Against the Current magazine

01/03/2024

"As we go to press, the Israeli military says its full-scale assault on Rafah will proceed unless all hostages are released by the start of Ramadan. Meanwhile, even though U.S. mainstream media are showing much less than what most of the world sees, the daily livestream of the destruction of Gaza and Palestine continues. So in the year 2024, we can now say that 'this is what genocide looks like' — and that we will be living with the consequences for decades."

ATC #229, our March/April 2024 issue, is now available online and in print.

22/02/2024

"Resolving the conflict in a lasting manner demands a transferal of perspective to some qualitatively new plan: whether two states (one Palestinian, one Jewish), one state (democratic and secular), or some sort of federation (with culturally autonomous regions), as long as Palestinians achieve self-determination and are no longer the stateless dependents of a hostile state power."

Alan Wald is an editor of Against the Current and a member of the Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace since 2016.

28/11/2023

Central to the organizing at both UPS and the Detroit Three was the call for the membership to shape their demands and prepare for their implementation in innovative of ways. Workers were encouraged to tell their stories so that the broader working class understood and supported their struggle.

Visit the post for more.

08/11/2023

ATC #227 is here! 🔥 Our new issue features a series of articles on the need for consistency in anti-imperialist politics, whether we're talking about Palestine, Ukraine, China or elsewhere. Plus: Reports from recent labor actions, privatization of healthcare, and more!

08/10/2023

"Wearing a T-shirt with the UAW logo and the slogan “Eat the Rich,” Fain said the strategy of escalation is working. Paraphrasing a Walter Reuther comment about negotiating with GM, Fain remarked that the strategy is designed to keep up the pressure so that the corporations will say YES when they want to say NO."

Going into the fourth week of the UAW strike, GM got serious when it dawned on them that workers at its most profitable plant, in Arlington, Texas, were about to join the picket lines. Instead of c…

23/09/2023

Friday, September 22 — As the UAW strike enters the second week, President Shawn Fain pointed to the enthusiastic picket lines at the three plants that are on strike. Strikers at plants withi…

21/09/2023

With the auto strike nearing the one-week mark, UAW President Shawn Fain will announce by noon Friday, September 22 that in addition to the three plants UAW workers struck when the contract expired, additional UAW workers will walk out of their plants if significant negotiations have not taken place.

This strike strategy, dubbed the “Stand Up Strike,” recalls the sitdown strikes of the 1930s. It places maximum pressure on the Detroit Three to meet UAW demands.

August 20 rally: Stellantis worker Kiada Shanklin (wearing T-shirt saying “I have three major reasons to strike”) and her three children with UAW President Shawn Fain (far right). Photo…

11/09/2023

Today, September 11, marks 50 years since the U.S.-backed assassination of Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973. His "Chilean way to socialism" emphasized democratic, peaceful and institutional means to achieve the profound economic and social transformation.

Read more about Allende, Allendismo and "The Original 9/11," in this piece from Oscar Mendoza, who witnessed Allende's thrilling ascent and brutal demise firsthand, prior to his political deportation in 1975.
https://againstthecurrent.org/atc226/chile1973-the-original-9-11/

07/09/2023

Our September/October issue is available online and in-print! 🔥

ATC #226 features Kim Moody and Barry Eidlin analyzing the Teamsters' UPS contract, reporting on the UAW and the recently resolved Graduate Employees' Organization 3550 strike, a "look under the hood" on capitalist and socialist approaches to banking, and more.

Pick up a copy, discuss with your coworkers, and join in the discussion on our articles' comment sections!

28/06/2023

"A FIELD GUIDE TO WHITE SUPREMACY [is] a lightning strike against any complacency within or without the academy that racism is merely Trumpism, or that both are somehow 'over' since the 2020 election," Bill V. Mullen writes.

A Field Guide to White Supremacy Edited by Kathleen Belew and Ramón A. Gutiérrez University of California Press, 2022. 424 pages, $24.95 paper. IT’S A WELCOME thing for the Left…

26/06/2023

"Music for Frank Hamilton is folk art, a collective activity created from the bottom up by people who are not taking orders or trying to be someone else. It’s socialist, made for use not for profit."

Left to right on guitar, banjo and guitar the three vagabonds who hitchhiked through the South collecting songs in the 50s: Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Frank Hamilton, and Guy Carawan. Taken at the…

21/06/2023

"While anti-trans bills are promoted by the right as an attempt to “protect the children,” they do just the opposite: gender-affirming care has been shown to lower the rate of depression and su***de among trans and nonbinary youths by respectively 60% and 73%. These proposed bills and legislations have palpable negative effects on the mental health of trans and nonbinary people."

