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.
Review of “Gaza Writes Back,” a collection of short stories, the majority written by Palestinian women, in the wake of Operation Cast Lead, perpetrated by the Israel Defense Forces 2008, through 2009.
La guerra de Israel contra las masas en Gaza alcanzó proporciones genocidas. ¿Cuándo podrán los palestinos regresar a los lugares donde vivieron y podrán reconstruir? Su autodeterminación debe comenzar con sus ideas y aspiraciones.
Vice President Harris and President Biden should stop talking about their “great trust” in women because anti-abortionists too know that women will fight to do what’s right for themselves. This is a fight against forced pregnancy, to keep birth control legal and accessible, for our health and lives to be valued, to be seen as whole human beings.
This essay explores Marx’s Idea of Absolute Freedom as the foundation for overcoming today’s retrogression. Marx’s view of labor as “the prime necessity of life” connects with his whole dialectical view. The essay explores Dunayevskaya’s reading of this passage, and criticizes partial outlooks.
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.
Israel’s war against the masses in Gaza reached genocidal proportions. When will Palestinians be able to return to the places where they lived, and will they be able to rebuild? Self-determination must begin with their ideas and aspirations.
Call for Convention of News and Letters Committees, 2024
While immigrants suffer as winter settles in North America, the new year arrived without a Congressional bargain on immigration. Republicans not only demand harshly restrictive immigration measures but want to make Biden look bad by blocking accomplishments.
Many thanks to the translator and publisher of the Farsi translation of our “Israel’s war and Hamas attack stoke retrogression”!
جنگ اسراییل و حملهی حماس؛ محرک سیر قهقرایی / فرانکلین دمیتریف / ترجمهی ناصر برین
La guerra genocida de Israel sobre Gaza, así como los atroces ataques de Hamás que la provocaron, están llevando al mundo en una dirección reaccionaria y exponiendo la inhumanidad de los poderes dominantes, así como el retroceso de buena parte de la izquierda (Traducción al español del artículo “Israel’s war and Hamas attack stoke retrogression”).
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.
In-person report of the Sept. 15 mobilization in Chicago to protest political inaction in the face of climate emergency.
The 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.
U.S. President Joe Biden simultaneously put in place a proposal different from Donald Trump’s Title 42 that required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico until their asylum hearing appointment. Biden used another of Trump’s laws: to require refugees to prove that they sought asylum in the first country they encountered. In both proposals human rights are trampled.
Efforts to declare an end to the COVID pandemic are part of a drive to return to a pretended normal, to keep anything fundamental from changing–even if it means leaving the door wide open for the next pandemic
Congress has done its best to become the nation’s strikebreaker by forcing a five-year contract on railroad workers who had been set to go on strike on Dec. 12.
Congress has done its best to become the nation’s strikebreaker by forcing a five-year contract on railroad workers who had been set to go on strike on Dec. 12. Union members in four of the 12 unions had voted to reject a tentative agreement that negotiators had reached with six major rail carriers in September.
The Ohio LGBTQ+ community protested a meeting of the Ohio State Board of Education delaying a vote on a “don’t say gay” bill; Israeli playwright Yochai Greenfeld’s autobiographical play about conversion therapy opened in Israel; there was a memorial on Chicago’s south side for several LGBTQ+ people killed by a hit-and-run driver; and murdered Palestinian Gay man Ahmad Abu Marhia’s body was found in Hebron in the West Bank, and a suspect has been arrested.
When the U.S.-imposed non-elected, illegitimate government of Ariel Henry decided to raise highly subsidized fuel prices in September, all hell broke loose in Haiti. Mass protests occurred everywhere, particularly on the streets of the capital, Port-au-Prince.
The Women’s March and other groups held A Women’s Wave Day of Action on Oct. 8, 2022, demanding a nationwide right to abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted that right. Women, youth, and allies are aware of the importance of reproductive justice to our lives and democracy and are motivated to organize and creatively fight back.
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.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan provoked controversy. Times may have changed since Nixon met Mao but then as now, look to internal reasons in both nations for their foreign policy stances.
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.
