Putin’s war on Ukraine has shaken up world politics, sharpened the divide in the Left and nurtured Red-Brown alliances. That Putin’s genocidal but threadbare ideology could have such an impact reflects the Left’s philosophical disorientation. It is necessary to listen to the voices and actions within Ukraine for social transformation toward freedom.
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.
Voices from a California solidarity action with Russian dissidents who expressed their opposition to Putin’s war within Russia.
To avoid Russia’s outright defeat in its brutal war against Ukrainians, the alliance of nations–Russia, Iran, and China, now with North Korea–that for 12 years has united to suppress the Syrian Revolution for freedom and dignity seems to be firming up again.
Call for Convention of News and Letters Committees, 2023
Readers’ Views on: Women’s Struggles for Freedom; Open Season on Lgbtq+ ; Healthcare Workers on Strike; Lois Curtis; Immigrant Solidarity Needed; Putin vs. Ukraine; U.S. Right vs. Ukraine; Water and Humanity’s Future
Ukrainians’ self-organizing drew in all layers of the population, acting on their passion for independence and freedom from imperial overlords. The new life they have brought to the idea of democracy is deeper than political democracy. Marx’s humanist idea is a future determined by fully realizing that deeper content.
Canada’s Conservative Party and Alberta province’s United Conservative Party have both chosen racist, anti-immigrant leaders, moving Canada to the Right.
Readers’ Views on: Iran: Woman, Life, Freedom; Election Threats and Battles; Women’s Marches and Enemies; Sexist Supreme Court; Ukrainians Fight for Freedom; Para-Transit Disservice; Mike Davis; Labor Struggles, from Amazon…to the Bank.
Excerpts of the appeal from the Executive Committee for the 60th International Antiwar Assembly, together with the message of solidarity sent to the Assembly from News and Letters Committees. Against Putin’s war and for revolutionary new beginnings!
In 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.
Putin failed to terrorize Ukraine into submission with massive bombing of civilians and social infrastructure. Ukrainian social solidarity, resilience and massive participation of all layers of the population inspired the world that a people do not have to cave to extortion and terror.
Readers’ Views on Abortion Rights Struggles; Ukraine, Russia and the Left; Marx and Transgender; World Food Crisis; Normalized Domestic Violence, and Ecuador’s Uprising
Ukraine is afraid of losing European supporters after having fought off a Russian invasion for six months in the largest war in Europe since World War II. Ukrainians are also fighting imposed rotten compromises at the expense of Ukrainians! Yes to Ukrainian self-determination and freedom from Russian imperialism!
This appendix to “Society in the Grip of Genocidal Ideology” details Putin’s genocidal ideology and how prominent Left journal “Monthly Review,” its editor John Bellamy Foster, and Noam Chomsky echo Putin’s propaganda in their apologetics for Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Genocidal ideology, which was manifested differently in the Buffalo mass shooting and in Putin’s war on Ukraine, has spread throughout our society, pervading the Right but also polluting the Left. How to fight this retrogression in all its forms?
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
Like repression in Iran, the war against Ukraine is, more than anything else, understandable on the basis of fear of revolution and the overthrow of the existing order.
Free Syria areas have repeatedly demonstrated solidarity with Ukrainians fighting their common enemy, but have had to carry on their fight, for freedom and to avert extermination, without the international support their struggle has deserved.
Readers’ Views on: Abortion Bans vs. Women and Freedom; Anti-War, Pro-Democracy Voices from Russia; Patriarchy Attacked; Putin’s Brutal War
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.
Readers’ Views on: Putin’s Brutal War on Ukraine; War on Yemen; Canadian Convoy; Trucks and Tribes; and Abortion Politics.
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.
Students at West Virginia University, Harvard and Stanford, among others, held protests and rallies against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition, college students picketed the office of Illinois Democratic Rep. Mike Quigley on March 4 to protest an $8,000 campaign contribution from weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin.
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.
Defying Burma’s coup has provided time for the forces of old revolutionaries, youth, workers and women to work out what they are fighting for, beyond deposing the military caste that has ruled them, and an opportunity to bridge long-time divisions between the Burmese-speaking majority and the peoples long fighting for self-determination.
A seven-year-old war in Ukraine–involving Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists, with Russia’s ominous, close presence–recently underwent an escalation. Ukrainians are caught within this developing new Cold War, subject to competing powers, West and East, far away from any genuine self-determination.
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.
Humanity needs to take head of the warfare that broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan in late September, over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh which took the lives of thousands of soldiers, and hundreds of innocent civilians, on both sides.
Free Syrians continue to fight the regime and Russia, and regime supporters keep pressing for genocide. They cannot coexist.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is laying the groundwork for his own continued hold on state power.
Trump’s Oct. 23 speech on Syria lays out his counter-revolutionary vision of a changed world including his intention to reorient the U.S.’s PYD allies in line with world capitalism.
Report on the increase of large protests and mass unrest in Russia caused by economic conditions, reports of slave labor and the government’s refusal to allow opposition candidates on the ballot for Moscow city council elections.
“Woman as Reason” columnist Terry Moon writes about the state of abortion rights in the U.S. in light of the draconian attacks against it and relates women’s struggle to control their bodies to the thingification of women, the poor response of the U.S. left, Karl Marx’s devastating critique of capitalism, and what revolution must come to mean.
Readers’ Views on: Socialism and a philosophy of revolution; Sudan in revolt; Iran vs. Iranians; Flint, Mich., play captures voices; Notre-Dame and fracking on native land; gun control debate; labor strikes; debate on fascism; Trump and DeVos; and voices from behind bars.
Marxist-Humanist Bob McGuire looks through history to Marx’s relationship to labor and the Black movement for freedom and then to our day and the relationship of Marxist-Humanism to labor and the Black struggle for freedom in speaking to the question many are asking today: What is socialism?
Participant report of a Chicago vigil in solidarity with the Syrian people against Assad.
The retreat from even modest efforts to control nuclear weapons has brought humanity closer than ever to annihilation. President Donald Trump’s suspension of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) with Vladimir Putin’s Russia gins up an already accelerating new arms race.
In 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.
The Syrian Revolution has been the physical and intellectual battlefield that defines our time. As early as 2012 it was clear that what happened in Syria would determine the next stage of world history.
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.
A U.S. activist in Syria solidarity criticizes the broad Left’s failure to practice revolutionary solidarity and outlines the dangerous political consequences.
News & Letters editorial taking up how in Syria, attacks are intensifying upon the three million Syrians, mostly civilians, trapped in Idlib province and how so many in the Left have failed them.
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.
Free Syria activists gathered in Chicago on June 8 in a vigil opposing the ongoing genocide against civilians who are ignored by most of the world.
Marxist-Humanist analysis of the Trump-Kim summit and G7 summit shows Trump is not charting a path to world peace but rather toward a more openly brutal world order. .
The 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.
We 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.
Far Right racist parties have continued to make inroads into mainstream politics. 40,000 people marched in Austria against the new governing coalition of the anti-immigrant Austrian People’s Party and the neo-Nazi Freedom Party.