ON MARCH 4 at the Conservative Political Action Conference, right-wing commentator Michael Knowles called for transgenderism to be “eradicated from public life entirely.” His violent re…

19/06/2023

WHAT DOES AN 1873 “anti-obscenity” law have to do with women’s rights today? It may be a zombie, but the Comstock law lives on...

Robert Minor’s cartoon, making fun of Anthony Comstock: “Your honor, this woman gave birth to a naked child.” The Masses, September 1915 WHAT DOES AN 1873 “anti-obscenity&rd…

19/06/2023

An open letter for the São Paolo Forum / Foro de São Paulo, from denationalized participants of the Nicaraguan Revolution:

>> "Daniel Ortega and what is left of the Sandinista Front present themselves as leftist and anti-imperialist, but, far from that proclaimed discourse, many years ago they began a process of abandoning their principles, through corruption, alliances with the worst right-wing forces of the country, strengthening of a neoliberal model that increases the already enormous inequalities and misery of the population, and concentration of political and economic power in his family and close associates."

Dora María Téllez in 1979, former Commander 2. In relation to the meeting of the Forum in Brasilia, from June 29 to July 2, 2023 We, the signatories of this letter — participants of the strug…

15/06/2023

"Faced with the mildest of criticism from Vancouver City Hall, VPD Chief Palmer planned a cynical manipulation of the lives of unhoused people as political instruments to expand the power and influence of the police, making a play for greater autonomous power (and funding) within the Canadian state apparatus."

Police start a right outside Carnegie Community Center, Vancouver, Canada, August 9, 2022. Ben Neims / BY THE HEIGHT of summer 2022, as fires burned a record number of residential hotels…

13/06/2023

Free Efrén Paredes, Jr.! Against The Current supports freedom for Efrén Paredes Jr. and the campaign to abolish the inhumane practice of sentencing Michigan minors to death in prison. Please re-share and circulate widely in your network.

From within the Michigan prison system Efrén Paredes, Jr. advocates for prisoner rights. NEARLY A DECADE after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark Miller v. Alabama ruling which forbids mand…

12/06/2023

"As socialists analyzing the geopolitical and economic ramifications of China’s entrenchment in the global neoliberal system, we must not lose sight of the on-the-ground impact of China’s overseas investments," Robert Connell writes, drawing from his ethnographic, political, and ecological research.

Maroon community and visitors celebrate in Accompong, 2017. Robert Connell SINCE ITS FOUNDING in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global infrastructural development project of the People…

08/06/2023

"Wokeism is democratic, and radical. It should be proudly said and defended," Malik Miah writes.

WE LIVE IN a surreal reality. Those of us who argue for truth-telling about history are attacked as practicing a nonexistent “wokeism” as described by Florida Republican Governor Ron De…

06/06/2023

"A question has bedeviled the left: Is it possible to support both the Ukrainian and Palestinian struggles, and oppose imperialism, at the same time?

Actually, the question should be reversed: How is it possible for a genuinely internationalist left NOT to support both of these struggles for self-determination and national survival?"

Palestinian and Ukrainian flags Embassy of Palestine in Ukraine EXPLODING OVER THE past year, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s escalating violence and ethnic cleansing in Palestin…

01/05/2023

Happy May Day, International Workers Day! 🌹 Our publication was started by radicals who embedded themselves in the shop floor to support the self-organization of the working class, and has covered labor issues since our beginnings. Today and all days, we celebrate worker militancy around the world!

Our May/June 2023 issue features a new piece from Barry Eidlin on the historic 2022 University of California strike:

>> "As academic worker unionism continues to sweep across campuses in the months and years ahead, the UC strike offers important lessons for the path forward. At a basic level, it has shown how transformative a strike can be, even when workers don’t win all their demands [... Through struggle,] workers figure out who they are, what they want, and how they want to get it. You can’t figure that out through surveys and carefully managed focus groups."

The UC strike was a struggle for dignity and equity. Xinhua ACADEMIC WORKERS ARE on the move. Just in the past year, academic workers at 25 campuses including over 25,000 workers unionized, includi…

17/04/2023

"The back story to the election is a political shift that resulted from the 2012 CTU strike which electrified the city and beyond. The victory of the caucus of rank-and-file educators (CORE: The Caucus of Rank and File Educators) in two years before in the CTU election galvanized the existing progressive community organizations and led to their working together."

IN IN STUNNING rebuke to the political establishment in Chicago and around the country, Brandon Johnson, a Cook County commissioner, former teacher, and organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union de…

14/04/2023

"Thus, the Democrats have lost voters among both relatively poorer working-class people and well-to-do suburbanites as well as among Blacks, Latinas/os, and women. Clearly neither money nor moderation, much less running on Biden’s record, can save the opportunist political center from itself as it faces a Republican Party in which the extreme battle the merely ultra-conservative."

