Against the Current

Election 2024: What are our options?

FACING THE HIDEOUS specter of a second Trump presidency, the operational leadership of the Democratic Party — that is, the party mega-donors — ultimately took the reins and pushed aside its all-too-visibly declining incumbent standard-bearer. From the voting base on July 21 came the instant response: “Free at last, free at last  thank God Almighty (and Covid), we’re free of Biden at last!”...

Amilcar Cabral at the 1964 Cassacá Congress.

ANTI-COLONIALIST AND anti-imperialist, party organizer and guerilla warfare strategist, diplomat and publicist, revolutionary theorist and internationalist, Amílcar Cabral was among the most original Marxists of the 20th century.

Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral was born on September 12, 1924 in the town of Bafata in Portuguese Guinea, wedged between what was....

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.

ON AUGUST 5, AT 2:30 pm, Sheikh Hasina resigned from her post as prime minister and fled with some of her Special Security Forces by helicopter to India. She is now in Delhi, and some reports indicate that she wants to go to London for political asylum, but Britain is refusing her entry because of her human rights violations....

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,...

“…the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe.”
—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952

Written in Honor of Noam Chomsky....

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!...

Anti*Capitalist Resistance statement on far-right violence sweeping Britain and Northern Ireland in August 2024

1. The tragic murder of three young children by a 17-year old in Southport in July 2024 has been manipulated by opportunistic fascist forces to organise a series of riots across England. They have kick started a response from across the organised workers’ movement and threatened Muslim communities....

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....

‘Travailleuses de la résistance.
Les classes populaires ukrainiennes face à la guerre
By Daria Saburova, 2024.
Available from the publisher's website.

Daria Saburova

DARIA SABUROVA HAS written a fascinating three-month wartime field study of the Ukrainian mining town of Krivih Rih (which happens to be the home town of president Zelensky). It focuses on the voluntary “resistance work” of working-class women in this town. (For now, Resistant Work’ of Women Workers. The Ukrainian working classes in the face of war is in French only.)....

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....