In-person report of the Sept. 15 mobilization in Chicago to protest political inaction in the face of climate emergency.
climate change
World in View: Amazon Summit–Much talk, little action
August 19, 2023Eight 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.
Climate toll sparks revolt
July 23, 2023The climate crisis is already disrupting billions of lives. Yet the economic and political powers are more concerned with eliminating safeguards for workers and pushing more fossil fuels. It is no time to despair. It is a time of crisis that opens the door to a revolutionary transformation of society.
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2023-2024: Polycrisis and the need to transform reality. Part IV
June 15, 2023The oil companies and allied capitalists and politicians admit the need for a transformation of economies in the face of the climate emergency, but have managed to frame it as an energy transition. That is a political and ideological victory narrowing the transformation down to a technological-centered change. Thus the transition, as it is being designed, is a nontransformational transformation that will solve nothing—and climate militancy continues.
May-June: Women WorldWide
May 11, 2023Takes up: Canadian Dawn Dumont Walker’s struggle to keep her son and escape her abusive ex-partner; the Spanish parliament passing legislation for paid leave for debilitating menstrual pain and decriminalizing abortion, including for minors; and the life-altering and horrendous suffering of women in Bangladesh due to climate chaos.
Readers’ Views: March-April 2023, Part Two
March 21, 2023Readers’ Views on: Ukrainian Self-Determination and the Idea of Freedom; N&L for the Study Group; Sharing the Paper; Climate Movements vs. Summits; Unsanitary Prison Conditions; Prison Exploitation; Voices from behind Bars
Police murder of Tyre Nichols puts U.S. civilization on trial yet again
March 16, 2023The murder of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police reveals the racism permeating police departments and sparked protests across the U.S. calling into question the system in which the violence is rooted. The police murder of tree-sitter Tortuguita in Atlanta showed how deep the rot is and the uprooting needs to become.
COP15 and COP27: Ecology summits hide two worlds clashing
January 22, 2023Two 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.
Attitudes to the climate crisis and technology
November 10, 2022Today’s divide in attitudes to technology and climate solutions is more than a political question. It is a deep divide in philosophy. As crucial as are technological advances and the “energy transition,” they are liable to turn into their opposite if they are the focus instead of struggles of people trying to take control over their own lives.
Climate strike, Oakland, Sept. 2022
September 26, 2022Hundreds of youth participated in the Oakland event of the international climate strike on Sept. 23, 2022.
World in View: Grave contradictions plague Mexico
September 13, 2022Two ongoing events in Mexico: 1) The state finally admitted its role in the 2014 murder of 43 Ayotzinapa students, and 2) the administration’s construction of an oil refinery in Dos Boscos.
Climate law: Capital’s strategic retreat
A critical view on the first big U.S. climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, showing its deep limitations and the truly transformational alternative reached for by climate justice movements, including Indigenous struggles and youth climate strikes and occupations.
War is excuse to ravage the climate
July 19, 2022Country after country reacted to the war by increasing oil and gas trade and production. Only movements from below can keep the fossil fuel capitalists from turning the opportunity for a greener, freer future into opposite.
Readers’ Views: July-August 2022, Part One
July 12, 2022Readers’ Views on: Supreme Court’s Attack on Women’s Freedom; Abortion, Healthcare and Women’s Movement; Abortion Unseparated from All Freedom Struggles; Gay Pride: Whose Bodies? Ours!; Colonizers Past and Present; Let Them Eat Rockets; Oppression of Homeless; Only 14 More Mass Shootings!; Church, State and Football
Youth in Action: July-August 2022
High schoolers refuse to live in fear of being gunned down at school; Fridays 4 Future “dies in” to shame carbon-happy Wall St. financiers; teenager highlights Palestinian human rights at Tel Aviv Pride.
War, climate chaos, capitalism, COVID: World food crisis spreads
July 7, 2022With Russia’s war on Ukraine, a food crisis is emerging globally with lightning speed. Capitalism, with its agricultural-industrial system of commodity food production for the world market, is the cause of, and suffers from the consequences of, multiple, linked crises of war, COVID, and climate. There is radical opposition to this perfect storm of capitalist crises.
Editorial: Climate report: revolution or disaster
May 18, 2022The battle over the latest UN report on climate change laid bare the stark alternative between business as usual and the forces fighting for social transformation to stave off catastrophe. Protesting scientists called for “climate revolution.”
Readers’ Views: March-April 2022, Part Two
March 19, 2022Readers’ Views on Absolute Idea and Self-Liberation; Labor and Ecology; Avoiding Race; and Voices from behind Bars.
Climate change report
March 16, 2022A new report issued by a body of scientists convened by the UN, gives the most detailed description of the dangers posed by the climate crisis: a frightening future of flooding, fire and famine which will displace millions, species extinctions and the earth irreparably damaged.
Brazil: floods and inequality
March 15, 2022A 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.
Madagascar reveals climate crisis
The near-famine in Madagascar starkly reveals the reality of the climate crisis, which cannot be separated from the ravages of colonialism and capitalism.
‘Don’t Look Up’ movie speaks to threat of climate chaos
February 2, 2022The film “Don’t Look Up” summed up the alarm so many of us feel about the climate crisis, including activists and scientists. The reviewer hopes it will serve as a wake-up call.
COP26: Rulers strive to stifle youth response to climate emergency
January 24, 2022In the face of climate justice movements from below, the rulers are determined to keep control in their hands. With creative new actions and thinking raising the possibility of alternative, anti-capitalist paths of development, the powers that be are working hard to reduce that to a mere “energy transition.”
