Eight South American countries met in Brazil for a summit to combat deforestation in the Amazon basin. The summit’s failure to agree on a pact protecting Amazon forests points to the global failure of forging concrete agreements to combat climate change.
Days after Lula da Silva had taken office as President of Brazil, right-wing supporters of former President Bolsonaro stormed the Congress, Presidential Office and Supreme Court in Brasilia.
Two hotly anticipated global summits on ecology and climate papered over a raging war of capital against humanity and Planet Earth—a war manifested in open conflict between “developed” and “developing” countries, but more deeply in a war of the two worlds of rulers and ruled within each country.
After journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous solidarity activist Bruno Pereira were murdered in the Brazilian Amazon, condemnations and calls for justice rang out around the world.
A Brazilian city of over a quarter of a million people close to Rio de Janeiro, was hit in February by a huge rainstorm, the heaviest in nearly a century—almost 10 inches in two hours. It caused 26 landslides which killed 176 people, with more than 100 still missing.
Honduran migrants from the first caravan since Joseph Biden’s election speak about why they are leaving their homeland; and São Paulo, Brazil residents, thrown out of work by the pandemic, are occupying buildings in order to have a place to live.
Capitalism is exacerbating the havoc being wreaked by COVID-19 in Latin America. In the projected largest recession in its history, 12 million more people will lose their jobs, leaving 29 million more in poverty.
The battle against the COVID-19 pandemic is a battle over how society will change, mirroring the battle over how to confront and adapt to the climate and extinction crisis. Strikes are erupting across the world.
Participant report on a California protest against the burning of the Amazon rainforest and the Brazilian government’s negligence.
A report on a forum with Brazilian Black women activists in San Francisco on sexism, racism and incarceration in Brazil.
In a year marked by the contradiction between deepening women’s revolt and activism and neo-fascism rising across the globe, women have been fighting back in unprecedented numbers and ways.
Readers’ Views addressing: challenging fascism across all borders; charter teachers strike; pitfalls of bourgeois politics; women on the march; prison strikes big and small; and the racist criminal injustice system.
The Syrian Revolution has been the physical and intellectual battlefield that defines our time. As early as 2012 it was clear that what happened in Syria would determine the next stage of world history.
Protests in Tunisia against non-implementation of Transgender human rights bill; Brazil’s new president threatens crackdown on homosexuality and same-sex marriage; new Tunisian documentary “Subutext” about homosexuality, poverty, illness and drugs in Tunisia’s slums; and a Chicago protest against Antwan Haywood being thrown out of the Powerhouse International Ministries supposedly over the way he was dressed.
Marxist-Humanist Editorial that takes up Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, including his attack on the landless workers movement, on the environment, on those who are LGBTQ, and his support for capitalism and neo-fascism.
Readers’ Views on: Capitalism vs. the Planet; Anti-Semitism’s Inhumanity; Kavanaugh Travesty; Youth Rock!; Freedom Movements vs. Fascism across the Globe; Catholic Church Crisis; Voices from behind Bars
An account of #MeToo in China is documented in a new book by Leta Hong Fincher, “Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China.”
Jair Bolsonaro, elected President of Brazil, is a racist, misogynist, homophobic admirer of Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship. The coming months will tell whether the masses will mount a crucial resistance.
On Sept. 2, Brazil’s National Museum in Rio de Janeiro was devastated by fire after being subject to drastic budget cuts because of its location in the more working class North Zone, as opposed to the South Zone of Rio with its glitzy tourist beaches.
Editorial that takes up the evil that the Catholic Church has imposed on children and women; how movements from below, especially by women, have challenged it; and how future church crimes will be revealed, signaling the beginning of the end of the Catholic Church.
Racist and homophobic politicians have moved from the fringes to contend for state power in Brazil. Fabricio Alvarado in Costa Rica and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil represent a further step down an anti-human path.
Queer Notes takes up the launch of The Black LGBTQIA+ Migrant Project; the Grupo Gay da Bahia, the oldest LGBT rights group in Brazil; and the out LGBT athletes at the 2018 Winter Olympics.
