Against the Current

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

Written in Honor of Noam Chomsky....

Student encampments sprung up on campuses across the country in opposition to genocide in Gaza.

WHILE THE GENOCIDAL Israeli-United States war on Gaza and Palestine continues — amidst all kinds of diplomatic posturing and UN resolution-splicing — the one really hopeful development is the outpouring of activism in many U.S. communities, most visibly the magnificent movement on college campuses organized in encampments demanding an immediate permanent ceasefire, and divestment from corporations tied to Israel’s machinery of massacre and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people....

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....

Prime Minister Narendra Modi: Can his plan for Hindutva be stopped? Photo: Official Portrait

THERE IS A tremendous euphoria, a little bit of which is legitimate, after the election results. The elections of 2024 were the least democratic in Indian history. The state apparatus, including the anti-corruption branch, political police, tacitly the Election Commission of India, (which refused to take action against the Prime Minister despite his aggressive communal campaign), were all pressed into service.

The bulk of the mainstream media, especially most television channels, were likewise going all out for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA, led by Modi’s BJP), with particular stress on Modi and how he was going to win an immense victory....

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.)....

WE, THE UNDERSIGNED organisations, are deeply concerned over the prosecution of three activists in Singapore for organising Palestine solidarity action.

The three pro-Palestine solidarity activists, Annamalai Kokila Parvathi, Siti Amirah Mohamed Asrori, and Mossammad Sobikun Nahar, were charged in court on 27th June 2024, under the Public Order Act for organising an assembly or procession without a permit related to the Palestine solidarity actions on 2nd February 2024..../p>

The Starbucks Elmwood store in Buffalo, NY was the first store to win their union, inspiring workers across the country to begin their union campaigns.

THE U.S. SUPREME Court sided with Starbucks in a June 13 decision that will make it harder for labor advocates to win court injunctions against employers engaged in anti-labor practices, in this case firing union organizers.

The Supreme Court, an unelected body appointed for life and controlled by hard right extremists, ruled for the employing class against workers at the large coffee brewing company....

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...

Sudan Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas

ON 15 APRIL 2023, violence erupted in Sudan’s capital Khartoum following weeks of growing tensions between the leader of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemedti). Amidst the power struggle between the rival factions that make up the military government, hundreds of people have been killed, thousands injured and millions displaced.

Red Pepper: What is happening in Sudan today?

Muzan Alneel: There’s a war taking place in a number of Sudanese....

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....

ALL TOO OFTEN in the fog of war, the brutality of sexual assault and rape is lost in the public eye, and bringing these abuses to light is something for which feminists have fought for decades. Complicating this issue, however, is the fact that accusations of sexual assault have also been wielded as a tool of war – and as an (often lethal) weapon of racism and colonialism....

AS THE WORLD watches in horror over the mounting death toll of Palestinian civilians and Israel faces charges before the International Court of Justice for the Crime of Genocide, the carnage in Gaza gives us a ghastly window into the rapidly escalating crisis of global capitalism. Connecting the dots from the merciless Israeli destruction of Gaza to this global....

There has been an upsurge of interest in degrowth –a long-discussed strategic alternative to climate chaos and not just from the radical left. It is experiencing a renaissance at the moment, driven by the relentless rise in global temperatures and the resulting climate chaos.

It was the theme of a three-day....