June 1999

We Need Your Help To Continue N&L!

Ten years after the collapse of the state-capitalist regimes that called themselves Communist, capitalism everywhere faces new crises and instability. We are confronted with such virulent new forms of racism and ethnic-cleansing that it approaches outright genocide in Kosova.

At the same time, at a protest against police brutality in Chicago, a Black activist charges that the African-American community here is fast becoming "a Black Kosova."

The face of the crisis at home can be seen as well in the draconian cutbacks that have forced thousands of welfare mothers off public assistance and into the most extreme poverty wage jobs or simply into the ranks of the "disappeared." It is measured, perhaps most of all, in the continuing warehousing of our youth within an ever-growing prison-industrial complex.

The constant struggles against these and the many other attacks on our humanity have been documented in every issue of NEWS & LETTERS. It could be seen in the attempt by young Black women workers to organize the catfish plants in Mississippi; in the national marches to free Mumia Abu-Jamal from death row in Pennsylvania, led on the West Coast by Longshoremen; in the way the vicious lynching of Matthew Shephard, far from cowing the queer movement, impelled it to new organizing efforts; and in the daily protests against the police murder of Amadou Diallo in New York that have now continued for almost three months.

Never was it more important to hear all these voices from below unseparated from the articulation of a philosophy of revolution that lets them ring louder and clearer because it discerns a very different future coming from the dialectic of the present. This year we have published for the first time anywhere a series of "Notes on Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC" from the pen of Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism.

It is this unique combination of philosophy and revolution, which we practice in every issue, that makes it urgent to keep NEWS & LETTERS alive, BUT WE CANNOT DO IT WITHOUT YOUR HELP!

As we have done every year since we began more than four decades ago, we must once more turn to you, our readers, to help us pay the ever-rising costs for our office rent and the printing of N&L. We want to thank the many readers who consistently send an extra contribution along with their subscription renewals.

Our special thanks this year also go to all those who paid not just for their own but for two copies of our acclaimed new pamphlet by D. A. Sheldon, VOICES FROM WITHIN THE PRISON WALLS, so one copy could be sent free to any prisoners who asked for it but could not pay. Requests from prisoners throughout the entire land have poured into our office in such a torrent that the postage necessary to fill those orders has pushed our postage bill to a staggering level!

NEVER WAS YOUR HELP MORE NEEDED TO KEEP THIS UNIQUE COMBINATION OF THEORY AND PRACTICE ALIVE! PLEASE GIVE AS GENEROUSLY AS YOU CAN. WE CANNOT CONTINUE WITHOUT YOUR SUPPORT.

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