If there is one dominant philosophy in the modern world that embraces both left and right (not to mention post-modernism) that philosophy is pragmatism. As a philosophy pragmatism is really quite simple. If you want to eat a bowl of soup, and the choice is between using a fork or a spoon, you will choose the spoon because it will do the job best.

On September 23, 2009, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the blatant thief of the June Iranian presidential elections, visited New York City to attend the United Nations summit conference. In opposition to his presence there, thousands of Iranian exiles, students, youths, activists, and women, young and old alike demonstrated in front of the United Nations building.

Khalfani Malik Khladun is a New Afrikan political prisoner who is incarcerated a the Westville Detention Center in Illinios. He is one of the leading voices from inside the prison walls against the abuses of the U.S. criminal injustice system. We call on our readers to support his struggle for exoneration.

The following statement by the US Marxist-Humanists, London Corresponding Committee and international Marxist-Humanists from Canada, India, and West Africa is a contribution for the events in solidarity with the democracy movement in Iran in September and the fall.

For eighteen days, from July 20 to August 7, a group of workers at the Vestas wind turbine factory at Newport, on the Isle of Wight, on the south coast of England, held a sit-in at the plant. The occupation was part of a continuing campaign to prevent the closure of the plant by the Danish-owned company, Vestas Wind Systems, and the loss of about 625 jobs.

The group left the premises, to the cheers of hundreds of supporters, just before bailiffs were due to enforce a court order to remove them. A picket of the factory continues at the time of writing, and a national day of solidarity activities has been called for Sept. 17.

Of all the problems and contradictions that have afflicted the radical movement since the time of Marx, those pertaining to the dialectics of organization has proven to be the most difficult and perplexing of them all. Leftist groups and radical tendencies of various sorts have come and gone over the years, but the effort to develop revolutionary organizations on the basis of the insights of dialectical philosophy remains a task to be done.

Radical change is never accepted easily. With the current discussion on health care reform, we have an opportunity to dismantle three basic dysfunctional tenets of the current system.

The first tenet is that access to health care is a privilege and not a basic human need that our society as a whole values for everyone. Second, for most people, access to health care services is dependent on a person’s employment status. And third, insurance companies and employers are in control of the kinds of health care to which we have access.

Racism, Class and Profiling

Author’s note: The arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates speaks to the question of race and class in America. In terms of the media and pundit response, it also speaks to the absurdity of personalization and thus the substitution, in this case, of Gates’s socioeconomic status for the social question of “race” in the United States.

There are “two worlds” in each country, the “rulers” and the “ruled” or to put it more concretely, between workers and non-workers. Never, in my lifetime, has the divide between workers and non-workers in the U.S. been as vast as it is during the current economic crisis. The working class is bearing the brunt of the crisis, yet how much of their actual voice are we hearing in the political debate about the economy?

The upheaval in Iran has shaken up Iranian and even regional politics. Not since the Palestinian Intifada of 1987 has the Middle East seen such a massive and persistent grassroots mobilization. At the same time, the Iranian upheaval is also the product of deep divisions inside the nation’s dominant classes.

A year after its publication, the new Persian translation of Marx’s Capital has sold out in Iran and is undergoing a reprint. Translator Hassan Mortazavi explains why he felt compelled to translate Capital anew, years after the publication of Iraj Eskandari’s translation in 1973.

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the great movement of the Chinese students centred on Beijing’s Tiananmen square and the bloody suppression of this non-violent, democratic movement by the Chinese state power.

The French CGT union’s racist expulsion of African immigrants from its offices reveals deep contradictions inside the labor movement.

On Wednesday, June 24, a terrible event took place in Paris: Hundreds of Africans sans papiers (undocumented immigrants) who had occupied the Bourse de Travail for over a year were evicted and pushed onto the street with their belongings. These workers had taken refuge in the Bourse du Travail, a union-run employment service, because they have no work permits and hope to secure legalization.

’This place is a thousand times worse than Guantanamo’

Excerpts from a report on the torture of students arrested At Tehran University from Akhbar Rooz

Translator’s note: During the early morning hours of June 15, 2009, The dormitory of Tehran University was attacked by Iranian security forces and plainclothes policemen. Five students were killed and many were arrested. Below is a report which describes the ordeal of the arrested students.