Reeking of Imperial Hubris Seizing upon what they consider to be a generational opportunity, with Iran’s theocratic dictatorship shaken by the January people’s uprising, Trump and Netanyahu launched a “prolonged” attack from the air on February 28. While the attacks are aimed, they say, at eliminating Iran’s nuclear and [...]
A few weeks after the epochal fall of the Assad dictatorship, Syria remains in flux. It could not be otherwise after 53 years of the strangulation of civil and political life under one of the world’s most murderous regimes. Nonetheless, some broad outlines of where Syria is going can [...]
As French parliamentary elections pushed the leftist New Popular Front into first place, a pleasant sort of shock greeted revolutionary and progressive-minded people in France and around the world who had feared the triumph of the neofascist National Rally party. To be sure, recent elections in India and Turkey [...]
In response to the police murder of a 17-year-old youth, Nahel Merzouk, in the banlieue [variously translated as working class suburb, or even “inner city”] of Nanterre outside Paris, marginalized youth across the country engaged in nearly a week of clashes on the streets with police. [...]
While all eyes have turned to Trump’s fascist coup attempt in Washington, and rightly so, the political earthquake that has occurred in Georgia since November should not be forgotten. Not only did Joe Biden eke out a victory in the November presidential election, but the January Senate runoff elected two [...]
The U.S. remains a deeply polarized country, with a very large racist following for a far-right party, Trump’s Republicans. At the same time, people of color, the working class, women, and youth, the LGBT community, Native Americans, and environmentalists have mobilized at levels not seen since the 1960s — in the Sanders campaign, the Black Lives Matter uprising, the immigrant rights movement, and in so many other ways. We are at a crossroads.
This spring, as some countries began to reopen after months of COVID-19 lockdowns, youthful rebellions broke out inside the two most powerful states in the world, the USA and China. The Black youth of Minneapolis, their allies, and countless others across the USA expressed their anger on the streets over yet another police murder, which was one too many. During the same days, the youth of Hong Kong renewed their protests against new anti-democratic moves by the Chinese government. The US protests, which grew into a massive nationwide Black Lives Matter uprising, also had a major international impact.
Luxemburg’s 1906 pamphlet, “The Mass Strike,” analyzed the essentially spontaneous character of the gigantic strikes that accompanied the Russian revolution of 1905, and it showed that the workers learned and developed in the course of the struggle, not only strategy and tactics, but also revolutionary ideas. In a similar vein, she also wrote a stinging critique of Lenin’s more top-down concept of revolutionary organization, in a famous response to his writings on the vanguard party to lead. Also in this vein, Luxemburg penned an essay offering critical support to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, with her criticism centering mainly on the establishment of a single-party state, something she accurately predicted would undermine the democratic aims of the revolution.
