Trump’s intention to rule indefinitely must be blocked. His plans would worsen living and working conditions. The new bureaucracy of MAGA loyalists would be used to crush resistance. Resorting to the electoral system is a necessary defense, but it cannot be separated from joining and building movements whose challenge to the system goes beyond electoral politics.
Takes up: the documentary ‘Old Lesbians’; the Taliban’s law granting authority to arrest anyone violating its 35 articles, which especially oppress women; 19 Afghan women arriving in Scotland to complete their medical degrees; and the National Assembly in The Gambia voting for female genital mutilation to remain illegal.
After Roe v Wade was overturned after nearly fifty years, what will it mean to be a woman in America and what kind of country is it becoming? This is what the book ‘The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America’ explores, reviewed by Adele.
A massive movement of students overthrew the dictator and aim for deeper social transformation, which needs to encompass various social forces. Can the needed solidarity between students and workers chart a way forward?
Takes up: Disability services for students in college; the Supreme Court in Japan ruling unconstitutional the Eugenics Protection Law, which prevented people with disabilities from giving birth; and the life of disability rights activist Margot Imdieke Cross.
Making a brief retrospective of the Bolivarian project in Venezuela, begun in 1998 with Hugo Chávez, and tracing its connections with Nicaragua and other Latin American countries, Baltodano reflects in this article about the current situation of democracy in the continent, after Venezuela’s recent elections.
Review of the book ‘El capital amoroso’ by Jennifer Guerra, a five-part essay that challenges our ideas and practices of love in modern society, and aims to restore its revolutionary meaning.
In the spirit of Black August Memorial, Faruq talks about the conditions of Black prisoners, the need to break race divisions between them and white prisoners, and the quest for the Idea of Freedom.
The obviously fraudulent election results in Venezuela, along with the dire economic-political situation in the country, signal the impasse, if not dead end, that the decades-long call for “21st Century Socialism” has reached.
The UK faces a stark reality of empowered anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim racism. Riots have been spreading in Northern Ireland, as well as in Southport, Liverpool, London and other cities in England.
What started as a student protest at universities has become an expression of profound discontent about life in Bangladesh. Can this mass movement grow and force authentic change?
Statement by the No to Mining for a Future for All Front against the attempt of the Cuzcatlán company to start mining in El Llano, Sitio Santiago, Oaxaca.
Queer Notes columnist Elise presents a bird’s-eye view of the advances and retrogressions in the struggle for freedom of LGBTQI+people worldwide, from Uganda and South Africa to Indonesia, from Poland and Czech Republic to the U.S. and Canada.
Retired women in Detroit speak for themselves about Project 2025, whose authors are connected to Trump.
Students have poured into protests and encampments because they see a genocide taking place in Palestine. They have shown how intimately their universities are embedded in the military-industrial complex that is arming Israel’s genocidal attack. This movement must be defended, supported and encouraged to develop.
What is happening in Sudan is not civil war but a war on the Sudanese people by two generals fighting each other. Sudan’s masses’ revolutionary process, begun in 2018, must not be forgotten for they have not forgotten the revolutionary movement they created.
Review of “Gaza Writes Back,” a collection of short stories, the majority written by Palestinian women, in the wake of Operation Cast Lead, perpetrated by the Israel Defense Forces 2008, through 2009.
On June 25, young protesters stormed the National Assembly in Kenya protesting a bill raising taxes and prices on imported staples. The protests forced the president to cancel the bill. Grave contradictions exist in this supposedly “stable” country, including multiple dimensions of revolt.
Statement with demands by the Nahua community of Santa María Ostula, Michoacán, who in July were brutally attacked by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, with no response from state and federal authorities.
The mass of French voters in the latest parliamentary elections allowed the Left-wing coalition of parties—the New Popular Front—to gain the largest number of seats in Parliament, though far short of a majority. The far-right National Front has hardly been defeated.
Takes up: Protest in Brazil against a bill that equates abortion after 22 weeks with homicide; the 4th World Congress for the Abolition of Prostitution in Montreal; women outdo fundamentalists in Turkey’s local elections; and the cancellation of a state-sponsored mass wedding of 100 orphaned girls and young women in Nigeria.
Focus on the real differences in ideas, in News and Letters Committees’ response to the IMHO statement “Our Differences with Other Marxist-Humanists in Light of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.”
Thirty years after the ANC took power, defeating the racist apartheid regime in South Africa, the party decisively lost its majority in the parliamentary elections. How could this happen?
If Republicans are able to institute their white Christian Nationalist dream of forced pregnancy and no birth control, the kinds of fascist practices women in Romania suffered under Nicolae Ceausescu will be imposed on women in the U.S. Not only women, but children too will suffer and die.
Takes up: employees at a hospital in Japan sexually abusing patients with severe disabilities; the push to enforce Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act in the U.S.; ‘Menopause and Me,’ a video for women with autism and learning disabilities; and an update of the situation of people with disabilities in Russia.
Takes up: In memoriam Faith Ringgold, a seven-decade Black American artist; research by Dr. Debby Herbenick about violent sexual behavior among college students; a paper by the Snow Leopard Trust about “Applying a Gender Lens to Biodiversity Conservation in High Asia”; and the documentary ‘You Are Not Alone: Fighting the Wolf Pack’ (2024) about the trial inspiring Spain’s #MeToo movement.
