Our Life and Times
By Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth

In recent weeks, negotiations have taken place between Israel and Syria, the Palestinians, and possibly Lebanon as well. Syria and Israel are discussing a full peace agreement, mediated by Turkey, in which Israel would finally return the Golan Heights, seized in 1973. In addition, Israel and the Palestinian fundamentalist group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, have announced a six-month truce. All of this reflects the weakened position of the U.S. and Israel after the catastrophic war in Iraq and Israel’s disastrous war in Lebanon in 2006.

Our Life and Times
By Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth

In June, resurgent Taliban forces attacked the major prison in Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city and the center of the predominantly Pashtun South. They blew up the prison’s wall, killed 15 guards, and freed all 1,200 prisoners, 400 of whom were Taliban members.

Our Life and Times
By Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth

Despite polls showing a closer race, the right won a decisive victory in April’s national elections. Since then, it has launched unprecedented attacks on immigrants, especially Roma. Billionaire Silvio Berlusconi, a strong supporter of the Iraq war, will head the new government. His coalition includes the anti-immigrant Northern League and with the National Alliance, a party with roots in neo-fascism.

Our Life and Times
By Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth

In recent months, Turkey has been gripped by what amounts to a slow-motion coup on the part of the secular and military establishment. The moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) is facing a ban by the Constitutional Court, even though the AKP controls both the executive and the legislative branches of the government.

By Anne Jaclard

Today, most women around the world are as poor and oppressed as at the start of the Women’s Liberation Movement nearly 40 years ago, in spite of the movement circling the globe. In this reactionary period, women want to know whether it will ever be possible to construct a society in which women are free; otherwise, there is no reason to continue struggling for it. That is why feminists urgently need to theorize how a non-capitalist, non-sexist alternative to this society could function, and how it might become reality.

by Peter Hudis

"Pure self-recognition in absolute otherness, this Aether as such, is the ground and soil of Science or knowlege in general."--Hegel, PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT

The numerous discussions and conferences occuring around the world on Hegel's PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT on its 200th anniversary show that interest in his work is far from dead. Hegel's thought today appears to be as much at the center of ideological debate as ever before.

by Kevin Anderson, author of LENIN, HEGEL, AND WESTERN MARXISM

This year, we celebrate the 125th anniversary of Marx's 1882 Preface to the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, co-authored by Engels, in which he espouses an alternate road toward communism for Russia, one based upon agricultural Russia's village communes, and different from that outlined in CAPITAL, Vol. I for Western Europe. The 1882 Preface is the culminating point of Marx's late writings on Russia, which to this day have been unassimilated into the framework of "Marxism" as developed by post-Marx Marxists.

By Andrew Kliman

Developing a philosophically grounded alternative to capitalism is vitally important in order to free our minds from the clutches of Margaret Thatcher’s slogan, "there is no alternative" (TINA)—and from its practical effects. Struggles for freedom continue but, given the widespread acceptance of TINA, they understandably stop short of trying to remake society totally. Just as it is rational to try to change what can be changed, it is rational to refrain from trying to change what cannot be changed. People who don’t want to hear about socialism because of the failures of what they believe to have been socialism are making perfect sense.

Our Life and Times
By Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth

Four months after a nationwide uprising that left 17 dead, the banana-producing region around the town of Njombe Pena remains on lockdown. Mayor Paul-Eric Kingue is still in jail, charged with incitement. His real crime: exposing how French-dominated multinational banana companies exploit the local population while paying no real local taxes.

Cyril Smith was one of those rare radical thinkers: one who, after many decades of commitment to a particular Leftist cause, could face radical changes in the world by radicalizing his own ideas.

By Kevin Anderson, author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism

After viewing some alternate perspectives -- evolutionary biology (Richard Dawkins), structuralism and poststructuralism (especially Bourdieu), pragmatism (Richard Rorty) -- that are very influential today, this essay offers another look at three important dialectical thinkers, Herbert Marcuse, Karel Kosík, and Raya Dunayevskaya. It concludes: "We need to examine some of the questions raised since Marx or Lukács, especially on difference, particularity, gender, and sexuality. Otherwise dialectics could atrophy into a 'classical' perspective, like those of Plato or Confucius, rather than a living and critical philosophy for today." It is based on a public lecture Wuhan University in China on October 29, 2007.

