Against the Current No. 228, January/February 2024

The sequel -- not by popular demand.

IN A POLARIZED, angry, anxiety-and-crisis-ridden United States of America, wide swathes of a fragmented and divided electorate find common ground at least on what they don’t want: a 2024 repeat of a presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Yet eleven months in advance....

August 6, 1965: President Lyndon Johnson signs Voting Rights Act as MLK and others look on.

A FEDERAL COURT on November 20 issued a decision severely curtailing enforcement of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) that could affect voters of color nationwide and will probably be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The decision opens the door wider to a return to Jim Crow laws that once ruled the South. The laws made it nearly impossible for African American people to vote or function as equal citizens....

1865 — Adoption of 13th Amendment that abolished slavery,

1866 — Civil Rights Act gives citizenship to all born in the United States, although excluding the Indigenous population....

Garrett Brown on a United Farm Workers picket line while at the University of Chicago, 1976.

WITH A NEW generation of socialist activists entering the workforce to build unions and the socialist movement, experiences from 45 years ago may provide lessons about what works and what does not work when talking socialism on the job.

I joined the Young Socialist Alliance in 1971 and the Socialist Workers Party in 1973, resigning from the party in December 1983. I was a student activist in California, Massachusetts, and Illinois, before becoming the labor reporter for The Daily Calumet newspaper in southeast Chicago in 1976.

While a journalist at The Daily Calumet I covered the United Steel Workers of America (USWA) and Ed Sadlowski’s campaign for union president in 1976-77.

I was also a member of the SWP’s national “fraction” or subcommittee of USWA members, and wrote articles about the Steelworkers Fight Back campaign under the pen name of “Michael Gillespie” for the party’s newspaper, The Militant....

Demonstrators march in Detroit on October 25, demanding ceasefire for Gaza. Photo: Barbara Barefield

THE UNITED STATES’ December 8 veto of the UN Security Council emergency ceasefire resolution makes it all but official that the catastrophe engulfing Gaza and all of Palestine is a joint Israel-U.S. war of genocide. Compounding the monstrosity, the Biden administration immediately shipped hundreds of millions of dollars in new ammunition to Israel, not bothering with the formality of Congressional approval....

Rabbis for Ceasefire in Washington, DC. Instagram

[The broadside attacks launched in Congress against pro-Palestinian activism exploded into the headlines with demands for the resignations of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania who has already been forced out. The following account details a struggle unfolding at a major Midwestern public campus — ed.]

ON NOVEMBER 15, 2023 Representative Jim Banks (IN-03) sent Indiana University President Pamela Whitten a letter demanding information about antisemitic incidents at IU that had occurred following the horrifying October 7 Hamas attacks in Israel....

The newly elected Polish parliament lists strengthening the rights of women as its sixth highest priority. Will protests demanding the right to abortion break out again?

LED BY Law and Justice (PiS), the conservative and far-right parties maintained a firm grip on power in Poland until the fall of 2023 when, in October, the opposition won the parliamentary election. A new more liberal government was sworn in by the President in mid-December.

After eight years of conservative rule, one could expect that the shift of power would lead to dismantling the current restrictive abortion laws. However proponents of abortion rights should be advised to lower their expectations....

THE FIRES THAT burned the forests of western Canada through the spring, summer, and early fall of 2023 were the hottest, broadest and most destructive in the region’s recorded history. Two million eight hundred thousand hectares burned in British Columbia (BC) alone — twice the area burned during the previous record-breaking wildfire year of 2018.

The entire city of Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, was evacuated, as was the entire city of West Kelowna, and a number...

[DECEMBER 17 WAS THE Chilean voters' second rejection of a draft constitution. The first, discussed in detail in this article, rejected a strongly progressive draft by a commission with left and Indigenous participation. The second and recent rejection was a rightwing draft produced by a highly conservatively-dominated body. As a result of these rejections, the Pinochet-era constitution created by the dictatorship of 1973-89 remains in place.--ed.]