The “cockroach” movement in India grew from educational reform to the demand to transform the country’s “democracy.” This new youth movement is fighting to make this a turning point, rather than allow the government’s concessions to disarm it.
India
World In View: India’s state elections marred by Hindu nationalism
May 16, 2026Recent elections in India have further consolidated Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s drive to make India a nationalist state. The far-right Hindu nationalist group from which Modi emerged recently celebrated its centenary anniversary.
Handicap This! October 2025
October 6, 2025Takes up: Opening of the Disability Cultural Center in San Francisco; ‘Everyone Is Good at Something’ by Indian photographer Vicky Roy; and new steps in the struggle for the rights of people with disabilities in Ireland.
Queer Notes: July 2025
July 20, 2025Takes up: Hungarian Supreme Court ruling that President Orban’s law banning public displays of homosexuality is illegal; Black Pride Colorado’s fund raise for “Diana,” a Trans woman attacked with acid in Philadelphia; and Kashish Pride Film Festival in Mumbai, India.
World in View: Could India-Pakistan Conflict Go Nuclear?
June 19, 2025The May conflict between these two countries was only the latest of a long series of clashes, indeed wars, over the Kashmir region which both claim. However, this “incident” was particularly ominous as both nuclear-armed powers seemed close to further escalation.
Women WorldWide: December 2024
December 31, 2024Takes up: Sixteen days of activism in Ivory Coast opposing violence against women; a demonstration against violence against women in Kenya; technology intended to monitor wildlife in Northern India being misused to harass and intimidate women; and the European Court of Human Rights rejects the challenge against France’s anti-prostitution law.
Women WorldWide: June 2024
June 5, 2024Takes 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.
Draft Perspectives, 2024-2025: Part Three, Russia’s war on Ukraine and the worldwide drive toward fascism
May 4, 2024Part 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.
Call for Convention of News and Letters Committees, 2024
February 25, 2024Call for Convention of News and Letters Committees, 2024
Women WorldWide: July 2023
July 13, 2023Takes up: the Taiwanese TV drama that is inspiring a #MeToo movement; the struggle to get authorities in India to take seriously accusations of rape and harassment against the chief of the Wrestling Federation of India; the legislation passed by Maine to help survivors of prostitution rebuild their lives; and Canada’s failure to implement the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls after three years of federally ordered hearings and testimonies from survivors and victims’ families.
Youth in Action: May-June 2023
June 9, 2023Takes up: students at 300 schools in 42 states and D.C. participated in a national walkout against gun violence on April 5; at Boston University’s commencement ceremony on May 21 students booed the CEO and president of Warner Brothers, whose one year salary exceeds the sum of raises demanded by his 11,000 writers who are now on strike; and after days of protesting, grad students in Delhi, India, succeeded in blocking a 200% tuition hike at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute.
Women Worldwide: January-February 2023
January 25, 2023Feminists in Armenia and Azerbaijan aim to break the cycle of violence between the countries; hundreds of acid attack survivors held a seminar in Delhi, India; Iranian women played soccer in London to support the uprising, and protested Qatar’s homophobic, sexist, and racist regime; Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter held a vigil for at least 10 women murdered by current or former male partners in British Columbia.
Queer Notes: January-February 2023
Supporters of a Winnipeg cafe opposed threats made against a drag story hour; Granbury, Texas, school district is investigated after ordering librarians to remove all LGBTQ+ books; Indian photographer Nishat Fatima’s exhibition seeks to raise awareness of the various dimensions within the LGBTQ+ community.
World in View: India’s unemployment stirs youth revolts
July 12, 2022Double-digit growth in India’s economy cannot hide the gravest of contradictions—massive unemployment especially among the youth.
Queer Notes: June 2022
June 3, 2022Takes up: UK waffling on protecting LGBTQI+ people from so-called conversion therapy; reviewers are calling ‘Badhaai Do,’ Harshavardhan Kulkarni’s Indian dramedy film about Lesbians and Gay men, bold and refreshing; Gay man Venton Jones won the Democratic runoff primary for Texas’s 10th House district against queerphobe Sandra Crenshaw; and a teacher in Florida created a template letter that cleverly works around Gov. Ron DeSantis’ hate-filled Don’t Say Gay Bill, HB 1557.
