Excerpt from new book, 'Race in Cuba: Essays on the revolution and racial inequality'
The following is an excerpt from Esteban Morales Domínguez's new book, Race in Cub
Tunisia: Activist leader assassinated as left re-unites to provide alternative
More than 1 million people mobilised to protest the assassination of Chokri Belaid.
50 years since ‘The Feminine Mystique’
By Suzanne Weiss
January 31, 2013 -- Green Left Weekly -- Fifty years ago, on February 13, 1963, the publication of US writer and activist Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique sparked a new awakening in the thinking of women across North America. Friedan denounced the repression women suffered in the aftermath of World War II, when they were forced out of wartime jobs and convinced to accept the role of keepers of the home.
Profiteers of the market launched an unrelenting but subtle propaganda campaign to venerate women as wife and mother. This role, Friedan said, was the “feminine mystique”.
This domestic existence became, Friedan wrote, “a religion, a pattern by which all women must now live or deny their femininity”. In submitting to this concept of womanhood, women gave up their self-respect, recognition of their talents and abilities, and — most importantly — their identities. Fundamentally, Friedan said, this was a scam to sell more consumer goods to women, who were to be the major purchasers for home and family.
Chris Williams: What must be done to stop climate change?
For a moment he lost himself in the old, familiar dream.
The demand for shorter working hours with no loss in pay has been a key transitional demand.
By Doug Lorimer
France: As Hollande takes the social-liberal road, what prospects for the left?
France's Socialist Party President Francois Hollande with the Left Front's Jean-Luc Melenchon.
By Murray Smith
Catalonia: Fight over right to decide political future intensifies
[For more coverage of Catalonia, click HERE, and Spain, HERE.]
French troops in Mali ‘for the long haul’; left responds to war
French troops in Mali.
[Click HERE for more on Mali.]
By Roger Annis
February 6, 2013 – A Socialist in Canada, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with the author's permission -- ”France is in Mali for the long haul.” That’s the headline of the France daily Le Monde on February 4. The newspaper’s front page, as well as pages 2 and 3, were devoted to a discussion over "what next" for France and the world in Mali.
The views of the newspaper’s editors are explained in a front page editorial. (The editorial translated into English is below.) Describing in the politest of terms France’s historic role in Africa as a slave and colonial power, and summarising the political situation in Mali and west Africa as a “struggle against narco-Islamists”, the newspaper argues for a long-term, Haiti-style tutelage of Mali.
Marxism, feminism and women's liberation
Alexandra Kollontai, a leading member of the Bolshevik Party and one its leading theoreticians on women's oppression.
Britain: Is the left coming together or falling apart?
By Socialist Resistance (Britain)
January 29, 2013 -- This is the editorial from the latest issue of the British socialist newspaper Socialist Resistance -- Recent events on the [British] left give the impression that it is falling apart. Last summer, following George Galloway’s outrageous comments on rape, Respect suffered the resignation of Kate Hudson, Andrew Burgin, Salma Yaqoob and others. Now, the Socialist Workers Party is tearing itself apart after its leadership tried to protect one of its own from allegations of rape in order to “defend the party”.