By Peter Hudis

As we consider legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the 40th anniversary of his death, it is worthwhile considering an aspect of King’s legacy that has received little or no discussion—even though it speaks directly to the problems facing us today, including those revealed by the campaign for the next U.S. president.

Ba Karang, a revolutionary from West Africa, writes as Robert Mugabe's regime initiates another series of crackdowns against opposition forces inside Zimbabwe and human rights groups in anticipation of the run-off election for president on June 27. It has also appeared in Africa Link, a journal dedicated to African liberation.

Social Movements Indaba (SMI) Western Cape statement on xenophobic attacks

The Social Movements Indaba Western Cape has closely observed what is taking place in South Africa. We speak of the recent and current xenophobic attacks on our foreign nationals. We strongly condemn all these atrocities and we also condemn the slow pace at which the South African government responded to these xenophobic attacks.

By Carlos

"It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!"
-V. I. Lenin, Conspectus of Hegel's 'Science of Logic' (1)

The New Face of State Intervention in the Midst of Financial Crisis and Recession

The United States is in the throes of two distinct but interrelated economic crises, a recession and a financial crisis. The latter crisis is potentially the more important one. While recessions typically create the basis for, and give rise to, the next upturn in the economy, the financial crisis could bring the economy crashing down. It calls into question the stability and indeed the very survival of capitalism.

Our Life and Times
By Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth

Since December, when the secular political leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, the people of Pakistan have shown their growing revulsion at both their U.S.-backed military rulers and the fundamentalists. In the February elections, a landslide victory went to the two main secular parties, which have been marginalized under military rule.

Our Life and Times
By Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth

German labor took the offensive in March. A series of strikes by Ver.di, the large public sector union, shut down airports and subways on March 5. The Union of Railway Conductors (GDL), which shut down large sectors of the economy last year, is threatening another strike, one that could again paralyze commerce and industry as well as public transport. In February, metalworkers and Berlin’s subway workers also staged brief strikes.

Our Life and Times
By Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth

In March, as China prepared for the August Olympics, mass protests broke out in Tibet. On March 10, Buddhist monks began a nonviolent street demonstration against ethno-religious restrictions and were met by arrests and beatings. On March 14, as the protests continued, Chinese police started to beat up protesting monks in the Barkhor Market in the old city of Lhasa, this in broad daylight. Witnessing this atrocity, long-abused area residents rose up, stoning police, attacking and burning Chinese-owned shops, and then setting fire to police cars and fire trucks, all the while waving Tibetan flags. It is now being reported that at least 80 people have died, the greatest toll in a social conflict since 1989.

Our Life and Times
By Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth

As the Iraq war entered its fifth year, with no end in sight, the World Health Organization estimated that about 150,000 civilians had been killed, in a study that covered only the first three years of the war. The true figure may therefore be twice as high. The total U.S. military deaths have just surpassed 4,000. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates that the overall cost of the war will reach $ trillion, nearly a quarter of the annual GDP of the United States.

Our Life and Times
By Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth

In the last few months, Israel’s attempts to crush the Palestinians of Gaza have come up short. In late 2007, it intensified its economic blockade by cutting off or restricting supplies of gasoline and electricity, crucial for all basic services, including hospitals. This is all part of an attempt to crush the fundamentalist Hamas movement, which took control of Gaza last year. Such collective punishments of civilians violate international law, and this one is taking place on a massive scale.

March 10, 2008

Dear Friends,

We are writing to alert all readers and friends of a serious crisis afflicting News and Letters Committees (N&LC)-a crisis that places its very existence in jeopardy.

In response to philosophic disputes within N&LC over the past several years, an organized group within N&LC has usurped control of the organization and is acting in complete disregard of the democratically approved perspectives and principles that have defined it since it founding in 1955 as a decentralized, non-hierarchical group based on the unity of worker and intellectual, theory and practice, and philosophy and organization. Those wanting to continue our democratic and humanist heritage have formed the Marxist-Humanist Tendency of N&LC. It constitutes almost half of the membership of N&LC, and we appeal to you to support us in our effort to reverse the crisis that threatens America's only Marxist-Humanist organization.