Women WorldWide, Jan.-Feb. 2022
February 1, 2022Women demonstrate at Boise State University against misogynist professor Scott Yenor; four male porn stars in France were charged with rape after 53 women performers complained; Sudanese women demonstrated in three cities against gang rapes by security forces; and in India, two men and a woman were arrested for creating a website pretending to “auction” over 100 Muslim women as slaves.
The injustice of India’s surging COVID-19 deaths
July 4, 2021In person report of the COVID-10 pandemic in India which is 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.
The health crisis in India
May 29, 2021India is in the throes of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first reason behind the health crisis is a chaotic vaccination campaign and the second reason, which has impacted the first, is the augmentation of neoliberal healthcare over the last decades which has subjected the health sector, its institutions, systems and services to a severe process of erosion.
World in View: COVID-19 decimates India
May 8, 2021A second wave of COVID-19 is devastating India. Each day over 300,000 new cases are reported, and over 3,000 people die. In the midst of this, the farmers’ protests continue as thousands remain camped outside Delhi. The Modi government has accused the camps of being “super-spreader” events, while farmers say the government is using the pandemic to demobilize its opponents.
Women from India to the USA fight against misogynist violence
March 11, 2021Violence against women has worsened in the era of COVID-19. Sexism, like racism, is systemic to almost every culture. Nevertheless women fight back with creative activism and thought. What is new is the internationalization and deepening of that struggle. This year’s International Women’s Day shows women deepening our fight for full freedom and new human relationships.
World in View: Historic mass strike of India’s farmers
January 30, 2021An estimated 250 million Indian farmers have been on strike since last September in opposition to a series of new laws, proposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
Double scourge of fascism and COVID-19 shakes the world: Vaccine rollout inflames global inequalities
Vaccine rollout has been mired in poor planning, profit-centered thinking and indifference, with discrimination both within countries and against poor countries. Worldwide, a rat race ensued.
Queer Notes
October 10, 2020The new event, Trans Empowerment Month; Trans founded and run dairy farm colony in Manthithoppu, India; and the alarm in the LGBTQ+ community over the nomination of anti-human-rights judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Women worldwide, September-October 2020
August 28, 2020Diana Russell remembered; Hawaii’s Feminist Economic Recovery Plan for COVID-19; Turkish women protest moves to withdraw from Istanbul Convention; women social health workers strike in India; women contest stolen election in Belarus; demands for release of Sanaa Seif in Egypt.
Migrant workers in India face lockdown
July 1, 2020In India, labor in general, migrant workers and daily wage earners in particular, are vulnerable to the impact of COVID-19. Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers are desperately trying to return to their hometowns, battling hunger and scorching heat.
World in view, July-August 2020: Asian brinksmanship
Two flashpoints in Asia between North and South Korea and between India and China erupted in threats and deadly clashes.
Discussion article: Neoliberal necropolitics and Indian migrant workers
May 18, 2020The coronavirus crisis has compelled the Indian state to haphazardly effectuate a lockdown in order to properly practice social distancing. But it has unaccountably forgotten that social distancing is a privilege of the elite class if well-thought-out arrangements are not made.
Capitalism is the real pandemic
April 6, 2020Neither the coronavirus nor the ongoing climate changes are merely “acts of nature.” Rather both have emerged at this moment because humanity is grounded—entrapped—in the economic-social-political system(s) of capital/capitalism. It is the behemoth that we must examine: the monster we must free ourselves from.
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.
Youth in action, March-April 2020
Youth in action column on the Valentine’s Day’s Fridays 4 Future and Climate Strike protests, and the student group Teens Take Charge’s actions against segregation in New York schools.
Women worldwide, March-April 2020
March 8, 2020Women worldwide column on Wet’suwet’en women fighting Coastal GasLink Pipeline; the Murang’a County Women savings and credit cooperative in Kenya; artist Jimini Hignett; dress codes for women in Japan; and Indian women demonstrating against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s new racist citizenship law.
