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.
Today’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.
Hundreds of youth participated in the Oakland event of the international climate strike on Sept. 23, 2022.
Country 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 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
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.
With 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.
A 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.
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.
The near-famine in Madagascar starkly reveals the reality of the climate crisis, which cannot be separated from the ravages of colonialism and capitalism.
The 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.
In 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.”
Cubans revolt and students speak out amid food and medicine shortages and human rights violations; and Latin America suffers under climate change.
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.”
As 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.
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.”
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
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 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.
Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico agreed with the Biden administration to put more military at their borders to stop immigrants.
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.
Recovery from current environmental, health and economic devastation needs radical struggles and ideas or it will be funneled into building a new stage of capitalism.
Readers’ 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.
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 on climate struggles; labor struggles; racist politics; election contradictions; Modi’s Kristallnacht?; anti-abortion terror; rewriting history; and women and culture.
Franklin Dmitryev explores the limitations of how “ecosocialism” rethinks, partially, post-Marx Marxism, focusing on theoreticians Michael Lowy and Joel Kovel.
POSTPONED: Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2020-2021
Readers’ Views on Capitalism and climate; Mideast upheaval; Trump the Mullah?; war crime hero; Trump’s judges; detransition debate; and women’s liberation.
Australia’s megafires show that the climate crisis is upon us and powerful people are forcing humanity into a death march toward climate catastrophe–in sharp contrast to the passion and urgency of the youth climate strikes that have spread across the globe.
News & Letters interviews some of the Global Climate Strike participants.
Participant report of the Dec. 6, 2019, climate strike in Chicago, part of global climate strike.
A review of the book “No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference” by Greta Thunberg. .
Participant report on a California protest against the burning of the Amazon rainforest and the Brazilian government’s negligence.
Readers’ Views on youth climate strike; Socialism and ecology; counter-revolution and revolution in the Middle East; auto and teacher strikes, and Brexit and labor
On the first day of the third Global Climate Strike, Sept. 20, 2019, millions of people, mostly teenagers, marched across the world—the biggest climate action ever. Hear the voices of youth and adults in Chicago, Detroit and San Francisco.
News & Letters interviews some of the Global Climate Strike participants.
Participant report on the Sept. 20, 2019, Global Climate Strike event in Chicago.
Susan Van Gelder reports on a rally of youth, workers, and native people in Detroit demanding ”Make Detroit the Engine of a Green New Deal.”
Readers’ Views on: Youth revolt, from China to climate strikes; Gunning for immigrants; Circling the abyss; Queer Notes; A prisoner responds; 1619 and today; Reading ‘N & L’; Elena Grigorieva; and Deborah Morris
The last of a series of essays on What is Socialism? This time, taking on the relation of anticapitalistic social transformation and climate chaos, in order to grasp what is essential to capitalism and its destructive environmental effects, and what kind of new society can transcend that.
Schoolchildren continue to hold Fridays for Future strikes weekly across the world, demanding “that governments immediately provide a safe pathway to stay within 1.5°C of global heating.” The Right’s attempts to co-opt this passion highlight capitalism’s contradictions and the need to center a liberatory direction.
Bay Area youth exuberantly join in a global march for the climate, raising awareness of climate change.
Report on the March 15, 2019, Youth Climate Strike in San Francisco.
Bruno Latour’s new book “Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime” wants to comprehend the era of global warming but takes a very wrong turn, substituting “Earth” for human subjects of revolution.
Readers’ Views on: Rosa Luxemburg’s revolutionary life; the Green New Deal; and voices from behind bars.
Women WorldWide takes up the South Korean Escape the Corset movement, Greta Thunberg’s work against global warming, and the struggle by BethAnn McLaughlin to draw attention to the harassment of women in science by prominent men.
Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2019-2020
Calls for a “green new deal” risk the kind of state/party co-optation of movements from below that was involved in the 1930s New Deal.
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
Yale Law School students sit in to protest the rush to confirm Brett Kavanaugh for the U.S. Supreme Court; three Australian eighth-graders boycott school over plan to open coal mines on indigenous land overlooking the Great Barrier Reef; and California high school students attend school board meetings en masse to demand the right of 16-18 year olds to vote in school board elections.
A Marxist-Humanist view of the 2018 U.S. midterm elections that highlights the illegitimacy of Trump’s rule, showing how it is the rule of a minority won because of anti-democratic voter suppression, gerrymandering, racism, sexism, extreme anti-immigration rhetoric, hate speech and lies. It highlights the other America that opposes such neo-fascism.
