The war on Iran and the Venezuela coup are part of Trump’s attempt to reorganize the world order and grasp for absolute power. In countering this tumble toward world war, can we build a movement that is not only against Trump and capitalism, but keeps developing the fullness of what we are for?
Trump expanded both the war on Venezuela and the world’s spiral into war. Its connection to his war to subdue the people in the U.S. was brought home by an ICE agent’s murder of Renee Nicole Good.
The U.S. capture of Venezuela’s president by the U.S. on Jan. 3 was framed as a fight against criminal networks. Beneath the surface, the event is part of a broader geopolitical struggle: a contest over resources, a selective application of international law, and the enduring hierarchies of global capitalism.
Indigenous peoples came en masse to this year’s climate summit, protesting, meeting, and insisting on radical participation. However, they were met with open resistance, feeble responses, and indifference from many countries, especially the rich ones.
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.
Venezuela’s president rekindled a territorial dispute with its neighbor Guyana. Not to actually take the territory, but rather to create an issue of patriotism to use in his upcoming re-election campaign.
El presidente de la Conferencia Climática Internacional (COP28) es el sultán al-Jaber de Emiratos Árabes Unidos, quien también encabeza la compañía petrolera estatal de dicho país. Las empresas de combustibles fósiles son el enemigo de la humanidad. Lo que se necesita es derrotarlas: no rogarles que hagan lo correcto, sino quitarlas del poder (Traducción del artículo: “The perfect COP head is the oil honcho al-Jaber”).
The president of the international climate conference COP28, is president, Sultan al-Jaber of the UAE, who also heads UAE’s state-owned oil company. Fossil fuel companies are the enemy of humanity. What is needed is to defeat them, not to beg them to do the right thing, but to remove their power.
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.
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.
Two ongoing events in Mexico: 1) The state finally admitted its role in the 2014 murder of 43 Ayotzinapa students, and 2) the administration’s construction of an oil refinery in Dos Boscos.
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.
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.
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.
No to war on Ukraine! The capitalist system in crisis ever veers toward war. Putin is not so much the exception but the embodiment of the ongoing shift in world politics, signaling the future this system holds if left unchecked. The destruction of democracy and the move to the Right, which Putin has aided, helps set the stage for that nightmare.
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.”
Readers’ Views on Philosopher-revolutionaries; Youth, climate and the freedom idea; Climate crisis; California fires, FDA fails women, and Voices from behind bars.
John Lewis, today’s struggles, and the needed philosophic dialogue; Remembering Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Putin: an opposing view; Amy Barrett’s fanaticism; Torture at Soledad; Pipeline battles.
Election battles, reaching for the future, and the pull of the past; Sabotage of the post office; Food recycling workers strike; Anti-labor statue downed; Oil and biden; COVID-19: where’s the vision?; Racism and fascism; Polish women’s revolutionary moment; News & Letters is back in print!
The fracking boom turned to bust and a wave of bankruptcies reveals the current operation of decaying capitalism in miniature: cannibalizing the economy, people and the planet, destroying our future, in order to funnel wealth to the favored few.
Dangers of refineries to nearby inhabited areas. .
Donald Trump’s threats to Iran analyzed in light of his use of capitalism’s lifeblood commodity, oil, and the continuity and discontinuity of U.S. imperialism.
The horrendous oil pipeline explosion in Tlahuelilpan, Mexico, which killed over 100 campesinos and injured many more, has shaken all of Mexico. This was a tragedy long in the making.
School students in Oakland, Calif. support striking teachers; Belgian environment minister resigns after attacking Strike 4 Climate Action; high school students walk out in Vancouver, Canada, protesting tar sands; medical students’ direct action at Gandaki Medical College in Pokhara, Nepal, against tuition theft.
The horrendous tragedy in Tlahuelilpan, Mexico, when an oil pipeline explosion killed over 100 people, has shaken all of Mexico.
In OPEC powers’ participation in the counter-revolutionary attacks on the revolutions in Syria and Yemen, and in the anti-immigrant reactionary reshaping of European politics, we see the next stage of bourgeois politics taking shape.
Some climate scientists estimate that the Arctic may be ice-free in summer within a few decades. Nations are already assuming this will happen, as seen by their competition for mineral rights.
Retired miner and Marxist-Humanist Andy Phillips recounts an incident from the Consolidation Coal Company whose foreman refused compensation for a worker who sustained a back injury from years of laying 10 foot steel rails that weighed 60 pounds a foot.
