Against the Current No. 239, November/December 2025
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Regime Terror Spreading
— The ATC Editors -
Trump's Reality for African Americans
— Malik Miah -
The F-35s Come to Madison
— Marsha Rummel -
The Painful Sound and Debris
— Marsha Rummel -
An Interview with Tom Alter: History Is Now!
— Suzi Weissman interviews Tom Alter -
A Rapidly Emerging Story
— Sam Friedman -
Attacks on Public Health: What and Why
— Sam Friedman -
UK: Can the Left Turn the Tide?
— Owen Walsh -
Donald Trump vs. History: The Trump School of Falsification
— Bruce Levine -
Toward a Socialist History: Utopian Communities in Texas
— Folko Mueller - Vietnam
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The Soldier's Revolt, Part II
— Joel Geier -
Radicalized by Vietnam
— an interview with Ron Citkowski - Reviews
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Looking Back at Marx Looking Forward
— Michael Principe -
Does Socialism Need Morality?
— Robin Zheng -
Revisiting Caché
— Robert Jackson Wood -
Christian Right on the March
— Guy Miller - In Memoriam
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Joanna Misnik, 1943-2025
— Promise Li
Regime Terror Spreading
— The ATC Editors

THE MURDER OF Charlie Kirk has done for the Trump 2.0 regime what the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 did for George W. Bush and company — with such disastrous consequences for the United States, Iraq, Afghanistan and the world. (A statement by the editors of Against the Current responding to the Kirk assassination is posted at our website.)
Amidst Trump’s bellicose rants about “lunatic radical leftists,” masked armed gangs called Immigration and Customs Enforcement are roaming city streets, kidnapping people for walking or driving while brown,...
Attacks on Public Health: What and Why
— Sam Friedman
THE TRUMP REGIME has attacked public health fairly massively as part of its overall efforts to transform the United States into an authoritarian state, ready for inter-imperialist war, that can attempt to weather climate change without a revolution....
From ATC authors and friends
The Great Flood
— B. Skanthakumar

CYCLONE DITWAH RIPPED through Sri Lanka between 27 and 29 November. The toll is devastating. Seven days later, the official count is 486 deaths and 341 missing. To which should be added five navy and one air-force officer killed in rescue operations; and an electricity board technician electrocuted while repairing a power line. As search teams reach previously inaccessible areas this week, the fatality count has grown exponentially, and some fear it will climb into four digits. We may never know the true number.
Hundreds of thousands are sheltering in state, community, and private facilities, as well as with family and friends. More than 41,000 homes have been fully or partially destroyed. As many as 108 roads are currently impassable; 247 km of road are damaged; 40 bridges are destroyed, isolating homes and hamlets, and hampering rescue and relief efforts. Electricity, water supply, internet, telephone, and transport services have been disrupted in all 25 districts. Over 1.5 million people....
Ukrainian Socialists Respond to Government Corruption
— Sotsialnyi Rukh

UKRAINE's SOCIAL MOVEMENT (Sotsialnyi Rukh) published this resolution, adopted at their annual conference, on their website September 28, 2025. This is a Google translation of their resolution. The first paragraph presciently identifies the problem of corruption that broke out in media with the charges against top officials for a $100 million kickback scheme. The body of the resolution expands the analysis and proposes remedies....
Oppose Trump’s Surrender Plan for Ukraine
— Ukraine Solidarity Network (US)

IMPERIALIST BULLYING IS rarely so open and brazen. Donald Trump demanded last week that Ukraine accept his surrender plan for Ukraine by Thanksgiving Day, November 27, or lose what little remains of U.S. support for Ukraine, which is the sharing of satellite intelligence about Russian military positions and the sale of arms to Ukraine....
Ecosocialism or Extinction: defending life, building free territories and Ecosocialism from and for the Peoples

“We don't sell our land because it is like our mother. Our territory is our body. And we don't sell our body. We don't sell our mother. We wouldn't sell it, because it is sacred.
“And we start suffering pressures of invasion, pressure from mining, from agribusiness, which has expanded a lot, pressure from logging companies, which are deforesting our territories. And we have been resisting.” —Auricelia Arapiun, Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB).
Second Ecosocialist Meeting, Belém, Brazil, November 2025.
(Participation included 99 organizations and more than 350 people, including a strong presence of organizations representing Indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants.)
WE GATHER AT moment of profound capitalist attacks on life,...
Milei Prevailed in Argentina’s Midterms Despite Economic and Political Problems
— Julio C. Gambina
Milei’s far-right party's success in local elections is part of a broader reorganization of global capital.

