Lead article: Women worldwide fight femicide

March 16, 2024

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.”

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An atrocity: Assad welcomed back

June 7, 2023

It is an atrocity that Bashar al-Assad was welcomed back to the Arab League Summit on May 19. This is one more attempt to bury the Syrian Revolution, which has heard its obituary pronounced again and again since the first mass demonstrations of Arab Spring, March 15, 2011.

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Editorial: Earthquake deaths are not a natural disaster

March 17, 2023

Twin earthquakes on Feb. 6 decimated a vast area of Turkey and Syria. They produced a catastrophe with human tragedies over hundreds of square miles. But it was the man-made disaster on top of the natural one that killed more than half of the over 50,000 victims accounted for so far.

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Turkish women challenge Erdoğan

May 11, 2022

In April Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, had his public prosecutors demand that We Will Stop Femicide, Turkey’s largest women’s rights group, be disbanded for “activity against law and morals.” Protests immediately broke out across the country with hundreds marching in Istanbul and Ankara.

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Women demonstrate against Erdoğan’s closing of WWSF

April 30, 2022

In April Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, had his public prosecutors demand that We Will Stop Femicide, Turkey’s largest women’s rights group, be disbanded for “activity against law and morals.” Protests immediately broke out across the country with hundreds marching in Istanbul and Ankara.

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Women worldwide, September-October 2020

August 28, 2020

Diana 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.

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International Women’s Day 2020

March 26, 2020

What was new this International Women’s Day was larger marches, greater militancy of women participants, the new places where they took place, and the attacks against them which escalated significantly from previous years.

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Revolution in Permanence in Syria, After the Uprisings

March 22, 2020

Review-essay (longer version) on the book ‘Syria After the Uprisings: The Political Economy of State Resilience’ by Joseph Daher. With a combination of ruthless criticism and consistent solidarity, the author situates the Assad regime and Syria’s three counter-revolutions into a broader trend of global neoliberalism.

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Queer notes, January-February 2020

January 22, 2020

The 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.

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Women worldwide, September-October 2019

August 31, 2019

Feminists in Iran call on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to resign; huge demonstrations against police rapes in Mexico; removal of the “Girl of Peace Statue” in Japan; and the trial of Canan Kaftancioğlu, the Istanbul chief of the secularist Republican People’s Party.

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Capitalism’s failures, and the struggles against it

December 26, 2018

We post this Dec. 24, 2018, commentary by Mohammed Elnaiem as a discussion article which begins: “On these holidays, we mourn for the Kurds in Syria who hopelessly fear an upcoming Turkish invasion, we mourn for the yellow vests in France who rise up in an empire built on colonial wealth but which continues to make destitute its working and unemployed poor…”

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Turkey on the brink?

September 27, 2018

Under the whip of global capitalism, so-called emerging economies, like Turkey’s, have little real independence, and their masses live under a no-exit sign.

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Youth in Action, September-October 2018

September 20, 2018

University of North Carolina students and workers bring down statue of generic Confederate soldier; Swedish pro-asylum student Elin Errson prevents deportation of Afghan refugee; Iraqi youth and women protest unemployment, electricity shortages and lack of clean water.

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Idlib: Syria’s 21st century concentration camp

September 10, 2018

Syria’s Idlib province faces imminent slaughter by Russia, Iran, and Assad regime forces, which have already made it into the model of the 21st century concentration camp. We call upon all of humanity to oppose this and to demand protection for these millions whose only “crime” was to fight for freedom against a fascist regime.

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Inhuman Iraqi rush to judgment

July 23, 2018

Iraq’s court system has disregarded the element of coercion as they rush to put to death not only ISIS fighters but their hostages as well. On one April afternoon, two hours was all a judge needed to convict 14 women who had been rounded up from areas liberated from ISIS and sentence them to hang.

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Turkey’s Erdoğan tightens authoritarian rule

July 21, 2018

With his victory in the June 24, 2018, presidential election, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has consolidated his one-man rule of Turkey’s 80 million-plus population. He had already eliminated the office of prime minister and created a powerful executive presidency.

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#MeToo, Women’s Marches show the resistance deepens

March 8, 2018

Women 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.” .

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Iranian workers, youth reach for new radical beginnings

January 28, 2018

The 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.

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China’s tentacles

July 2, 2017

Report on the Belt and Road Forum held in May in China and its connection with China’s imperialist and anti-labor actions.

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Where to now for the Middle East?

November 30, 2016

A look at the situation in the Middle East in light of Donald Trump’s election that takes up Syria, Yemen and the arming by the U.S. of varying forces–some of whom are fighting each other.

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Turkey’s Erdoğan – the pious dictator

September 7, 2016

A view of what the failed coup in Turkey has wrought, including mass arrests of teachers, trade unionists, doctors, medical personnel, and others as Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, makes a grab for total power.

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Britain’s hate-driven referendum a victory for the Far Right

June 26, 2016

With Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, the Far Right has been emboldened worldwide. As the economic and social crisis deepens, so does the brutality, while the Right seeks scapegoats for the results of capitalism’s objective laws, which only have force as long as humanity’s struggle to be free is not yet complete. The only solid ground for opposing this latest stage of reactionary retrogression is that of revolution in permanence.

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Women battle war, terrorism and anti-abortion fanatics

March 8, 2016

Foregrounding the new formal solidarity between Trust Black Women with Black Lives Matter, we explore the thought and actions of women worldwide, including the struggle for reproductive justice in the U.S.; women fighting war and terrorism in places like South Sudan and Syria, the successful fight of domestic workers to organize, and the need to make the revolutionary content of such actions explicit.

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Counter-revolution in Middle East shows crisis of humanity

August 28, 2015

From the signing of a nuclear weapons agreement by the U.S. and Iran, to the ongoing war in Syria including the roles of Turkey and of the Left, this wide-ranging article delves into the Middle East situation with an emphasis on the forces fighting for genuine freedom and a multi-ethnic society.

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