Against the Current No. 234, January/February 2025

THE ADVENT OF “Trump 2.0” poses dangers and challenges in U.S. society as well as globally — including the non-trivial problem of surviving environmental catastrophe — and most certainly to the social movement and socialist left. We will attempt here to sort through those elements of the swirling chaos that are pretty well known, and suggest where the uncertainties may lie. We know for sure that all our movements will be under attack — and it’s absolutely essential to stand together and refuse to be intimidated or divided. How extreme the assaults may become isn’t certain, and the strength of immediate resistance can make a big difference....

Judge Gorsuch's decision attempts to criminalize protest and solidarity actions. https://jimwestphoto.com

IN THE SPRING of 2024, students around the world set up Gaza solidarity encampments — at the same time that the U.S. Supreme Court took up the legality of camping on public lands.

The concurrence points to connections between rightwing opposition to pro-Palestine organizing and the ongoing....

Open letter to demand that MI Attorney General Nessel drop criminal charges against the U-M Encampment 11. TAHRIR Coalition www.tahrirumich.org

THE CAMPUS-BASED INTIFADA that swept college campuses during the winter and spring 2024 was an overwhelming show of solidarity with Palestine.

Demanding that universities sever economic and material connections with Israel’s genocide and apartheid in Palestine, students and workers marched, sat-in, “died-in,” disrupted military and weapons manufacturer recruitment fairs, protested graduation ceremonies, occupied buildings, and even went on strike in the case of UAW Local 4811 in California.

The intifada’s intensity and momentum temporarily knocked college administrators and powerful donors off-balance, and administrators struggled to respond to wave after wave of protest culminating in Gaza Solidarity Encampments last spring.

But if administrators were initially unprepared for the level of protest provoked by people’s anguish....

Ta-Nehisi Coates found the West Bank reminded him of the Jim Crow South.

TA-NEHISI COATES is a celebrated writer, journalist and public intellectual known for his works on racism and the Black freedom struggle.

Coates has been praised for his books and essays, including establishment publications. That would change after his 2023 visit to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories of Palestine, his first trip to the region.

As he says in his new book The Message (One World, October 2024, 250 pages):

“Writing is a powerful tool of politics. For positive action....

THE UKRAINE SOLIDARITY Network has issued this appeal:

Winter is coming to Ukraine, temperatures are dropping, but nearly 60% of the country’s electrical generating capacity has been knocked out by unrelenting Russian air strikes. After causing tens of thousands of civilian casualties, the Russians are bent on freezing every child, woman, and man.

The Ukraine Solidarity Network in the United States has teamed up with two Ukrainian trade unions, the Free Trade Union of Railway Workers and...

INTRODUCTION: As we enter a new political landscape following the election of Donald Trump, resistance to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and its bellicose military actions in the region takes on a greater urgency than ever before--even as political repression on US campuses intensifies....

Rachel Dawson

RACHEL DAWSON, A coordinator of diversity initiatives at the University of Michigan, was fired over allegations of “antisemitic remarks” reported to campus administration by the Anti-Defamation League. The accusations against Dawson (e.g. that she said Jewish students “are all rich”), are uncorroborated and denied....

CRUISING DOWN THE middle of the road, the Democratic Party handed Donald Trump and the political right the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. Looked at in percentage terms, the Republicans picked up support in just about every geographic and many demographic categories: urban; suburban; medium metros; small towns and rural areas; men; white non-college graduates; 18-29 year-olds; Black and Latino men; and those earning $50,000 or less a year....

p>This statement by Anticapitalistas [Spain] on the fall of Al-Assad in Syria was translated and pubished Wednesday 11 December 2024 in English on the International Viewpoint website.

THE ASSAD REGIME has fallen in Syria and the former dictator has gone into exile in Russia. Events have moved in rapid succession and in 11 days, the kleptocracy that seemed to have stabilized its rule has collapsed with a crash....

IN THE SPRING of 2023, there was a budding hope in the Chicago political left. In the final days before the election, Brandon Johnson held a large rally with Bernie Sanders, packed with supporters who lined up to get in. Many wore black market Brandon t-shirts that had popped up in an online store soon after Johnson made it to the run-off. City officials had decades ago discarded parties and primaries for municipal races to undercut progressive Black candidates from following in Harold Washington's footsteps, but Brandon Johnson seemed like he could maybe still win....

MARTA HARNECKER’s REBUILDING the Left is a major influence in my thinking in this article. In that book, she synthesizes lessons for the Left from her direct experience within socialist governments like Allende in Chile and Chavez in Venezuela, as well as her study of “Pink Tide” governments throughout Latin America in the 21st Century, and failed left governments of the 20th Century.