Queer notes, January-February 2020
January 22, 2020The death of Charlot Jeudy, president of Haiti Queer rights group Kouraj; anti-LGBTQ+ norms in Turkey; anti-Trans laws in India; and the largest-ever art exhibit about Southeast Asian LGBTQ+ people in Bangkok.
Honda workers sit in
January 21, 2020Report on the strike by Honda workers in Faridabad, India, in opposition to the company’s demand for signing a good conduct bond before entering the factory.
World in View: Mass protest challenges India’s Modi
Massive protests in India met the Citizenship Amendment Act, which introduces religious qualifications for immigrants to become citizens and excludes Muslims.
Editorial: Kashmir in our changed world
August 31, 2019Statement against the abrogation of the limited autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir in India by the Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) government of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party.
World in View: A tale of two democracies in crisis
June 26, 2019Elections in India and the European Union show the deep crisis in bourgeois society.
Youth in Action: May-June 2019
May 3, 2019An action against Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School allowing the ranking of girls by boys; K-8 Charter Day School students win against sexist dress code; Savitribai Phule Pune University graduate students win stipends and demonstrate for better meals; University of Illinois at Chicago graduate student teaching assistants strike.
World in View: Trump-Kim summit
March 13, 2019The second summit meeting between Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, in Hanoi on Feb. 27, ended without any new agreement. But it achieved what it aimed for as theater.
Women bearing the brunt of reaction lead the resistance
March 6, 2019In a year marked by the contradiction between deepening women’s revolt and activism and neo-fascism rising across the globe, women have been fighting back in unprecedented numbers and ways.
Women World Wide: January-February 2019
January 24, 20195.5 million women formed a 400-mile-long “wall” the length of India’s Kerala state for women’s freedom; Zimbabwe’s first all-woman anti-poaching squad; the opening of “Free Women’s Land,” a village built and occupied by women and children in the war zone of Syrian Kurdistan: and a remembrance of the founder of the field of African-American women’s history, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn.
Readers’ Views, November-December 2018
December 14, 2018Readers’ 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
Women Worldwide, November-December 2018
Women Worldwide column on a rape trial in Cork, Ireland; the women student movement Pinjratod or “Break the Cages” in India; and forced sterilization of Indigenous women in Saskatchewan, Canada.
Chicago Vigil for the Rohingya
September 27, 2018Over 100 people gathered in Chicago’s Federal Plaza on Aug. 25, 2018, for a vigil on the one-year anniversary of the massacre of the Muslim minority Rohingya in Burma.
Youth in Action, July-August 2018
July 25, 2018Youth in action column on a student demonstration in Delhi, India; a student rally against the alt-Right at Michigan State University, and revolt in Nicaragua headed by students.
Youth In Action: Students in India protest tainted test
June 11, 2018Nearly 1,000 college-age youth jammed the street in front of the Staff Selection Commission (SSC) in Delhi when official questions to exams were found on social media on Feb. 28.
III. The reality and the myth of contemporary capitalism
May 5, 2018We look at the world economic situation that must be changed: the role of state-capitalism, labor, climate change, the law of value, exploitation, alienation, and revolution and counter-revolution in Syria.
#MeToo, Women’s Marches show the resistance deepens
March 8, 2018Women have changed the world through an incredible and sustained activism based on a humanism that runs like a revolutionary red thread through an amazing array of actions, demonstrations and statements. This development is based on over 50 years of a movement that the founder of Marxist-Humanism, Raya Dunayevskaya, characterized as “Woman as Revolutionary Force and Reason.” .
Iranian workers, youth reach for new radical beginnings
January 28, 2018The recent uprisings in Iran start where the 2009 revolt left off. This analysis focuses on the rebellious working-class youth as well as the interconnections to the Arab Spring, Vladimir Putin’s interference, Donald Trump’s racist agenda, and the philosophic-historic significance of the Bosnian and Syrian struggles against genocide.
Women Worldwide, September-October 2017
August 31, 2017Women Worldwide column on Sheila Michaels’ popularization of “Ms.”; the Dutch anti-trafficking organization Free a Girl; and Nighat Dad, founder of Digital Rights Foundation.
China border controls
August 29, 2017China: protests against Hong Kong repression, border push into Bhutan vs. India, repression of Uyghurs.