THE MIDTERM ELECTION results in Argentina handed a political victory to Javier Milei’s far-right government of Javier Milei, despite recent economic and political problems.
Indeed, there were currency runs and financial turmoil amid a decline in consumer spending and recessionary trends in production, with a resurgence of price increases and significant limits on productive recovery. At the same time, there was an increase in allegations of corruption, political scandals involving figures with links to drug trafficking, and fractures within the ruling party.
Despite the turbulence and critical forecasts, more than 40 percent....
Confinement as a warning shot to an ill Kagarlitsky

“Stop speaking out or even worse can happen to you”
November 12, 2025 Media Statement from the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign
The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign is pleased to announce that Boris Kagarlitsky was....
Chile on the Eve of the Elections
— Oscar Mendoza
Chile 2025 — is the post dictatorship consensus truly and wholly over?
Oscar Mendoza wonders whether — as all opinion polls predict — Chile will go the way of an extreme right-wing populist president or do the highly unlikely/unthinkable and choose a working-class communist woman instead.

GAZING AT MY crystal ball, given that I’m writing in the eve of the first round of the presidential elections in Chile scheduled for Sunday 16 November, I am confident in my prediction that Jeanette Jara, a 51-year-old woman born in the working-class area of Conchalí in northern Santiago, will achieve the largest share of the vote but fail to achieve the required 50% plus one of the vote to win outright.
Jara is a shining example of an individual’s capacity to overcome fairly unsurmountable barriers to become a highly accomplished....
Latin America: The target of Trump’s neocolonial offensive
— Ana Cristina Carvalhaes & Luís Bonilla-Molina

DURING ITS FIRST nine months, the Trump administration has deployed warships and military infrastructure to the Caribbean, blown up small boats accused of drug trafficking, imposed 50% tariffs on Brazilian products — in opposition to the outcome of the democratic trial against former President Jair Bolsonaro and other coup plotters — and exerted extreme pressure on the Mexican government to force it to reduce the flow of Latin American migrants across the border and combat local drug cartels.
These are just a few elements of the brewing storm, whose explanation cannot be reduced to the strident and unstable personality of the neo-fascist president in the United States. The heinous televised murder of those on the small boats in Caribbean waters....
A Revolutionary Spirit: Walden Bello
— Tom Reifer
Global Battlefields:
Memoir of a Legendary Public Intellectual from the Global South,
Walden Bello
Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2025. 321 pp $30.95 ?978 1963892109

AT ONCE INTIMATE and wide-ranging, Walden Bello’s Global Battlefields begins with a discussion of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, a celebrated Indonesian intellectual jailed in 1948-9 for revolutionary activities against Dutch occupying forces. In 1959-60, Toer publicly defended the Chinese minority and became a beacon of the Indonesian left.
This was during the period when independent Indonesia gave birth to the largest independent mass socialist movement in the world, some 20 million strong,...
An Interview with Tom Alter: History Is Now!
— Suzi Weissman interviews Tom Alter

Contact the Committee to Defend Tom Alter for more information and to get involved in this important defense work.
On October 12 Suzi Weissman interviewed Professor Tom Alter, a tenured professor at Texas State University and author of Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth the Transplanted Roots of Farmer Labor Radicalism in Texas for KPFK's "Beneath the Surface" program. A popular professor, he was fired on the basis of a well-known neo-fascist's filming of an online conference where he was discussing different methods of movement organizing.
Suzi Weissman: Welcome to "Beneath the Surface." I'm Suzi Weissman. Professor Tom Alter, a tenured historian at Texas State University, was fired on September 10th after he was accused of inciting violence in a video of him speaking at a socialist conference. His remarks about organizing and defending workers was secretly recorded....

