Review: Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes
Ed Pavlić’s ‘Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes’ is the first critical book to appear after Rich’s Collected Poems (2016) and thus the first covering all of Rich’s poetry. The book is especially welcome because Pavlić attends to the latter half of Rich’s career, and acknowledges her Marxism, largely unexplored territory even now.
Afghanistan turmoil shakes world politics, challenges Left
The Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan has shaken world politics and challenged the Left to respond in a revolutionary way. In the absence of truly liberatory revolutionary movements, what looms to fill the vacuum is not only a reinvigoration of fundamentalist political and military movements but the reactionary maneuvering by Russia and China, refugee-scapegoating parties, and repression of social movements on the model of Syria’s Assad and Burma’s Tatmadaw—all of which have been flourishing under the U.S. permanent “war on terror.”
Afghan women pay the price for U.S. hubris
In Afghanistan the Taliban are murdering men who helped the U.S., UK, and other forces who fought them; and murdering and beating women and girls who have made even marginally independent lives for themselves. Yet, despite the terror, Afghans, especially women, continue to demonstrate against Taliban rule.
Autonomous trucks vs drivers’ pay
Large trucking companies are teaming up with others to inaugurate test runs of “Autonomous Relay Convoys” where an autonomous truck is programmed to follow a human driving a leader truck, as a way to eliminate human truck drivers and lower wages.
Youth demonstrate for Medicare For All
A high-school youth from San Jose read her poem castigating lousy U.S. health insurance at a Medicare For All (M4A) Rally in San Francisco on July 24.
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Solidarity with Palestinians needed as state powers scheme
July 1, 2021The brief, dirty war that broke out May 10-21 between the Israeli government and Hamas, the Islamist group ruling Gaza had many reactionary...
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From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Need for a Total Uprooting: Down with the Perpetrators of the Palestinian Slaughter
In light of the ongoing Israel-Palestine crisis, we present a piece that takes up the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the connected slaughter of...
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Native Americans challenge Line 3
The protests over the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota are the latest front in a long struggle of Native Americans. It is also part...
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Woman as Reason: Abortion rights at crossroads
Paxton Smith’s valedictorian speech against a new extremist anti-abortion bill signed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott illuminates how this assault on women's freedom can open...
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Chinese youth, labor and Marxism
July 4, 2021A U.S. youth looks at the "lying flat" movement in China seeing it as a revolt against the capitalist mode of production and the alienation,...
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Volvo workers defy UAW to resume strike
July 5, 2021UAW workers on June 7 resumed their strike at the Volvo Truck Plant in Dublin, Va., the day after rejecting for the second time the...
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World in View: Rogue generals send France a chilling message
June 29, 2021A letter to the French government warned of civil war. Signed by 25 retired generals and about 1,000 service personnel, it claimed that the nation’s...
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Forcing workers back to unlivable wages
July 4, 2021Missouri is one of 25 states on track to reject by July 2021 the $300 a week federal supplemental unemployment insurance. The payments issued to...
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Colombian strikers reject dispossession and repression
June 29, 2021In-person report on the revolt in Colombia and the history of displacement, repression and revolt from which it...
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Ortega jails dissidents
July 3, 2021Nicaragua’s President (for life?) Daniel Ortega, who has won three consecutive terms since returning to office 14 years ago, ruthlessly moved to consolidate his absolute...
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Voices from the Inside Out: Targeting anti-racism
June 29, 2021Black prisoner Robert Taliaferro critiques the attack on critical race theory, which he sees as helping "a nation to understand how far it has come,...
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Editorial: Republicans savage democracy and history
July 1, 2021The worldwide protests over George Floyd's murder and other protests of Republican-led policies led them to erode, stifle, obfuscate, erase from memory and repress democracy,...
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A Review: ‘Men Who Hate Women…’
Adele favorably reviews Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists: The Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All by Laura Bates. The book exposes the extreme damage caused to society by online misogynist communities, or the “manosphere.”
Women Worldwide: July-August 2021
The BC Women’s Alliance, a coalition of feminists in British Columbia, Canada, dropped banners reading #Women Demand Guaranteed Livable Income; Alix Dobkin, a founder of Lavender Jane, died; COVID-19 lockdowns contributed to a worldwide increase in violence against women, including female genital mutilation, which is being fought by Lucy-Ann Ganda, a director at Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation.
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Los Angeles police insist on their right to kill
Police brutality and murders have continued in the U.S. as District Attorneys rarely prosecute criminal police. Los Angeles is no exception, where police are behind the petition to recall progressive LA County District Attorney George Gascon.
Free Hong Kong rally
Activists from Hong Kong along with emigres from Tibet and the China mainland joined supporters of freedom for Myanmar and Thailand in Chicago to mark two years since millions filled the streets to protest a threatened extradition law.
