Against the Current No. 214, September/October 2021

TRUMP’S JANUARY 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol didn’t begin on that day, of course. It was prepared by the outgoing president’s feverish “stolen election” lies and bumbling lawsuits and cultish rightwing and social media disinformation in which a sizable sector of the Republican voting base has ensconced itself in a reality-free parallel ideological....

ANYONE WHO BELIEVED that in the arena of imperialist foreign policy at least, the Biden administration would be an improvement on the rampages of Trump, has come in for some rude awakenings. Biden’s no better and in some ways worse....

During the 2019 strike at GM, UAW members on the picket line said they wanted everyone to earn the same wages and benefits. Jim West

UNITED AUTO WORKERS (UAW) members have been scandalized as a dozen top officers were convicted in federal court of taking at least $3.5 million in illegal deals from FCA, kickbacks from vendors and/or stealing $1.5 million in union funds. Included were past and current International UAW presidents, Dennis Williams and Gary Jones. Although the other International Executive Board (IEB) members claim that these were “bad” apples, few believe the dozen could have managed by themselves.

Rory Gamble was quickly and unanimously elected by the IEB to serve out the rest of Jones’ term, ending in 2022. Gamble, the first African-American UAW International President, previously served as Region 1A Director for 12 years and Vice President in charge of the Ford Department since 2018. Although he comes....

ELEVEN HUNDRED BROOKWOOD coal miners have been out on strike since April 1st. They took concessions in their last contract, negotiated in 2016 with Warrior Met Coal after the previous owner Jim Walter Resources, went bankrupt. Agreeing to a range of concessions in order to keep the mine from closing, members of UMWA Locals 2245, 2397, 2368 and 2427 received a promise from the mine’s new owner that they would be rewarded in the next contract....

Comparing rise in world temperatures from 1951-80 period with those of June 2021. NASA

THE INTERGOVERNMENT PANEL on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group 1 has presented its Physical Basis Report as a contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report on climate change, due in early 2022.

The report and its summary are written in the precise style and vocabulary of scientific publications that make “objective” statements....

Fires blazing in the Oregon mountains. National Weather Service.

AS PEOPLE AROUND the country have seen on the news, ferocious fires are coming out of the Pacific northwest, particularly Washington, Oregon and California. Typically the wildfire season develops in August. This is what Oregonians expect and prepare for. However this year has been different. Spring was abnormally dry with low snowpack levels, adding to the persistent drought over the past 20 years....

[THE FOLLOWING NOTES are a very sketchy primer. It is not a detailed historical analysis nor a discussion of the Palestinian liberation struggle. The readings cited at the end provide some background and insight on these critical subjects.]...

EVEN BY THE degraded standards of Israeli jurisprudence, this Supreme Court “compromise offer” was particularly appalling as well as cowardly:

“Under the Israeli high court proposal, four Palestinian families and dozens of others threatened with forced expulsion from the [East Jerusalem}....

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett -- how long will this government last?

SUZI WEISSMAN INTERVIEWED Yoav Peled for her program on Jacobin Radio, June 21, 2021. The following are brief excerpts from his comments on the new Israeli governing coalition. Here is where the entire interview can be accessed.

I DON’T THINK the alternation (between Naftali Bennett and....

IT MAY BE no real surprise that ninety percent of people killed by U.S. drone strikes in Afghanistan (and elsewhere) weren’t supposed to be targets. And while it’s impossible to know, it might also be that the ferocity of U.S. air strikes on real-or-suspected Taliban targets may be contributing to the reported extreme brutality of the Taliban as they overrun more and more of the country with the chaotic U.S. military pullout.

We owe our detailed knowledge of the drone carnage to Daniel Hale, “a man of tremendous conscience, courage, and moral clarity” as described by The Intercept reporter Jeremy Scahill. Hale, like Chelsea Manning, is one of those ordinary-people-turned-heroes who didn’t leave his ethics at the door when he joined the military....

A NATIONAL STRIKE led by Indigenous Guatemalans, as well as an institutional crisis over the peremptory firing of anti-corruption prosecutor Juan Francisco Sandoval, are shaking that Central American country....

In addition to allowing more absentee voting because of the pandemic, some states had recently stipulated all who requested an absentee ballot receive one. Jim West

VOTING RIGHTS ARE under siege.

The right to vote without restrictions is an existential citizenship issue for African Americans. Other ethnic national minorities believe likewise. Progressive-minded whites also see the issue that way.

However, the Biden Administration does not. President Biden in a July 13 speech in Philadelphia attacked the Republican effort to overturn the will of the voters but laid out no action plan to stop it....

Civil War era photo of Thaddeus Stevens by Matthew Brady.

THE AMERICAN AND French Revolutions of the late 18th century opened an era marked by what Marxists call bourgeois-democratic revolutions.(1) These are struggles to overturn pre-capitalist social relations and institutions and to win “bourgeois-democratic rights” — rights, that is, that abet the development of capitalism or, at least, do not intrinsically challenge capitalism’s existence.

Such rights include national unification and independence; republican rather than monarchical....

EDITORS’ NOTE: This article appears in a collection of his essays, in French, Rosa Luxemburg, L'enticelle Incendiare (2018). Thanks to Paul Le Blanc for bringing it to our attention, and to Lynne Sunderman for translation.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article, if I remember well, was published around 1979 in the French Journal Quatrième Internationale. If I would rewrite it today, I would probably give greater emphasis on the positive side of Rosa Luxemburg’s and young Leon Trotsky’s views on political organization. But I still agree with the essential argument of the paper, bringing together both thinkers, as the....

The Benjamin Files
By Frederic Jameson
Verso Books, 2020, 272 pages, $29.95 hardcover.

IN THE ACADEMIC fields of cultural studies and critical theory, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is generally read in a particular way. He is more often than not mobilized to critique so-called “grand narratives,” to alert us to the ways narratives of historical progress paper over history’s more barbaric side, casting his dour gaze toward the cuts and the breaks that erode modern society’s pretensions to continuous improvement.

The dominant focus on these themes in Benjamin can hypostatize his thought as timelessly critical of political....