In-person report of a visit on May 28 to the Wayne State University students’ encampment in Detroit against Israel’s genocide in Gaza
El feminicidio (el asesinato de una mujer por ser mujer) está aumentando en todo el mundo, al igual que las manifestaciones en su contra. En esta lucha se puede ver algo de la visión de futuro implícita en este movimiento: una sociedad en la que las mujeres sean comprendidas como seres humanos libres. La clave está en la “totalidad y profundidad del necesario arrancar de raíz”.
La guerra de Israel contra las masas en Gaza alcanzó proporciones genocidas. ¿Cuándo podrán los palestinos regresar a los lugares donde vivieron y podrán reconstruir? Su autodeterminación debe comenzar con sus ideas y aspiraciones.
Third and last part of Dunayevskaya’s presentation on “Hegelian Leninism.” Here, the author deals with the transformation into opposite of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Lenin’s seven last years (1917-1924), and what has happened with Marxism and Socialism since then, including her critique to the thought and practice of Mao Zedong.
In 1999, new Horizon software was installed in post office branches across the UK. Immediately, sub-postmasters and postmistresses experienced inexplicable shortfalls from their branches. It has been called “the UK’s most widespread miscarriage of justice.”
Takes up: The public outcry that restored a talk by a gay actor to middle school students in Pennsylvania; a bill signed by Great Britain to deport people to Rwanda, a country not safe for the LGBTQI+ community; LGBTQ+ curricula being included in Washington state’s public schools; and three extraordinary support groups for 2SLGBTQ+ in Latin America.
Vice President Harris and President Biden should stop talking about their “great trust” in women because anti-abortionists too know that women will fight to do what’s right for themselves. This is a fight against forced pregnancy, to keep birth control legal and accessible, for our health and lives to be valued, to be seen as whole human beings.
Three years after the army staged a coup against the elected government of Myanmar, hundreds of pro-democracy militias, ethnic armies and local defense forces control over half of the country’s territory. Can the unity against the military forge a country with the need for multiple self-determinations?
A participant in the 1968 antiwar student occupation at Columbia University draws parallels to students there protesting genocide now. In both cases, administrators lacking reasoned arguments ordered police assaults that failed to quiet protests and spurred actions on campuses across the U.S. and internationally.
In the almost two years since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, Haiti has reached unprecedented levels of violence and chaos. While violent criminal gangs are causing havoc, whether some of the “gangs” now active in the country are revolutionaries remains to be seen. What is clear is that only social revolution in the hands of Haiti’s masses can bring forth a fully human, free society.
Interviews with several students from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., about the protest encampment there against the genocide in Gaza.
More than a year since two Sudanese generals began warring against each other, the country is devastated. The choice cannot be limited to these two. Only a reigniting of the Sudanese revolution from below can provide a viable pathway forward.
New Farsi translations are available from Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution by Raya Dunayevskaya
This essay explores Marx’s Idea of Absolute Freedom as the foundation for overcoming today’s retrogression. Marx’s view of labor as “the prime necessity of life” connects with his whole dialectical view. The essay explores Dunayevskaya’s reading of this passage, and criticizes partial outlooks.
Part I of the 2024-2025 Draft Perspectives. Takes up the youth Palestine solidarity movement, as well as the genocide in Gaza, its support from the powers that be and the mass resistance from below.
Part II of the 2024-2025 Draft Perspectives. Takes up: the global retrogression that a second Trump period would mean.
Part III of the 2024-2025 Draft Perspectives. Takes up Putin’s war on Ukraine and its connection with fascism worldwide, especially seen on Israel’s war on Gaza, the ongoing genocide in Sudan and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s religious chauvinism.
Part IV of the 2024-2025 Draft Perspectives. Takes on the retrogression in Left thought, especially on the questions of Israel’s war on Gaza and Putin’s war on Ukraine.
Part V of the 2024-2025 Draft Perspectives. Takes up the need to rediscover, for today, Lenin’s philosophical preparation for revolution, plunging into the study of Marx’s roots in Hegel’s philosophy at the time of the collapse of the Second International during the first years of World War I.
Part VI and last of the 2024-2025 Draft Perspectives. Takes up the organizational and philosophical tasks posed by News and Letters Committees for the year to come.
Adele reviews ‘When Men Buy Sex: Who Really Pays?’ Canada’s most comprehensive book on the struggle to abolish prostitution.
Workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., voted three to one to join the United Auto Workers. This gives hope that racial, ethnic and sexual divisions will not slow down the drive for auto worker solidarity in the South and across the country.
Takes up: The World Health Organization (WHO) report, ‘Measuring Violence Against Women With Disability’; World Bipolar Day; the “We Are Here” rally in Missouri calling for higher pay for care assistants; and three organizations in Asia sponsoring the UN’s 2024 Project Zero Conference for inclusive education and employment for those with disabilities.
Liberation Station, a Black-owned children’s bookstore in Raleigh, N.C., is closing less than a year after it opened on Juneteenth 2023, due to a series of threats.
