Against the Current

New York City demonstration calling for ceasefire and an end to the US-Israeli war in Gaza. Photo: Dan La Botz

SUPER TUESDAY, NIKKI Hayley’s presidential campaign, and Colorado’s hail-Mary effort to bar Donald Trump from the ballot all came and went. The United States of America hurtles, or stumbles, toward the November presidential choice that few people (outside the Trump cult) actually want. Either outcome — whether a Biden or Trump victory — is liable to be rejected as illegitimate by wide sectors of the population, opening up a potential deeper crisis. In regard to voting strategy, future issues of ATC will offer a range of perspectives.

We will explore here how dysfunction and looming chaos in U.S. bourgeois politics, and the existing and deepening global disorder,...

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....

Demonstration on Land Day 2024, Dearborn. This is an annual commemoration of Israeli seizure of Palestinian land in the Galilee (inside Israel) in 1976 and killing of six Palestinians in the subsequent protest. Photo: Giselle Gerolami

There is little doubt that Israel will respond to Iran’s launch of three hundred and twenty drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles on its territory with a major attack on Iran, and this for several reasons. The first is that the Zionist state escalated its attack on the “Islamic Republic” deliberately, by bombing the Iranian consulate adjacent to the Iranian embassy in Damascus. The whole world rightly saw in that attack a dangerous escalation of the low-intensity war that Israel has been waging against Iran for a few years, especially since the latter began expanding its own military network....

THE DANIEL SINGER Foundation has designated Boris Kagarlitsky as its first recipient of the “Prisoner of Conscience Award.”

Daniel Singer (1926-2000), a Jewish-Polish journalist and writer living in France, was a committed democratic socialist, and a sharp critic....

Writers and Missionaries:
Essays on the Radical Imagination
By Adam Shatz
New York: Verso, 2023, 357 pages,
$29 hardback.

The Rebel’s Clinic:
The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
By Adam Shatz
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2024, 451 pages, $32.00 hardback.

ARE YOU THE kind of socialist activist looking for easy answers to questions about revolutionary violence, or who hungers for uplifting political biographies of icons of radical commitment?...

[This text is edited from a speech Asma Aamir gave at the 13th International Meeting of the World March of Women, October 2023 in Ankara, Turkey. She speaks about Pakistani feminist movement’s history, their work and challenges.]

I WOULD LIKE to talk about Pakistan, a country that has no secular State. It is officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, run by the federal and provincial governments, following the Constitution of 1973. The Judiciary system is divided into civil courts, criminal courts and the Sharia court, which examine the laws of the country in compliance with the Islamic law and rights....

[UPDATE: Super Tuesday primary results in Minnesota show the “Uncommitted” movement spreading, with 19% of Democratic voters choosing that option. In Massachusetts, nine percent voted “No Preference” in the Democratic primary....

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....

Statement of the Ukraine Solidarity Network on the Second Anniversary
of Russia’s FulI-Scale Invasion of Ukraine

Two wars dominate world politics today – and the United States is involved in both, although in very different ways. Washington enables Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza with weapons, funds and political support while providing direct military backing through airstrikes in Yemen, Syria and Iraq. In Ukraine, however, the U.S. opposes Russia’s also-genocidal attack on its culture and people, and has provided weapons, funds, and political backing to the Ukraine government. Washington’s double standards and hypocrisy are obvious to the millions of people around the world who have taken to the streets in solidarity with Palestine.....

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....

Lavrov and Netanyahu Drawing by Sonia Mitralia

THOSE WHO STILL have doubts about the existence of "similarities" between the wars waged by Mr. Putin and Mr. Netanyahu against Ukraine and the Palestinians, respectively, can now be reassured that their doubts have been finally and irrevocably dispelled: Sergei Lavrov, Russia's Foreign Minister and Mr. Putin's right-hand man, categorically asserts to the official Russian news agency RIA Novosti,...

World Bank graphic illustrating that 480 million people lack food security.

THE WORLD BANK report on the debts of “developing countries,” published on December 13, 2023, reveals an alarming fact: in 2022, developing countries as a whole spent a record US$443.5 billion to pay for their external public debt.(1)

The 75 low-income nations that are eligible for loans from the International Development Association (IDA), a World Bank organization that provides loans to the world’s poorest nations, paid a record US$88.9 billion to its creditors in the same year....

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....

IN HIS CLASSIC "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," Karl Marx amends Hegel's quip on history repeating itself, first as tragedy and then as farce (1986 97). With the former Philippine dictator Marcos's son in office, will farcical acts be the spectacle for the next six years? Imagine the sons of Somoza, Trujillo or Batista returning to their banana republics -- that would indeed be "the tradition of all the dead generations" acting as toxic "nightmare on the brain of the living."

The oldest U.S. neocolony, the Philippines, was then plundered....

A DECADE AFTER the U.S. Supreme Court banned mandatory life without parole (LWOP) sentences for justice-involved children under age 18 ("juvenile lifers"), Michigan appellate courts are course-correcting years of arbitrary sentencing outcomes which have been an affront to the rule of law.

LWOP sentences are often referred to as a "death in prison" or "death by incarceration" sentences because a person who receives the extreme punishment is condemned to die in prison unless her/his sentence is commuted by the Governor, which is unlikely to occur in most cases.