A look at labor struggles in auto and other industries in light of the deepening economic crisis, especially the housing bubble – Editors

A decade and a half after the end of apartheid, South Africa remains caught in an assortment of contradictions — foremost of which is the growing friction between the government of Thabo Mbeki and the rise of new freedom struggles. Most striking about those struggles is how seriously many take the ideas of liberation – Editors

Resistance on the part of labor, students, women, ethnic minorities, and intellectuals is growing in the face of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s repression and Holocaust denial, and the economic crisis.  New philosophical discussions are taking place around Islamic reformism and around the translation of Marxist works by Dunayevskaya and Lukacs, among others. – Editors

Israel’s invasion of Lebanon last summer will have a lasting impact not only on the Middle East but also on the world. Hezbollah is not only becoming the main power in Lebanon, but the war has also made the Iranian government into a major power in the region.

An examination of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution fifty years later, focusing on the creativity of its workers councils, the differing responses to the revolution at the time by C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, and the relationship of these to what can be done to overcome today’s crisis in developing an alternative to capitalism. – Editors

Israel’s murderous invasion of Lebanon was an overreaching comparable to the US war in Iraq, as the Islamist Hezbollah movement emerged stronger than before. It also placed Hezbollah’s sponsor, Iran, at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the first time. Leftist positions uncritical of Hezbollah and Iran are also critiqued as part of a call for a return to Marx’s vision of a total uprooting of capitalism – Editors

Summary: Review of Adventures of the commodity: for a new criticism of value by Anselm Jappe, Munich 2005 – Editors

A report on the March 12-14 conference on “Rosa Luxemburg’s Thought and Its Contemporary Value” at Wuhan University, China, where discussion focused not only Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital but also, to a surprising extent, on dialectics and humanism as well as feminism – Editors

The Danish cartoons demonizing Muslims should not be defended as free speech given the context of their publication, in which oppressed minorities inside Europe were demeaned in a racist manner by the dominant media. At the same time, equally reactionary forces in the Muslim world have taken advantage of the controversy to shore up their support – Editors

A report from the World Social Forum in Caracas. The turn to the left in Latin America, especially in Bolivia and Venezuela, has challenged US imperialism, and invigorated the global left. But the turn toward statism in Venezuela has also been challenged by some of that country’s youthful leftists, including anarchists. The lack of an in-depth discussion of exactly what constitutes a society that negates and transcends capitalism remains a problem – Editors

An assessment of the situation in Bolivia in the aftermath of the election of the leftist Evo Morales to the presidency, in a society with a long history of labor and indigenous struggles – Editors

Critique of John Holloway’s Change the World without Taking Power. Originally appeared in Open Space Forum (India): http://www.openspaceforum.net/twiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=49 – Editors

Hurricane Katrina did far more than wreak an enormous amount of human, material, and environmental devastation to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. The giant storm violently lifted the curtain that obscures the racial and class divides that constitute American civilization and made plain for the world to see that anti-Black racism continues to shape the reality for millions.

A review of John McClendon, C.L.R. James’s Notes on Dialectics: Left Hegelianism or Marxism-Leninism? (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004), Originally appeared in Socialism and Democracy, July 2005 — Editors