Editorial on the situation in Venezuela including the deterioration of living conditions; the repression practiced by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and their attempt to gut Venezuela’s Bolivarian Constitution; and the personality cult built around Hugo Chávez, revealing contradictions in the movements for freedom. .
As Venezuela’s social crisis deepens, the contradictions always present in Chavismo are coming to a head. A look at the Bolivarian Constitution, Chavismo’s relationship to the Arab Spring, and its dependence on high oil prices and a top leader illuminate the crisis.
Despite difficulties, there are tendencies within the Left in Venezuela and Latin American who are critical of Maduro and trying to work out support of the Venezuelan masses, along with opposition to neoliberalism and U.S. imperialism.
The fight against the Dakota Access pipeline continues despite military-style destruction of resistance camps. The movement for Native American liberation from colonialism and for stopping the fossil-fuel exploitation that drives climate change is still growing.
The resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline has become a beacon for all opposing the ruling system—and has been assaulted with ferocious repression. It is a powerful manifestation of the vast forces putting American civilization on trial. The time is now to support this struggle in practice and in thought.
Citizens of the Standing Rock Lakota Nation and allies are maintaining a Camp of the Sacred Stones along the proposed route of the Dakota Access oil pipeline to defend the water, sacred and burial sites and wildlife habitat despite having their water and medical care removed as well as threats from the state government.
Venezuela is in ever-deepening crisis–including electricity shortages, outrageous inflation, food shortages–because of neoliberal politics. Colombia sees a cease-fire agreement signed between the government and Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia/FARC while agricultural injustice, a major cause of increasing poverty, remains. Peru elects Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a right-wing neoliberal, as their new president, defeating Keiko Fujimori, daughter of jailed former president Alberto Fujimori, who committed many human rights abuses while in office.
The wildfires sweeping Alberta’s tar sands region provide a window onto the state of the environment and the multidimensional worldwide struggle against pollution and climate chaos fueled by capitalism’s drive for production for the sake of production.
Part III of the Draft Perspectives 2016: Strikes and workers’ uprisings in China have forced industrial wages up, not pausing even during the global Great Recession, as a window on capitalism and its crises.
People’s suffering, no matter the price of oil, demonstrates capitalism’s inherent deep ties with climate change and economic destruction.
Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2016-2017
It was a stunning defeat. Where to now for the Venezuelan masses who supported Chavez in power, but many of whom feel disappointed in the post-Chavez period?
Report of a lively demonstration in the San Francisco Bay Area against trains carrying tons of coal that can cause huge explosions and yet travel through highly populated areas.
Sixty years, to the day, after the Castle Bravo explosion over the Marshall Islands, Holly Barker, anthropologist at the University of Washington, spoke at the “Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction” conference in New York City on U.S. policy towards the people affected by 67 atmospheric nuclear explosions–the Marshall Islanders.
Report of the 5,000-strong march, from the banks of the Mississippi to the Minnesota state capitol on June 6, in St. Paul, Minn., to voice objections to Enbridge Corporation’s pipeline expansion.
On March 19 hundreds of workers from the BP oil refinery in Whiting, Ind., massed in front of BP corporate offices in Chicago. The 1,100 workers’ strike has continued over unfair labor practices. The local issues centered on safety and staffing after BP rejected the pattern agreement of the industry with the United Steel Workers.
The first national oil refinery strike since 1980 manifested safety-related demands by the workers and garnered much labor, community, and environmentalist support.
The 20th “Conference of Parties” was held in Lima, Peru, and, rather than action, issued a “Call for Climate Action” without binding commitments or effective monitoring. The U.S. and other nations as good as admitted the bankruptcy of capitalism by arguing that binding commitments had no chance of being adopted.
Brazil’s President, Dilma Rousseff, barely won a runoff election against the conservative free-marketeer Aécio Neves. With her election to a second term, the Workers’ Party, first under Lula Da Silva and now under Rousseff, has won its fourth consecutive presidential election. While Lula’s first election was greeted with great hope for a sweeping change in Brazil’s developmentalist trajectory, Rousseff’s cliffhanger illustrated the grave disappointment that much of Brazil’s masses felt recently….
Latin America in View, Sept.-Oct. 2013: Ecuador oil drilling; Brazil rapes; Mexico Escuelita Zapatista.
On July 6, around 1:15 AM, an unattended 74-car freight train filled with crude oil derailed and exploded in the center of the town of Lac Mégantic, Québec. This catastrophe was avoidable with even the slightest attention to safety, and is a result of cutting corners to save money, and the lack of anyone in charge taking responsibility for any aspect of the negligence, including those in the government.
