Against the Current

While the federal government seeks to intimidate activists, demonstrations continue. Photo: Randy Furst

IN LATE SEPTEMBER, flurries of email and text messages reported that Texas state police were surrounding the homes of people in Austin and San Marcos who had participated in a protest vigil the previous Sunday, following the violent arrest and ICE shooting of Wilber Rafael Garces Perez.

Garces Perez, a Venezuelan asylum seeker, was driving his food delivery van when he was rammed....

[This article was written in advance of the November 2026 elections, but the print edition will reach Against the Current readers after the election in our November-December issue. — The ATC editors]

MUCH OF THIS article will focus on the Democratic Socialists of America and an analysis of DSA’s electoral perspectives and results going into the midterm elections.

While there are thousands of DSA members engaged in grassroots organizing in unions,...

THE FLOWERS WERE the main thing,” one 24-year old Yemeni-born nonprofit worker told me when I asked what images stayed with her from Minnesota’s winter protests. “There was a lot of artwork, like so much visual art, but I feel like the flowers were the main thing that captured my attention.”

Frost on the 64 Bus Route

Anti-ICE protesters gather in subzero temperatures in downtown Minneapolis for a mass strike and march on January 23, 2026. Photo: Fibonacci, Blue, CC BY 4.0

Operation Metro Surge revealed itself to me through a strange irony already planted in the very map of East Side St. Paul.

So many of its streets are named for things meant to bloom: Rose, Geranium, Magnolia, Hyacinth, Ivy, Jessamine. But last winter ICE moved through these streets not as a distant bureaucracy, but as a kind of killing frost settling over those neighborhoods named for flowers....

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 11. I live in Barcelona and went to ithe meeting for the Sant Marti barri (neighborhood). The planning meeting was attended by a little over 100 people.

Sant Marti is a long group of smaller neighborhoods that runs east-west, north of the center of the city. It includes Poble Nou, once an industrial center and now a rapidly....

Comedian Lenny Bruce used to say “Chicago is so corrupt it’s thrilling.”

Chicago residents oppose police brutality and corruption. On the 3rd anniversary that Laquan McDonald was gunned down by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, community members organized a day of remembrance. The CPD, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and IL attorney general Anita Alvarez had tried to cover up what happened. Photo: Sarah Jane Rhee

IN OCTOBER 2026, the Chicago City Council authorized payment via plaintiff Anand Swaminathan’s law firm Loevy and Loevy of $260.8 million. That is over a quarter of a billion dollars in compensation for the wrongful murder convictions of the firm’s clients, 17 men imprisoned years ago.

This settlement against the Chicago Police Department is the largest in the city’s history.

The 17 men collectively served nearly 400 years in prison for murders for which they were falsely convicted....

Dolores Huerta speaking at an impeachment rally for Richard Nixon, April 17, 1974. Photo: Bill Andrews, Daily Worker

DOLORES HUERTA, A cofounder and coleader with César Chávez of the United Farm Workers union, became a national icon as the embodiment of Mexican Americans’ struggle for workers’ rights and civil rights, and as a female labor leader and feminist. Huerta spent decades organizing in Mexican American communities and the agricultural fields of California, recruiting workers to the union, organizing strikes and boycotts, lobbying for legislation, and working on political campaigns. She had 14 children, 12 of whom she raised, most of whom became accomplished in their own right.

She became the subject of several biographies written for adults and children, and of documentary films. Throughout the Southwest, schools and streets were named for her. She continued her activism into her nineties....

*THIS MATERIAL (INFORMATION) WAS PRODUCED AND/OR DISTRIBUTED BY FOREIGN AGENT KAGARLITSKY, BORIS YULIEVICH, OR CONCERNS THE ACTIVITIES OF FOREIGN AGENT KAGARLITSKY, BORIS YULIEVICH. 18+

From the beginning, police violently attacked French student demonstrators, who responded by hiding their faces. Photo: Dan La Botz

THE STRONGEST IMPRESSION from the latest French protests for me is not the familiar television images – running protesters, police, burning cars – but the expected, yet now exceeding "decent" boundaries, reaction of the right-wing of the Russian emigration, which is pouring curses on the opponents of the Parisian authorities, curses worthy of Kremlin propagandists. Well, honestly, gentlemen, if you hate protests so much and love order so much, what exactly is wrong with Lukashenko and Putin?

Of course, it's a pity that the city hall in Limoges burned down, a building built in the 19th century (I really hope it will be restored), but I doubt that anyone who is complaining about this was even interested in the city of Limoges, its history,,,,,

THE JOURNALIST AND editor Peter Beinart was invited to engage in a dialogue at the University of Michigan on October 19, 2026, 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 and dismantling of our civil rights and constitutionally protected freedoms.”...

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....

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 assault on the Twin Cities known as Operation Metro Surge....

"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,...

IN AUSTIN, TEXAS an ICE agent shoots a food delivery driver after he was rammed and pulled over by an unmarked van. Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, from Venezuela, entered the United States legally and is seeking asylum. He is now in ICE detention with his serious gunshot wounds inadequately treated....

The Ragged Edge of Freedom:
Race, Capitalism and Class Struggle in Slavery’s Borderland
By Matthew E. Stanley
New York: Monthly Review Press, 2026, 469 pages, $35.

TO APPRECIATE THIS wonderful and hefty volume fully, or perhaps with a combination of appreciation and dread, it might help to have lived within or near the geographic zone explored so intensively. The “borderland” of the title actually covers a large chunk of Illinois and Indiana, with frequent references to Ohio.

Would-be farmers and merchants streamed in during the first half of the 19th century, often traversing westward and northward from the upper South, bringing along their genetic Anglo-Saxonism and their cultural politics....

By the time Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre was released in October 2025, Giuffre’s story and the larger story of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes were well known. The book was published a few months after her untimely death by suicide in April 2025.

The book was the result of years of intense collaboration between Giuffre and writer Amy Wallace. Wallace worked tirelessly to speak in Giuffre’s voice and the result is a powerful testament to Giuffre’s strength and resilience but also a poignant reminder of the devastating and lifelong impact of sexual abuse on survivors....

I VISITED CUBA over the 2026 May Day week with a delegation from Building Relations with Cuban Labor. The effects of the 65+ year U.S. embargo and recent blockade of oil were everywhere to be seen....

There will be no Gulag under the new socialism.

Introductory note by Mikhail Orlov, /Spichka (Matches): “There will be no Gulag under the new socialism” — an article by Boris Kagarlitsky.

It is time to arrive at a shared understanding of what kind of socialism we want to build — and how.

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....