Welcome to Against the Current

Massive demonstration in Pushkin Square, 1/23/21. Associated Press photo

WE ARE PUBLISHING Susi Weissman's interview with Ilya Budraitskis, conducted on February 5th (Moscow time) for Jacobin Radio.

SW: I'm very pleased to have Ilya Budraitskis speaking with us for the first time about the recent protest movement in Russia. He's a Moscow-based historian, political writer, cultural worker, and co-host of the podcast called Political Diary, which you can find online and listen to if you know Russian. Russia has been rocked by massive protests over the last few weeks. These are the first large protests since the ones that took place....

Last April, the G20 countries launched the idea of debt service suspension by poor countries until the end of 2020. What actually happened?

Measures taken by the G20 regarding debt relief are utterly insufficient as well as unacceptable since they involve intensifying neoliberal policies....

As activists orient to the post-election landscape, we’re having lots of conversations about building power for the long term. We’re taking stock of the types of power we need and how they can reinforce each other – narrative, organizing, mobilizing, and electoral power, to name a few. And despite the decline in union membership and strength, workers’ collective bargaining power also offers a means of making gains for broader communities. “Bargaining for the Common Good” (BCG) makes this real....

IN CALIFORNIA, THE Richmond Progressive Alliance won another stunning victory in this month’s local elections.

Richmond is a working class city of 110,000, 80 percent people of color, north of Oakland on the San Francisco Bay. It is home to a major Chevron refinery that has been the focus of political battles about Chevron’s pollution, Chevron’s special tax considerations, and Chevron’s political involvement....

THE CONTINUOUS GROWTH of Islamophobia in France can be understood both in view of its current socio-economic and political context as well as in its colonial and imperialist heritage. On the one hand, the French government is trying to make people forget its socio-economic difficulties by the policies of stigmatization and exclusion of Muslim populations. On the other hand, the "defence of religion and an authentic Islamic identity" serves as a screen on the political and economic agenda of Islamic fundamentalists....

TEN YEARS AGO, on 17 December 2010, a young street vendor in the town of Sidi Bouzid in central Tunisia sparked a political firestorm that soon engulfed the whole country, before spreading across the entire Arabic-speaking region, in what has been known since 2011 as the “Arab Spring.”

The initial months of that “spring” were euphoric: a wave of massive protests....

The confrontation between the Tigray People’s Liberation Front and the other components of Ethiopia’s leadership has erupted into armed conflict. What are the opportunities for peace and the risks for the region.

Since 2018, the new Ethiopian Prime Minister (PM), Abiy Ahmed has been presented as a champion of peace and democracy. He released political prisoners and relaxed control over the press. And he signed a peace accord with Eritrea. Under Abiy, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) which had dominated the regime since the overthrow of the dictatorship, was gradually pushed out of one commanding position after another. Abiy’s actions resonated with vast numbers of Ethiopians, who seemed to have given him a strong mandate to continue with his reform agenda and consolidate it....

SOCIALISMS
Revolutions betrayed, mislaid and unmade
By Ian Parker
Resistance Books, 192 pages, $15.

IAN PARKER IS an activist and academic based in Manchester in the north of England. On the basis of a vast political culture and radical commitment in struggles against all intertwined forms of oppression, he offers us a journey in time and space, anchored in eight stopovers  – Russia, Georgia, Serbia, North Korea, China, Cuba, Laos and Venezuela, They all “went through...

A permanent exile, a dissident Marxist, a lucid anti-fascist, Walter Benjamin died in Port-Bou 80 years ago, in September 1940, after an attempt to flee Vichy's France to Spain. Like thousands of other German Jewish and/or anti-fascist refugees, he was interned in a camp in the summer of 1939, at the beginning of World War II, as a “national of an enemy country.”...

Connecting Contemporary African-Asian Peacemaking and Nonviolence:
From Satagraha to Ujamaa
Vidya Jain and Matt Meyer (Eds.)
518 pages, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018.

Since readers might be curious we will begin this review by citing the definitions offered in the book itself of two words used in the title that will surely be unfamiliar to many:

“’Satagraha’— Sanskrit word meaning ‘truth-force,’ ‘soul-force’ or ‘love-force,’ popularized by Gandhi throughout India to suggest the establishment of power based on truth, soul, and love rather than on greed, individualism, and a striving for personal profit.”

“’Ujamaa’—Swahili word describing village-based socialistic practices. It was used prominently by Julius Nyerere of Tanzania in his effort to bring scattered peasant communities together in order to encourage collective production and provision of social services.”...