Her view of a “new political instrument” is an organization that can synthesize between politicians and social movements, between indirect and direct lessons....

A Darker Wilderness
Edited by Erin Sharkey
Milkweed Editions 2023, 312 pages, $20 paper.

“This God who made the sun, who brings us light from above, who rouses the sea, and who makes the storm rumble will direct our hands, and give us help. Throw away the image of the god of the whites who thirsts for our tears. Listen to the liberty that speaks in all our hearts.” —Dutty Boukman, Haitian revolutionary and Voudon spiritual leader

ONE OF MY best friends is from Kalamazoo, a western Michigan city not far from the powerful Lake Michigan. The city of Kalamazoo boasts how it is a regional center of the pharmaceutical industry that has grown....

The Black Antifascist Tradition:
Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition
By Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen
Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2024, 280 pages, $24.95 paperback.

AT A WRITERS conference in Brooklyn during the 1980s, the novelist John A. Williams explained to his audience the inspiration for Clifford’s Blues, his novel about an African American musician imprisoned in Dachau.

Williams had seen a photograph, surprising to him, of a Black man in a concentration camp. His agent cautioned him to be sure about what he had seen if he intended to write a realistic story. The advice spurred Williams to conduct research and learn about Black prisoners in Nazi Germany....

The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women and Girls:
A Black Feminist Approach to Healing from Sexual Abuse
By Dr. Jennifer M. Gómez, American Psychological Association, 2023.
$40 paperback.

DR. JENNIFER M. Gómez’s premier work, The Cultural Betrayal Trauma of Black Women and Girls: A Black Feminist Approach to Healing from Sexual Abuse, is a radical advancement of psychological theory, practice, and research around trauma and healing for women who have experienced sexual violence within marginalized communities.

Gómez identifies sexual violence committed within marginalized communities as particularly harmful because of group dynamics. For example,...

The Regulation of Desire:
Queer Histories, Queer Struggles
By Gary Kinsman
Revised third edition, Montreal: Concordia University Press, 2023. Distributed in the USA by University of Chicago Press, 480 pages, $49.95 paperback.

THE PUBLICATION OF the third edition of Gary Kinsman’s The Regulation of Desire is an opportunity to mark the contribution of this path-breaking classic of queer Marxism. It is characteristics of Gary Kinsman’s work that the two subsequent editions (1996 and 2023) each involved substantial and creative reworking to integrate new thinking and challenges emerging from activist movements.

I would consider my relationship to The Regulation of Desire to be rather personal. It was a crucial resource....

Radioactive Radicals:
A Novel of Labor and the Left
By Dan La Botz
Booklocker.com, 2024, 738 pages. $29.99 paper.

RADIOACTIVE RADICALS BY Dan La Botz presents a sprawling, sometimes chaotic, panoramic overview of the author’s experiences and lessons learned in the left political movement that was birthed in the 1960s.

The novel is written as a roman a clef, i.e. based on the real people the author knew, worked with and engaged with politically, but with their stories told through characters whose fictional presentations both mirror and differ from the individuals on which they are based....

Rosa Luxemburg: The Incendiary Spark
Essays by Michael Löwy
Edited by Paul Le Blanc with a foreword by Helen C. Scott.
Translated by Dan La Botz, Paul Le Blanc, and Lynne Sunderland
Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2024, $19.95 paperback.

DURING THE FIRST two decades of the 20th century, Rosa Luxemburg was one of European socialism’s most trenchant Marxist thinkers and controversial political activists. Born in 1871 in Zamosc, a small town in Congress Poland, she was raised in Warsaw in a Reform Jewish family of modest means.

Growing up in a household that opposed the Tsarist regime and supported the education of girls, Rosa became a precocious student fluent in Polish, Russian, German and (later on) French. She joined Poland’s budding illegal....

The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg
Volume IV, Political Writings
On Revolution 1906-1909
Edited by Peter Hudis and Sandra Reom
Translated by Jacob Blumenfeld, Nicholas Gray, Henry Holland,
Zachary King, Manuela Kolke and Joseph Muller
Verso, 2024, 576 pages, $39.95 paperback.

Rosa Luxemburg (right) with Clara Zetkin, in 1910.

THE TITLE OF this review will strike many on the left as a baleful characterization of Luxemburg’s politics. Does the reviewer not know that in her famous 1904 essay Organizational Questions in Russian Social Democracy Luxemburg (and the Mensheviks) denounced Lenin and the Bolsheviks for adopting Blanquist organizational principles, where a dictatorial party lords over a working class, directing it toward socialism, thereby violating Marx and Engels’ injunction that the emancipation of the working class must be the task of the working class?

Now, in the aftermath of the 1905 Russian Revolution, Luxemburg reversed her position.

Luxemburg recollected....