Counterrevolution is the guiding principle of the Trump campaign and the dominant characteristic of politics worldwide. Although revolution does not appear to be on the horizon in the U.S. or in most other countries, capitalism is stumbling through a global crisis, both economic and ecological, psychological and communal.
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?
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.
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.
Femicide—the murder of a woman because she is a woman—is on the rise across the world, as are demonstrations against it. In this struggle can be seen some of the vision of the future implicit in this movement: a society in which women are comprehended as free human beings. Key is “the totality and depth of the necessary uprooting.”
Scientists and climate movements highlighted the urgent need to take real climate action. Opposed are fossil fuel industries and their nation-states, who dominated COP28 and guaranteed its emptiness. The path forward can be built on the movements from below, posing liberation from capitalist exploitation and the release of full human development.
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and the horrendous Hamas attacks that sparked it, are driving the world in a reactionary direction and exposing the inhumanity of the ruling powers—as well as the retrogression of much of the Left.
The Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas in Israel set off a new round of war. Israel is threatening genocide with U.S. support. Israel’s occupation in no way justifies Leftists celebrating the murderous attacks by Hamas, which undermine social liberation movements and stoke reaction. Raising the banner of liberation is critical as we engage in solidarity with Palestinians and oppose Israel’s genocidal war and Hamas’s terrorist actions.
In the weeks before the anniversary of Jina Mahsa Amini’s murder, the Iranian regime hardened its repression. None fear revolution more than it. But the people of Iran are letting the world know what they are fighting for on “the day after” the revolution. Their demands, if met, would transform Iran into one of the freest, most humane countries in the world.
The 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.
Society’s crying need for radical transformation makes itself felt day after day. In response, ruling classes across the globe have split into two main factions with differing strategies for heading off the threatened transformation from below: counter-revolution spawning new flavors of fascism with rough new figureheads, or non-transformational transformation to patch up the status quo while saving the powers that be. This thesis is about what is happening in the world and what to do about it.
The 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.
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.
The Iranian hard-line regime should be very afraid. The cries of: “Women, life and freedom!” “Death to the head scarf!” “Death to the dictator!” fill the streets. Iranian women have inspired the world and put Iran’s oligarchs on notice that their repressive regime is in grave danger.
Now that the Supreme Court of the United States has overturned women’s right to abortion, the profound ramifications of that unprecedented decision are becoming known. Women are fighting back, from the Women’s March, to Black women, to Teens for Reproductive Rights, women will reclaim the right to control our own bodies.
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.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resistance to it are shaking up the world and revealing the ideological pollution of society, including of the Left.
Putin’s invasion confronted fierce resistance in Ukraine and opposition on Russian streets. The war reveals a changed world of competing centers of capital–which is in a state of stalled accumulation globally, devolving into militarism, other-hating fascism and fomenting new forms of genocide–signaling the future this system holds if left unchecked.
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.”
The brief, dirty war that broke out May 10-21 between the Israeli government and Hamas, the Islamist group ruling Gaza had many reactionary consequences.
The Jan. 6 Trumpist coup reveals the depth of the far-right threat, compliticy of major institutions, and the philosophic void of the Left. A liberatory banner of a new society on truly human foundations is needed if we are not to be thrown right back into more oscillations between fascist horrors and the crumbling “normal” of capitalist liberal democracy.
Draft thesis for discussion about where the world is heading, and what to do about it from a revolutionary standpoint. Part I: Two events that happened almost simultaneously on March 15 dramatically reveal the tectonic forces ripping at this disintegrating capitalist society: the international climate strike carried out by youth and the racist massacre at New Zealand mosques. The first reveals a profound reach for a new human future. The second a reach in the opposite direction for a mythic past—one rooted in the actual past of slavery and oppression, but purged of the freedom struggles.