Whatever the general rate of turnout, Black voters came out at a lower rate than white voters. It’S GRIDLOCK. SPECIFICALLY, it’s still a right-versus-center impasse, but with a shift to…

12/04/2023

Janey Stone's “Revolutionaries, Resistance Fighters and Firebrands: The Radical Jewish Tradition" (Marxist Left Review, 2022) provides readers with an understanding of a suppressed history that "will strengthen their — our — efforts to build a mass radical Jewish culture outside of the extant communal infrastructure, which is controlled in large part by philanthropists, federations and other bourgeois forces," Jake Ehrlich writes.

“Revolutionaries, resistance fighters and firebrands. The radical Jewish tradition.” By Janey Stone. “Abolish Child Slavery” banner, May Day parade, 1906. AMONG PROGRESSIVE JEWS in the …

15/03/2023

"Lately in the West, the sentiment on the prospects of a peaceful end to the war imposed on the Ukrainian people is heard more and more often. But are such negotiations possible, and who would benefit from them? And does Putin actually want peace?"

Translated from Ukrainian, Denys Bondar and Zakhar Popovych contribute "Views from the Ukranian Left" to our latest issue.

INTRODUCTION: THE FOLLOWING article was originally published in Ukrainian on November 22, 2022.(1) Subsequent developments have only reconfirmed its arguments. Recently, it has become a commonplace…

08/03/2023

Today, March 8 is International Women's Day. To honor this occasion, our March/April issue always features a focus on feminist struggles.

In this article, Dianne Feeley provides a succinct retrospective of the struggle for bodily autonomy in the United States:

>> "The struggle for bodily autonomy opens up a discussion about how people live our lives. For socialists who demand a world where human beings can live without exploiting others and in harmony with our environment, this is a struggle with revolutionary implications."

1971 Women’s Abortion Action Committee protest Austin, Texas Howard Petrick TWENTIETH-CENTURY PRE-ROE America was a scary world for women. Pregnancy and childbirth were destiny. When I was in…

06/03/2023

Our latest issue features an extensive interview with Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, founder and director of AMED Studies at SFSU.

She discusses her Teaching Palestine project that articulates connections between the colonial struggles of Palestine, Tunisia, and Lebanon, the current state of reaction in Israel, and the implications of U.S. imperialism for global solidarity.

Read more at https://againstthecurrent.org/atc223/witness-resilience-accountability/

01/03/2023

Indigenous resistance, International Women's Day series on global struggles, a Ukrainian leftist viewpoint, Palestine solidarity., and more...

🌹 ATC #223 is now available in-print and online! 🌹

31/01/2023

"Black police officers are servants of the same violent racist system as white cops. Black police officers know when in civilian clothes they are treated like all Black people with racial contempt.

The root of police culture is white supremacy and racism/national oppression. The original sin of the United States, written into the Constitution, is acceptance of slavery (and the extra political power given to slaveholders) and national oppression of Black people and other nonwhite populations. [...]

Memphis makes [it] clear. Cops are cops no matter their skin color. Police violence reflects the internalization of racist ideology."

What it says about policing and why abolition is only answer. ANOTHER BLACK MAN was murdered by police in a modern-day lynching in Memphis, Tennessee. The city is nearly 70 percent African American…

24/01/2023

"The politics of deference assumes all oppressed people are a monolith. If white activists are encouraged to 'listen to the Black voices in the (coalition) room' then they usually aren’t encouraged to question 'which Black voices should we follow?' [...]

The constructive politics that Táíwò is yearning for needs a class analysis about how low-income, subsistence-income and no-income folks are pushed out of the institutions of this profit-based society — or given shoddy and detrimental versions of these institutions..."

Owólabi Aboyade reviews ELITE CAPTURE by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Haymarket Books, 2022)

Elite Capture By Olúfémi O. Táíwò Haymarket Books, 2022, 168 pages, $16.95 paper. Elite Capture by Olúfémi O. Táíwò makes criti…

22/01/2023

An endorsement from a younger comrade:

"ATC is a strong publication with a great history & editorial line. Its origins lie in 1970s radicalism - particularly socialist groups deploying cadre to factory work and multiracial coalition building - and the desire to transcend narrow sectarian thinking.

As a result, the thought is sophisticated but presented accessibly. There's not an excess of theory jargon, but there are deep dive articles. In the era of knee-jerk insta politics, this a publication that deserves exploration -- for both new issues and the archives, available on the website."

Pictured: ATC #113 (Nov/Dec 2004)