Against the Current

THE JOURNALIST AND editor Peter Beinart was invited to engage in a dialogue at the University of Michigan on October 19, 2006, on “Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and American Democracy.” The purpose was to “explore the intersection of law, humanity, morality, racism and bigotry and how we can use this knowledge to oppose the rise of fascism… Continue reading Introducing Peter Beinart

The Sant Marti banner reads, in Catalan, “We’ll stop the housing business.” This is a play off a central slogan of the housing rights movement: “Housing is a right, not a business.” Photo: Kit Adam Wainer MONDAY, OCTOBER 12 I attended my neighborhood meeting for planning the general strike in the Spanish state on November… Continue reading A Month to Prepare for the General Strike

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have a long friendship as seen in their meeting on June 28, 2019. Photo: Kremlin.ru CC 4.0 WHAT WAS EVIDENT to many observers from the onset of Donald Trump’s second presidency is now out in the open: Trump and Vladimir Putin are allies in Russia’s war to amputate and subjugate… Continue reading The Trump-Putin Axis

SECONDARY STUDENTS ARE taking action; the government is cracking down. The situation in the national education system has been deteriorating for years. Successive governments and various ministers, led by Blanquer [Minister of Education 2017-2022], have accelerated the destruction. The lack of resources is becoming increasingly unbearable. When there aren’t enough chairs, ceilings are collapsing, there… Continue reading French Students Mobilize — and Their Supporters Too!

October 3 march in Minneapolis. Photos: Randy Furst HUNDREDS OF DEMONSTRATORS, mostly union members, rallied and marched through the streets of Minneapolis on Saturday, Oct. 3. The march was a show of support for 15 political activists who were indicted earlier this year by Donald Trump’s Justice Department for their organized opposition to the ICE… Continue reading Labor Marching for the Minnesota 15

“Make the rich pay!” ON WEDNESDAY, 23 September, the police evicted Maricarmen in Madrid. Maricarmen is an 87-year-old woman whose rent was gradually increased by a vulture fund, until the fund decided it wanted the flat for new business ventures. In that sense, her case is not so unusual: in Spain, there are thousands of… Continue reading The Spark That Lit a Prairie Fire: Let’s Organise a Hot Autumn

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is opening an immigrant detention center, Big Horn Facility, on the plains of northeastern Colorado. It will be operated by the for-profit GEO Group. Photo: Jim West IN AUSTIN, TEXAS an ICE agent shoots a food delivery driver after he was rammed and pulled over by an unmarked van. Wilber… Continue reading A Reign of Anti-Immigrant Terror

September 11, 2001: Smoke rises from the site of the World Trade Center. Photo by Paul Morse, Courtesy of the George W. Bush Presidential Library TWENTY-FIVE YEARS have passed since the September 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon, by a group of Arab men who had commandeered commercial planes.… Continue reading Double Standards, Imperial Hypocrisy 25 Years After 9/11 – What Has Changed?

September 11, 2001: Smoke billows from the World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan after a Boeing 767 hits each tower. Photo: Michael Foran CC-by-2.0 Jannis Hagmann interviews Gilbert Achcar on the impact of 9/11 THE ATTACKS OF 11 September 2001 fundamentally altered US foreign policy and triggered a series of wars that have reshaped… Continue reading The Iraq War Shattered the Promise of a New World Order

INDUSTRIAL UNION BUILDING in the 1930s has long been the lodestar for the post-New Deal labor left. If organized labor in the United States could go from historic membership lows in the 1920s to an early 1950s peak union density of nearly one-third of all private sector workers, maybe that great leap forward could be… Continue reading Labor Day Lessons: Can CIO Best Practices Aid Union Organizing Today?

Mikhail Lobanov speaking at a rally in Moscow. Links IVAN DRURY ZARIN conducted this interview for Against the Current with Mikhail Lobanov, Russian democratic socialist politician in exile and one of the organizers of Radical Democracy, at the international anti-fascist conference in Porto Alegre, Brazil in March 2026. In 2018, Mikhail Lobanov won a seat… Continue reading Preparing the Left for Russia’s Future Crisis

Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis By Anderson M. Bean Bloomsbury Publishing, New York, 2022, 172 pages. $36.85 hardcover. Venezuela in Crisis: Socialist Perspectives Edited and translated by Anderson M. Bean Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2026, 332 pages. $27.95 paperback. IN THE FIRST decade of the 21st… Continue reading Venezuela’s Process & Fall: The Legacy of Hugo Chávez

Günther Anders in California in the early 1940s. “We can make hydrogen bombs but are insuffi-ciently able to imagine the consequences of what we produce. Our capacity to feel, likewise, limps behind our deed: We can bomb hundreds of thousands into the ground but cannot sufficiently mourn them or feel remorse.” —Günther Anders (1956) LONG… Continue reading Prometheanism & Human Obsolescence

Take Back the Power: The Fall and Rise and Fall of NYC’s Transport Workers Union Local 100, 1975-2009 By Marc Kagan Brill, 2026, 452 pages, $157 hardcover (Haymarket paperback edition in 2027). JANUARY 3, 1984 was author Marc Kagan’s first day on the job as a New York City Transit worker. He begins his story… Continue reading The TWU Local 100 Experience

The Six Mile Circle A Sea Story By Syd Stapleton Marline Publishing, 2026, 233 pages, $18.99 from Amazon. A FAMILIAR STATISTIC provides the context for the literary genre that Six Mile Circle represents: Approximately 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by bodies of water. For most of us, the Earth we tread is… Continue reading High Drama on the High Seas

Cero Rico, near Potosi, Bolivia. It has been mined since 1545 for silver. Extractivism is still the basis of Latin America’s economy. Mhwater at Dutch Wikipedia RECENT ELECTIONS ACROSS across Latin America appear to have placed the hard right firmly back in power. While the landscape may appear to be dim for the left, other… Continue reading Latin America: Patterns and Pendulum

Their End is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition By brian bean Haymarket Books, 2025, 280 pages, $19.95 paper. IN MAY 2006 in Oaxaca, Mexico, teachers and their families assembled for a “festive but militant protest occupation” of the city’s central square, which had become an annual fixture of contract negotiations. When the governor sent… Continue reading Ends and Beginnings: An Abolitionist Manifesto

Crucible By John Sayles Melville House Publishing, 2026, distributed by Penguin Random House, 496 pages, $32.99 hardcover, paperback available December 2026, $21.99. WHEN THE New York Times asked John Sayles if Crucible, his novel about Detroit in the early 20th century, confirmed him as a writer of “historical fiction,” his answer highlighted a defining trait… Continue reading Choosing History: A Detroit Crucible

DONALD TRUMP’s ATTACKS on worker health and safety protections are notorious, but less well known is that Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom in California has mimicked Trump in likewise understaffing and underfunding Cal/OSHA, the state’s worker safety agency. Trump has allowed the number of field compliance inspectors for federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to… Continue reading Gutting Health & Safety Protections: Gavin Newson Following Trump’s Lead