Forcing workers back to unlivable wages
Missouri is one of 25 states on track to reject by July 2021 the $300 a week federal supplemental unemployment insurance. The payments issued to shore up the economy in response to the pandemic, and in fear of unrest that unemployment levels unseen since the Great Depression of the 1930s might create, were not scheduled to end until September.
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Readers’ Views: July-August 2021, part one
Readers’ Views on: What Is Socialism?; What Is Marxist-Humanism?; Nuclear Socialism?; Nuclear Capitalism; Flat Earth Society; Indigenous Genocide; Indigenous Liberation; Racism Takes its Toll; Rape Culture; Coming Out in Sports; Colonialism and Liberation
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Readers’ Views: July-August 2021, part two
Readers’ Views on Covid-19 in Prisons; Labor and Capitalism; Weeds and Flowers; Censorship; Politics of Snitching; and Voices from Behind Bars.
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Abiy Ahmed’s bloodbath in Tigray
Ahead of parliamentary elections, Ethiopia’s President Abiy Ahmed proclaimed that he was aiming for a country “where every Ethiopian moves around relaxed, works and prospers.” but instead he launched a brutal civil war against the northern Ethiopian region of Tigray.
‘Care, not jail’
On June 22, Decarcerate Alameda County called on Oakland’s City Council to move $43 million from the sheriff’s proposed budget and designate a total of $122 million to fund mental health and housing.
Celebrating Juneteenth
Oakland, Calif., celebrated Juneteenth 2021 with a couple hundred booths. There were also book stalls featuring Black history and tables staffed by people from various movements.
Thoughts From the Outside: Capital is out of control
Where I work among the homeless on the street, I see the infinite degradation experienced by those discarded by capitalist society and barely surviving on its margins. There were always those who live on the edge. Marx showed that what appears to be a free decision to sell your labor is nothing of the kind. Yet people stay away from thinking about how all labor, even paid labor, is forced labor.
Mexico Notes: July-August 2021
Mexico Notes on Precarious Labor; Zapatistas in Spain; and The collapse of the Mexico City Metro-line.
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The injustice of India’s surging COVID-19 deaths
In-person report of the COVID-19 pandemic in India in the throes of a second wave. There are horrific scenes of people dying due to the lack of medical oxygen, hospital beds and so on. There is neither enough space for the dead in the crematoriums and graveyards, nor enough wood for the pyres.
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Ortega jails dissidents
Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega ruthlessly moved to consolidate his absolute hold on power in advance of the November elections by jailing four of his possible opponents.
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China out of Burma, support revolution!
China’s dictatorship insists we stay out of other countries’ affairs, yet they are the main backers of the coup regime in Myanmar and of other authoritarian states. Today there is no such thing as non-interventionism—the only question is whether intervention will take the form of solidarity with the oppressed or support for the oppressors.
‘Generation on fire’ youth march
Participant report of the Sunrise Movement youth march, “Generation on Fire,” June 10-14 in Northern California, and the lively discussions of ideas during the march.
Youth in Action: July-August 2021
On the anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, thousands of Chinese students protested a government plan to merge private colleges with vocational schools; rural youth in eSwatini demonstrated for the right of the people to vote for their own prime minister; and several high school graduates spoke out at graduation for an end to anti-Asian racism; the right to give your speech, not the principal’s; and for pride at being the first in your family to graduate.
Peru: Election conflict during COVID
A Peruvian post-presidential election battle is raging between Pedro Castillo, a union activist and former schoolteacher, and Keiko Fujimori, a right-wing neoliberal and daughter of the jailed authoritarian former President Alberto Fujimori.
Queer Notes: July-August 2021
Iranians protesting “honor killing” of Gay man Alireza Fazeli Monfared; students at Pendleton Heights High School in Indiana protest administration’s demand that Pride flags be removed from classrooms; nonbinary genderqueer Tryfan Morys Eibhlyn Llwyd, fighter for Gay liberation and the end of racism, died at age 70.
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World in View: COVID-19, philosophy, and revolution
The ruling class response to the pandemic was to lie, obfuscate, and manipulate the public in its own interest. The possibility that COVID-19 may have been a lab leak illustrates how capitalism can turn our deepest insights into our nature towards our own destruction.
World in View: RIP Bunny Wailer
For many, the rhythms of Bunny Wailer’s 1976 Blackheart Man album sounded like the beating heart of a heartless world. Spark lit from embers of a fallen empire, the influence of reggae and Black consciousness remains one of the great moments in popular culture.
World in View: Tunisia youth protest
Youth revolt broke out in Tunisia after police brutalized a 15-year-old. This year over 2,000 youths have been arrested in protests, many having been beaten and some tortured.