Since a neoliberal legislative coup by the Brazilian Congress removed President Rousseff of the Workers’ Party from office, there has been a campaign to reverse many of the social gains implemented during the administrations of Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva and Rousseff.
The essay takes a critical look at the “Latin American Pink Tide” (a decade of progressive governments in South America), its limits and contradictions, and poses the question: Is there a way forward that does not substitute statism for the action and thought of the masses?
Readers’ Views includes: Politics; revolution and the power of philosophy; remembering Olga Domanski; the sports section; national prison action; and voices from behind the bars.
The impeachment of Brazil’s President Rousseff by right-wing forces in Congress betrays longstanding divisions in Brazil along lines of race and class, but was made possible because Rousseff’s Workers Party tried to demobilize the social forces that had brought it to power, leaving street agitation to Right-wing militants.
Brazil is in a meltdown. President Dilma Rousseff has been impeached and will possibly face trial in May. The upheaval has less to do with stamping out corruption than with an effort to shift power by lawmakers with questionable records themselves.
Part V of the Draft Perspectives 2016: Together with the depths of counter-revolution, the passion for philosophy points to both the need for and the potential for totally new beginnings in the transformation of society, for new banners of freedom as a polarizing force.
Foregrounding the new formal solidarity between Trust Black Women with Black Lives Matter, we explore the thought and actions of women worldwide, including the struggle for reproductive justice in the U.S.; women fighting war and terrorism in places like South Sudan and Syria, the successful fight of domestic workers to organize, and the need to make the revolutionary content of such actions explicit.
Police in Brazil kill five times more people than do police in the U.S. So what’s it going to take to create a sustained movement of resistance and international coverage?
La nueva edicion de Praxis en America Latina. Esperamos sus comentarios. Por favor, reenvíenla a sus redes y contactos.
Colombia’s Election and ‘Peace’; Zapatista Activist Assassinated; World Cup Shows Other Brazil.
ISIPE; Ché Café; Lindsey Stocker; Australian students protest fee increases.
Oppression of women in tech industry; El Salvador demonstrations over miscarriage jailings; Brazilian Stop the Catcalls project.
Occupations of planned fracking sites in Canada and Romania showed the intensification of struggles against the damage fossil fuel exploitation is inflicting. The urgency of stopping the headlong rush to extract and burn fossil fuel was underscored by the latest comprehensive report from the International Panel on Climate Change.
Resistance by Indigenous groups in Colombia; Indigenous Guatemalans resist Canadian mining company; teachers in Mexico protest “educational reform” law
Latin America in View, Sept.-Oct. 2013: Ecuador oil drilling; Brazil rapes; Mexico Escuelita Zapatista.
What began as local protests against an increase in public transportation costs has grown into massive protests in dozens of Brazilian cities with hundreds of thousands in the streets of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the largest demonstrations since protests against military rule in the 1980s.
News & Letters, July – August 2013. Lead: Turkey, Syria and Iran at crossroads of world revolt; From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: ‘Russia more than ever full of revolutionaries…’; Editorial: Support striking prisoners!; Essay: Communization theory and its discontents truncate Marx’s dialectic; Workshop Talks: The boss is spying; Revolutionary from Turkey speaks; Brazil’s uprising; Teacher and school struggles; and more…
Another devastating sign of capitalism’s degeneracy is its failure even to slow down climate change. Youth have spearheaded a new movement to control it. It is the actual social relations, relations of production, forms of labor, relationship to the land and other means of production, by which we can judge what must be uprooted, and to what extent any society has or has not moved to a path of development that breaks from capitalism’s never-ending growth of capital, or, as Marx put it, production for production’s sake.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the original “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, here is what we wrote about it at the time (from the July 1992 News & Letters):
Ideological pollution at ‘Earth Summit’
by Franklin Dmitryev
The UN Conference on Environment and Development (or Earth Summit) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, began June 3 with [=>]
Queer Notes
by Elise
Marco Melgoza, seventh-grade student, protested anti-Gay bullies. With his dad Jerry Watson at his side, Melgoza carried the sign “Bullying Is a Weapon” outside his Middle School, Desmond, in Madera, California. He has been called names and been physically attacked. Melgoza joins people from San Francisco, to Utah, to New York City, from [=>]
