

Called after the disastrous failure of the Copenhagen Climate Summit, the World Peoples' Summit on Climate Change and Rights of Mother Earth is supposed to present an anti-capitalist alternative coming from the Global South.


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