Against the Current

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....

War on Gaza, 2nd installment

AFTER ISRAEL’s RECENT assault on Gaza began, Joe Sacco (a “moral draughtsman” in the words of Christopher Hitchens) was compelled to speak out against Israel’s war. At the Comics Journal, Sacco contributed The War on Gaza from January to July. Sacco’s bravery should serve as an example for other cartoonists to follow. Introducing the series, Comics Journal publisher Gary Groth said “It is surely....

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....

THIS OPINION PIECE by Cliff Conner is an additional contribution to the discussion in ATC 232, where we have published three statements by Dan La Botz, Howie Hawkins, and Kit Wainer on the strategic choices facing the progressive and socialist left in the November presidential election. We will be continuing to cover the dysfunction and potential crisis of legitimacy in the U.S. political system.

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....

Arab Spring Movements Graph: Wikipedia

THIS TEXT IS an edited transcript from the author’s podcast. Gilbert Achcar is the author of several of books on the Middle East and North Africa, including The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (2013) and Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising (2016 ). His most recent book is The New Cold War. The United States, Russia, and China from Kosovo to Ukraine (Haymarket Books, 2023). Here is where you can follow his columns and other podcasts....

The house is burning. Textile: Oksana Briukhovetska

Joint declaration by ecosocialist, anarchist, feminist, environmental organisations, and groups in solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance and for a self-determined social and ecological reconstruction of Ukraine.

This declaration has been launched jointly by Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement) in Ukraine, Posle Media Collective in Russia, Bewegung für den Sozialismus / Mouvement pour le Socialisme and solidaritéS – mouvement anticapitaliste, féministe, écosocialiste in Switzerland, emanzipation – Zeitschrift für ökosozialistische Strategie (DE, AT, CH), 4 June 2024....

OSU President Walter “Ted” Carter, also known as “Top Gun” from his career as a naval aerial gunner.

OFTEN FORGOTTEN TODAY is that the massive anti-war protests of 1968-70 grew from foundations of more than a decade. Today’s actions began almost spontaneously with some pre-pandemic roots in Black Lives Matter and Diversity-Equity-and-Inclusion movement.

An appearance of a new anti-Gaza War and innocent Palestinian lives movement is just emerging with a “campus encampment movement” in the wake of Columbia’s violent New York City. Arrests in total have passed 3200....

Why is the G7 discussing Ukraine’s debt?

For more than a year, the leaders of the main powers allied against Russia following its invasion of Ukraine have been debating at the G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States), but they have been unable to reach agreement on how to finance the war and the reconstruction of Ukraine.

It should be noted that as part of the sanctions imposed by NATO members, the Russian Federation’s financial assets in Western...

It’s been two and a half years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade. The dystopian landscape that many activists feared has indeed materialized with 14 states banning abortion, while seven more have severely restricted the procedure – for example, banning abortions after six weeks or 15 weeks -- in ways that would have been illegal under the Roe v. Wade decision in effect from 1973-2022....