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.
Italy
Mujeres en lucha contra el feminicidio
May 19, 2024El 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”.
Women worldwide fight femicide
March 16, 2024Femicide—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.”
Handicap This!: November 2023
November 14, 2023Takes up: The right of disabled people to be part of the reproductive justice discussion; Indigenous Disability Awareness Month in Canada; and European Union countries requiring people to prove their percentage of disability in order to have free access to culture.
Queer Notes: October 2023
October 18, 2023Takes up: Italy’s Premier Giorgia Meloni reversing progress on Queer rights; Queer Trans K-pop group QI.X performing at the Seoul Queer Culture Festival; and Mount Dora, Florida, voting in August to be a Safe Place Initiative city.
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.
World in View: Europe’s racist leaders
November 11, 2022In both Sweden and Italy neo-fascist leaders have won great influence: Jimmie Akesson in Sweden and Giorgia Meloni in Italy. They have in common vicious anti-immigrant and other racists beliefs and actions.
World in View: EU contradictions
January 30, 2021There is danger of neo-fascist parties gaining or taking control in several European countries including Germany, France, The Netherlands and Italy.
II. The true pandemic war
April 29, 2020Draft thesis for discussion about where the world is heading, and what to do about it from a revolutionary standpoint. Part II. The true pandemic war: A. The capitalists’ class war; B. Subjects of revolution fight back; and C. Pandemic class war reveals the social structure.
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.
Pandemic as battlefield
March 30, 2020The battle against the COVID-19 pandemic is a battle over how society will change, mirroring the battle over how to confront and adapt to the climate and extinction crisis. Strikes are erupting across the world.
El COVID-19 evidencia la crisis del capitalismo, muestra la urgencia de una nueva sociedad humana
March 24, 2020Más allá de la mayor o menor eficacia de la respuesta de uno u otro gobierno ante la pandemia, es el capitalismo en su conjunto el que muestra su incapacidad para darle solución a los problemas que amenazan la vida humana.
COVID-19 manifests the crisis of capitalism, shows the urgency of a new human society
Beyond the greater or lesser effectiveness of the response of one or the other government to the pandemic, it is capitalism as a whole that shows its inability to solve the problems that threaten human life.
World in view: Notes on a pandemic
March 17, 2020Every aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic can be expected to highlight the class nature of society. The more important thing to remember is human solidarity.
Amazon workers organize cross-border solidarity
June 27, 2019Excerpts of a talk by Polish Amazon worker/organizer Agnieszka Mróz, on a U.S. tour seeking cross-border solidarity among Amazon workers worldwide.
Women WorldWide: May-June 2019
April 23, 201930,000 in Italy protested World Congress of Families; Sudan’s first female-run radio show; survivors of prostitution marched from France, arriving to Germany for Survivor’s Day; Women Advocates Research and Documentation Center in Nigeria provides pro bono legal services and research to fight civil rights violations and violence against women.
World in View: Rise of Far Right threatens ‘Europe’
March 13, 2019The Far Right threatens to make significant gains in the European Parliament elections this May. What inheres within the “idea of Europe” that can destroy fascism as idea and reality is the humanism that became its internal critique, Marx’s humanism.
World in View: French ‘Yellow Vests’
January 28, 2019The uprising of the gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests) against French President Emmanuel Macron embodies the unity and brutal disunity of our time.
World in View: Reaction and racism in the ‘new’ Europe
July 24, 2018Update on the reaction, racism and anti-immigrant and anti-refugee laws growing in Poland, Italy and Hungary.
Millions denounce Trump’s heinous immigration abuses
July 19, 2018Marxist-Humanist analysis of the nature of President Donald Trump’s inhuman immigration policy, the damage it is causing and the outcry against it, including from his own base.
World In View: After Italy, European Right coalesces
May 9, 2018The victory of Far Right and “populist” parties in Italian elections, preceded by that in Austria, and followed by that in Hungary, emphasizes the current threat of neo-fascism which means to take power in the EU.
II. Spreading revolt opens new doors
May 3, 2018We look at the true opposition to Trumpism: mass revolt worldwide of women, youth, Black people, labor…–the context to work for new beginnings.
World in View: Libya and Italy chaos
March 12, 2018On Feb. 7, 2018, many Libyans celebrated the seventh anniversary of the revolution that overthrew long-time dictator Muammar Gaddafi. But the dictator’s toxic influence has outlived him.
Refugees risk death fleeing war, terror and climate chaos
June 28, 2015Worldwide, the refugee crisis is unprecedented and is fueled by war, terrorism and climate change. The worldwide response is paltry with country after country turning away or deporting frantic and desperate people in search of a safe haven.
Capitalism’s violence, masses’ revolt show need for total view
May 1, 2013The world today is riven between the creativity of masses in revolt and the violent degeneracy of counter-revolution, whose destructiveness even extends to the revived specter of nuclear war two decades after the collapse of the USSR. Such is the degeneracy of the globalized capitalist system, laden with destructive forces and sunk into structural crisis. The deep crisis is seen in the U.S. and abroad, economically, in unemployment and poverty, homelessness and hunger. It is seen politically, in new laws attacking workers and women, and new outbursts of racism. It is seen environmentally, with the advance of climate disruption and fake capitalistic solutions. It is seen in thought, as the lack of philosophy, of a total view, hampers the development of struggles from the U.S. to the revolutions of the Arab Spring facing counter-revolutions.
Spain, Greece, Europe: capitalist crisis and revolt
July 10, 2012by Franklin Dmitryev
When the bailout of banks in Spain, the Eurozone’s fourth largest economy, was announced on June 9, the immediate reactions revealed the two worlds that exist in every country. The Spanish masses intensified their protests, marching directly on both banks and government, while Greek and Spanish workers exchanged messages of solidarity against the [=>]
‘We are all Greeks’
March 21, 2012From the new March-April 2012 issue of News & Letters:
‘We are all Greeks’
On Feb. 12, open rebellion broke out in Athens. “Layoffs! Layoffs…You will save Greece without the Greeks!” protesters proclaimed against the Greek parliament’s approval of a new round of austerity measures, dictated as conditions for a new 130 billion euro loan [=>]
World in View: No to ‘bunga-bunga’!
April 20, 2011by Gerry Emmett
Hundreds of thousands of Italian women took to the streets Feb. 13 to protest President Silvio Berlusconi’s sexist and absurd political culture of “bunga bunga.” Demonstrations, mostly of women, calling for his resignation were held in 280 Italian cities.
Berlusconi will have to stand trial beginning April 6 for having sex with an underage [=>]