On April 24, Emmanuel Macron won a second five-year term as president of France. The rise of right-wing politicians posing as populists is a worldwide phenomenon aided by the neoliberal economic policies of centrist candidates such as Macron and Joe Biden
After seven years of war in Yemen, the UN estimates that almost 400,000 people, primarily civilians, have died, 60% from hunger and disease, with children being 70% of the deaths. The war has become a proxy for the Saudi Arabia-Iran Middle East conflict.
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.
Trump’s national health emergency, continued by Biden, had asylum seekers wait in Mexico for processing. This breaks U.S. law and though other pandemic emergency measures have lifted, virtually all Republicans and a growing number of Democrats are urging the Biden Administration to keep breaking this law past May 23, despite the suffering it causes.
Trump’s national health emergency, continued by Biden, had temporarily superseded certain statutes so that asylum seekers had to wait in Mexico for an appointment. While other pandemic emergency measures have lifted, virtually all Republicans and a growing number of Democrats are urging the Biden Administration to keep breaking the law past May 23.
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.
Texas, Florida and Oklahoma have recently passed laws that threaten Queer kids and can be directed against any marginalized group. No matter which politician is in power or what political party is dominant, they will do little to protect oppressed groups or benefit the lives of regular people in any significant way.
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.
The raging attack on abortion rights is an attack on freedom by fascist leaders and their followers who want to undermine democracy and save a decrepit, unworkable, exploitative, racist-patriarchal capitalism.
Kellogg’s workers held a 78-day strike over the company’s two-tier wage system. Reported from Battle Creek.
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 raging attack on abortion rights is an attack on freedom by fascist leaders and their followers who want to undermine democracy and save a decrepit, unworkable, exploitative, racist-patriarchal capitalism.
Transgender Day of Remembrance 2021 marked the deadliest year for the Transgender and gender nonconforming community. Internationally over 375 Transgender people, 47 in the U.S., were reported murdered. The overwhelming majority of them—as it has so often been—were women of color under 30 years old.
Readers’ Views on Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives 2021-2022; Labor shortage?; Workers as reason; Support El Milagro workers!; Detroit women’s march; Chapelle’s sexism; Afghans dead and buried; Betrayal of Haitians; and Which side are you on?
Readers’ Views on Philosopher-revolutionaries; Youth, climate and the freedom idea; Climate crisis; California fires, FDA fails women, and Voices from behind bars.
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.
Workers in the U.S. have made 2021 a year that ought to panic giant corporations and small store owners alike. The wave of strikes and other job actions this fall have exploded and not just in numbers.
Today’s descendants of slaves are asked to accept an interpretation of history that centers on acts of the government, not on those of slaves asserting themselves in their lives. Biden’s recognition of the day slaves “received” their freedom from the government, might help secure the African-American vote for the Democratic Party. But even this limited freedom is under attack.
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.”
The delusions and propaganda that recall the spirit of fascism cannot be defeated by countering them with facts. The new universal must be grounded in the Reason of the masses in motion for freedom, and the philosophy of liberation that roots itself in those movements. What is needed is to begin from the Absolute of the projected new society.
Fascism has been cultivated by rulers fearing revolution and enabled by the normalization of genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Congo, and Syria–and by the philosophical void on the Left, a substantial part of which is still accepted as “Left” despite ideological confusion that aligned it with genocides in Syria and Bosnia.
In Afghanistan the Taliban are murdering men who helped the U.S., UK, and other forces who fought them; and murdering and beating women and girls who have made even marginally independent lives for themselves. Yet, despite the terror, Afghans, especially women, continue to demonstrate against Taliban rule.
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.”
In Afghanistan the Taliban are murdering men who helped the U.S., UK, and other forces who fought them; and murdering and beating women and girls who have made even marginally independent lives for themselves. Yet, despite the terror, Afghans, especially women, continue to demonstrate against Taliban rule.
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.
The worldwide protests over George Floyd’s murder and other protests of Republican-led policies led them to erode, stifle, obfuscate, erase from memory and repress democracy, passing laws to subvert elections and teaching. Republicans decided that democracy must be destroyed so that they can rule in perpetuity, representing the 1% in the name of white Christian America.
