News and Letters Committees is a small, revolutionary-socialist organization in the United States. It is the world's most prominent Marxist-Humanist organization.
Founded in 1955 by Raya Dunayevskaya, the Committees trace their origin to a split in the Correspondence Publishing Committee, which had been led by C. L. R. James and Dunayevskaya. The organization publishes a newspaper, News & Letters, that tries to unite activist struggles to transform the world with what it calls the "philosophy of liberation" of Karl Marx and Marxist-Humanism.
News and Letters Committees is committed to the abolition of capitalism, the establishment of what it calls "a new human society," and women's liberation. It supports freedom struggles of workers, African-Americans and other people of color, women, and youth, and it opposes heterosexism against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals. It has opposed both "private" capitalism and the former Stalinist states, which it regarded as state-capitalist, and has opposed the imperialism of both. In recent years, it has opposed what it regards as imperialist wars waged by the U.S. (and its allies) in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Islamic fundamentalism and non-state terrorism. Arguing that a new, human society is the only viable alternative to permanent war and terrorism, it supports the struggles of what it regards as democratic, secular, anti-imperialist organizations of women and workers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Partly as a response to the past decade's movement against global capitalism and its slogan, "Another World is Possible," News and Letters Committees calls for and seeks to help develop what it calls a "philosophically grounded alternative to capitalism," rooted in the theory of post-capitalist human development that Marx sketched in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. The organization has also paid particular attention to the rights of prisoners in the United States and published a short book, Voices from Within the Prison Walls on the topic in 1998.
There are News and Letters Committees in a small number of cities in the United States, including Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Memphis, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Members of News and Letters Committees occasionally contribute to other political journals with somewhat related outlooks, such as New Politics, and to theoretical journals. In addition, one of the two Co-National Organizers, Olga Domanski, is listed as an editor of Lexington Books' Raya Dunayevskaya Series in Marxism and Humanism, which includes books by Dunayevskaya and others including The Power of Negativity, a posthumous collection of Dunayevskaya's writings on the dialectic in G.W.F. Hegel and in Marx.
Famous quotes containing the words news and, news, letters and/or committees:
“[In response to this question from an interviewer: “U. S. News and World Report described you this way: ‘She’s intolerant, preachy, judgmental and overbearing. She’s bright, articulate, passionate and kind.’ Is that an accurate description?”:]
It’s ... pretty good [ellipsis in original].”
—Joycelyn Elders (b. 1933)
“I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.”
—Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)
“A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist—nothing shields him from the world’s gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix himself up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.”
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)
“When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity.... We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group.”
—Lewis Thomas (b. 1913)