On Dec. 10, the police violently broke up a peaceful sit-in by students at San Francisco State University. We express our solidarity with the students who occupied the Business Building at SFSU, and with all others in California struggling for the right to an education. We find especially noteworthy that the SFSU students are linking their movement to anti-racist and labor movements, to the protests against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the wider struggle against capital. Below we reprint their statement and their demands.

This is a previously unfeatured article that was mis-placed a year ago as a comment below an article from a correspondent. Ian’s article in fact uniquely expresses his philosophical approach to struggles in the workplace that is his legacy.

Ian MacDonald, a leading contributor to The Hobgoblin, has died from cancer, aged 52. As Unison lead convenor for Surrey, Ian made a video for his trade union colleagues from his hospital bed, with solidarity greetings on the ongoing struggles in children’s services. “But at the moment,” he said “I’ve got my own fight; I wish you the utmost the very best and in yours.” Days later Ian lost the fight.

This study of the development of Marx’s theory of revolution–using Marxism as its method–focuses on the formative years of 1842-1848. Although I will raise some criticisms concerning the treatment of dialectics, it is unusual and especially valuable in drawing connections between Marx’s theoretical concepts and his deepening involvement in this early, ideologically vibrant period of European working class activity.

[Philosophy] is the scientific expression of a certain fundamental human attitude… toward being and beings in general, and through which a historical-social situation often can express itself more clearly and deeply than in the reified, practical spheres of life.
— Herbert Marcuse[1]

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?