Against the Current

WE’RE WRITING THIS appeal shortly before the November 5 U.S. election. We don’t know what the outcome will be, or what kind of confrontations or chaos might follow if the results are delayed or disputed. As we follow these events both on our website and in our print editions, we know that fundamental issues will remain unresolved: the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s expanding war in Lebanon, spreading climate catastrophes, looming imperialist conflicts and attacks on democratic rights...

The National Arab American convention, sponsored by the American-Arab Anti-Discriminaton Committee, heard from this panel of former Biden Administration officials discussing why they resigned over U.S. support for Israel's war in Gaza. www.jimwestphoto.com

WITH WAR AND genocide spreading from Palestine to Lebanon and Iran, with Florida and southern states inundated by the twin biggest climate-change flood disasters in U.S. history, and people’s general insecurity about their own and the country’s future, the United States lurches toward what’s called “the most consequential election in our lifetime” that may resolve little or nothing.

The outcome isn’t known as Against the Current goes to press a couple weeks before November 5, but will be shortly after or before this issue reaches our subscribers....

INTRODUCTION: As we enter a new political landscape following the election of Donald Trump, resistance to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and its bellicose military actions in the region takes on a greater urgency than ever before--even as political repression on US campuses intensifies....

Free Boris Kagarlitsky and all anti-war political prisoners in the Russian Federation!

A message from Boris Kagarlitsky, November 14, 2024

Suzi Weissman: Welcome to Jacobin Radio. I'm your host, Suzi Weissman. On October 8th, the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign held an online conference on “Boris Kagarlitsky and the Challenges of the Left.” Although Kagarlitsky is serving a five-year sentence in a Russian penal colony, he has just published a book called The Long Retreat: Strategies to Reverse the Decline of the Left....

IAM Local 251 strikers and supporters on the picket line. Photo from IAM District 251 facebook page

UPDATE: LEADERS OF THE International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) District 751 in Seattle said 59% of members who cast ballots November 4 agreed to approve the fourth formal offer (and the third put to a vote). It ended a seven-week strike. The October 31 deal was backed by the union leadership.

“It’s time for us to come together. This is a victory,” IAM District 751 President Jon Holden told members....

ONE OF THE key decisions of the Social Movement (Sotsialnyi Rukh) conference, which took place in Kyiv on October 5-6, 2024, was the adoption of the resolution, “The path to victory and the tasks of the Ukrainian left.” Below is the text of the resolution:...

Free Boris Kagarlitsky and all anti-war political prisoners in the Russian Federation!

A message from Boris Kagarlitsky, November 14, 2024

GREETINGS AND MY profound thanks for the honor of participating in and addressing today’s conference, celebrating the work of comrade Boris Kagarlitsky and acting in solidarity with the comrade in his fight for freedom. A fight, I should say, not only for his own freedom, but a fight for freedom against the forces of authoritarianism and 21st century fascism.

In twenty minutes, it is impossible to address all or most of the features of Kagarlitsky’s The Long Retreat. Let me start by saying that this work is brilliant, sobering and, in some important respects, problematic....

We Live Here
Detroit Eviction Defense and the Battle for Housing Justice
by Jeffrey Wilson and Bambi Kramer
Seven Stories Press, 2024, 238 pages, $16.95 paperback; ebook $10.

WILSON AND KRAMER’s graphic story highlights the victorious struggles of several homeowners, providing a glimpse into the economic crisis in Detroit and its resistance by the community. The tsunami came to the city earler than the country's 2008 meltdown and stayed longer.

The group of activists that became DED came out of the 2011 Occupy Detroit encampment. Their own eviction from the grounds of the historic public square, Grand Circus Park, came after 60 days of taking back the public space and a lot of political dialogue. ...

Scott McLemee interviews Paul Reitter, translator of a new English edition of Marx’s Capital.

IN EARLY 1845, a young and precariously employed holder of a Ph.D. in philosophy named Karl Marx signed a contract with a German publisher for a book, in two volumes, on political economy. He had already filled notebooks with extracts from his studies in the field, and at the time likely felt like he was already reasonably far along on the project. But his publisher canceled the contract two years later, in part on the grounds that Marx rejected the suggestion to write with an eye to avoid provoking the authorities....

The Palestinian Feminist Collective demands the immediate and unconditional freedom of Palestinian political prisoner, feminist activist and scholar, and revolutionary leader, Khalida Jarrar, who teaches us that “hope in prison is like a flower that grows out of stone.”

Jarrar has been held in captivity by the settler-state for more than six years over the course of five imprisonments and is currently held captive in zionist dungeons without charge since December 26, 2023. She now faces her greatest challenge: the brutal conditions of solitary confinement. On August 12, 2024, the colonial zionist prison authorities transferred her from Damon Prison in occupied Haifa to Neve Tirza prison in occupied al-Ramlah, where she is enduring inhumane conditions in complete isolation....

AT THE END of 2023 Palestinian lawyer and activist Khalida Jarrar was arrested by the Israeli police and jailed without charges. Placed in administrative detention, she has had the charges renewed for another six months. Given her health problems, her husband, Ghassan Jarrar, is concerned about her well being.

The Palestinian Feminist Movement is campaigning to have the charges against her dismissed. This story, by Gideon Levy, is from the August 30, 2024 edition of Haaretz.--The ATC editors....

Beyond the Internationale:
Revolutionary Writings by Eugene Pottier, Communard
Edited and Translated by Loren Kruger
Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Company, 2023,
150pp. $17 paperback.

BACK IN MY days of teaching U.S. history, I would pull out a tape recording made by an ancient friend, an erstwhile Trotskyist living out his last years outside Seattle, his singing in Yiddish with a piano accompaniment....

An Interview with Au Loong-Yu, Part II

Lunchtime in Guangzhou, China.

AU LOONG-YU IS A long-time Hong Kong labour rights and political activist. Author of China’s Rise: Strength and Fragility and Hong Kong in Revolt: The Protest Movement and the Future of China, Au now lives in exile. Speaking with Federico Fuentes for LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, Au discusses the factors that fueled China’s phenomenal economic rise, how they have begun to exhaust themselves, and the significance of the White Paper movement, which he argues heralds a new period in Chinese politics.

This is the second interview in a two-part series. The first interview covered the nature of China’s state,...

Notice the dial on the top right on the TTS. This was critical in justifying each line of type. Southwest Museum of Engineering, Communications and Computation, https://www.smecc.org/teletypes_in_typesetting.htm.

IN 1962, AS a young and rather aimless woman, I was hired by the Oakland Tribune to learn typesetting on the TTS — TeleTypeSetting machine — which attached a misbegotten contraption to a keyboard that punched holes into a sturdy ribbon. The ribbon was later fed into a similar misbegotten contraption on a Linotype, where it was set into actual type. That poor baby did not live long.

I thought it would be “exciting” to work in a newspaper. And indeed it was. I don’t recall what I earned in former jobs as a typist, but I can tell you I earned a lot more as a printer!...

Toomaj Salehi (Photo by Hosseinronaghi / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)

ALTHOUGH THIS JUNE the Iranian Supreme Court overturned the death sentence for dissident rapper Toomaj Salehi (33), rather than freeing him they sent his case back to a lower court.

Sentenced to death on April 24 for his participation in the “Woman Life Freedom” demonstrations, he has been severely tortured. Suffering from fractures in his hands and legs as well as an eye injury, Salehi is in solitary....