Against the Current No. 232, September/October 2024
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Slouching Toward November
— The Editors - On the 2024 Election: Three Views
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Why Socialists Must Defeat Trump
— Dan La Botz -
Socialist Support of the Green Party
— Howie Hawkins -
What Question Are We Answering?
— Kit Wainer -
Sonya Massey Killed by Illinois Police
— Malik Miah -
The Indus Water Treaty
— Mohammad Ebad Athar & Mona Bhan -
Bureaucracy, Emigration & Broken Lives -- A Narrow Gate
— Kristin Ferebee -
"No Fist Is Big Enough to Hide the Sky": 100 Years of Amilcar Cabral
— B. Skanthakumar -
The Past Is Present
— Oscar Hernández - Review Essay
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Cause at Heart: Socialists & the Abolition of Antisemitism
— Alan Wald - Essay on Lenin
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Lenin's Perspective: What Exactly Does It Mean to Vote — Part 2
— August H. Nimtz - Reviews
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Colonial Myth, Reality & Modernity
— Robert Connell -
Turning Left in the Heartland
— Lyle Fulks -
Universities Weaponized: The Case of Israel
— Michael Principe
Slouching Toward November
— The Editors
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!”...
"No Fist Is Big Enough to Hide the Sky": 100 Years of Amilcar Cabral
— B. Skanthakumar
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....
From ATC authors and friends
Joe Sacco: Comics for Palestine
— Hank Kennedy
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
Recovering Eugene Pottier: The “Internationale” and its Communard Lyricist
— Paul Buhle
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....
A Marxist Case for Voting for Kamala Harris
— Cliff Conner
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.
The Struggle Over the Power Vacuum Continues in Bangladesh
— Badrul Alam
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....
The Beginning of the End of China’s Rise?
— Federico Fuentes interviews Au Loong-Yu
An Interview with Au Loong-Yu, Part II
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,...
Cause at Heart: Socialists & the Abolition of Antisemitism
— Alan Wald
“…the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe.”
—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952Written in Honor of Noam Chomsky....
Recalling the ITU: A Militant & Democratic Union
— Linda Kerth
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!...
Solidarity & Unity Vs. Far-Right Violence
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....
Judicial Harassment Vs. Toomaj Salehi Continues
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....
The Crisis is Permanent: Middle East and North Africa After 2011
— Gilbert Achcar
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....
Ukraine: A People's Peace, Not an Imperial Peace
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....
"Resistance Work" of Women Workers
— Catherine Samary
‘Travailleuses de la résistance.
Les classes populaires ukrainiennes face à la guerre
By Daria Saburova, 2024.
Available from the publisher's website.
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.)....
New Campus Wars, 2024: A View from Ohio State
— Harvey J. Graff
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....
G7: Suspend Ukrainian Debt Payments -- Or Not
— Eric Toussaint
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...
Abortion Rights After Dobbs: The State of the Struggle
— Johanna Brenner
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....