Readers’ Views: November-December 2021, Part Two
November 17, 2021Readers’ Views on Philosopher-revolutionaries; Youth, climate and the freedom idea; Climate crisis; California fires, FDA fails women, and Voices from behind bars.
Youth hold Climate Strike in San Francisco
November 10, 2021As part of the ongoing Fridays for Future, on Aug. 27 several hundred, mostly youth, gathered in San Francisco to call attention to environmental racism, the climate crisis, and public health.
Chicago climate strike
Participant report of the Fridays for Future climate strike in Chicago on September 24, 2021.
Editorial: Rulers say to the world: ‘Burn in hell!’
While climate justice movements are increasingly radical, COP26 is run by capitalist states and private capital, greenwashing to block any kind of real self-determination from below to take the reins.
Chicago climate strike
September 29, 2021Participant report of the Fridays for Future climate strike in Chicago on September 24, 2021.
Youth Vs Apocalypse
As part of the ongoing Fridays for Future, on Aug. 27 several hundred, mostly youth, gathered in San Francisco to call attention to environmental racism, the climate crisis, and public health.
Climate disaster: Non-solutions by state and private capital, or transformation from below?
Excerpted from a draft report for the Convention of News and Letters Committees, the piece takes on different movements and actions form below fighting for climate justice, as well as the actions from governments and companies blocking them.
Latin America Notes: September-October 2021
September 21, 2021Cubans revolt and students speak out amid food and medicine shortages and human rights violations; and Latin America suffers under climate change.
Taliban reconquest shakes alliances, challenges Left
September 12, 2021The 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.”
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2021-2022: The dialectic of crises worldwide is testing liberation struggles
September 1, 2021As another wave of the COVID-19 pandemic swells, too many people are stuck in a recurring nightmare. The world faces multiple existential crises–a global state-capitalist system shot through with racism, xenophobia, sexism, heterosexism, ableism and authoritarianism. That calls for the confluence of labor and liberation struggles through a unifying philosophy based in the dialectic of liberation in those movements.
Afghanistan turmoil shakes world politics, challenges Left
August 21, 2021The 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.”
Readers’ Views: July-August 2021, part one
July 2, 2021Readers’ 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
Native Americans challenge Line 3
July 1, 2021The protests over the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota are the latest front in a long struggle of Native Americans. It is also part of the movement to confront climate change in a way that benefits Black, Indigenous and People of Color, women, workers and youth, rather than narrowly aimed to help capital.
‘Generation on fire’ youth march
June 29, 2021Participant 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.
Central America deal: troops at borders
May 8, 2021Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico agreed with the Biden administration to put more military at their borders to stop immigrants.
Youth in Action: May-June 2021
Young climate activists prepare for the next UN climate change conference, COP26; the French Senate’s reactionary vote to dissolve the National Union of Students of France; youth protest a Japanese plan to dump more than 1 million tons of irradiated water from the Fukushima reactor site into the ocean; and more than 60,000 schoolchildren in Japan signed a “Stop Extreme School Rules” petition.
Coming soon: ‘What Is Socialism? A Marxist-Humanist Symposium’
March 11, 2021Announcement and pre-publication offer for a new publication, ‘What Is Socialism? A Marxist-Humanist Symposium’
Readers’ views, March-April 2021: part two
Readers’ Views on: The Objective Movement of History and Philosophy of Emancipation; Electric Cars are No Panacea; Pricing Nature and Lives; Racism and Anti-Racism in the Queer Community; COVID-19 in Prison.
Climate obstruction unplugs Texas
The way business and government prepared—or failed to prepare—for the Winter Storm Uri disaster and the way they responded to it tell a bloody tale of climate obstruction, greed, indifference and cruelty.
Editorial: Green recovery needs a radical struggle
January 30, 2021Recovery from current environmental, health and economic devastation needs radical struggles and ideas or it will be funneled into building a new stage of capitalism.
Black-led revolt ensures defeat of Trump’s racist campaign
November 27, 2020Racism and the resistance to it permeated the election, from the Trump campaign’s appeal to white supremacy to the outpouring of Black organizing and votes, energized by the new stage of revolt sparked by the police murder of George Floyd. However, grave questions remain about where the U.S. and the world are heading. Movements from below will be challenged to resist the calls for “unity” under the capitalist umbrella and to continue to deepen their revolt against a “return to normal.”
Trump re-election battles concentrate system’s myriad crises
October 24, 2020In addition to pandemic, climate, and economic disasters, we face the specter of pre-emptive counter-revolution. Self-activity of masses in motion is needed not only to defeat Trump but to move beyond society that breeds Trumpism.
Readers’ views: September-October 2020, part two
August 29, 2020Readers’ Views takes up: Queer safety is a human right; fake green politics; women in India; women in the U.S.; shameless evictions; voices from behind bars.
Letter from Mexico: Ecological protest in Xochimilco
Participant report of a protest against the construction of a bridge that would destroy the wetland of Xochimilco, one of the few natural zones remaining in Mexico City.
Readers’ views, March-April 2020: Part one
March 17, 2020Readers’ views on climate struggles; labor struggles; racist politics; election contradictions; Modi’s Kristallnacht?; anti-abortion terror; rewriting history; and women and culture.
Essay: Ecosocialism and post-Marx Marxism
March 8, 2020Franklin Dmitryev explores the limitations of how “ecosocialism” rethinks, partially, post-Marx Marxism, focusing on theoreticians Michael Lowy and Joel Kovel.
News and Letters Committees Call for Convention 2020
March 2, 2020POSTPONED: Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2020-2021