Against the Current

The UAW accepted two-tier wages and benefits in 2006 concession bargaining. The 2023 contract finally ended the wage difference, but did not restore full benefits. (Jim West)

THE U.S. LABOR movement over the past half century has experienced more defeats — and even more failures to fight — than victories. Defeats are not permanent, though. And neither are victories. What we learn from them often lasts far longer than the specifics of the event itself.

In January, 1919, following the suppression of what became known as “the Spartacist Uprising” in Berlin, Rosa Luxemburg wrote:...

Strait of Hormuz.

APRIL 16 — IF the war on Iran ended right now, by all accounts it would take many months to stop the ever-greater damage to the world economy, particularly but not exclusively to nations of the Global South and Asia. Repairing energy production and infrastructure in the Gulf is probably the work of years.

This is not counting thousands of lives already lost in Iran and Lebanon, and irreplaceable....

No Race, No Country:
The Politics and Poetics of Richard Wright
By Deborah Mutnick
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025, 312 pages, $13.37 paper, $36.20 hardback.

Baldwin: A Love Story
By Nicholas Boggs
New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2025, 720 pages, $23 paper, $36 hardback.

Survival is a Promise:
The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
By Alexis Pauline Gumbs
New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2024, 528 pages, $18.60 paper, $25.60 hardback.

Something to Do with Power:
Julian Mayfield’s Journey Toward a Black Radical Thought, 1948–1984
By David Tyroler Romine
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025, 304 pages, $25.90 paper, $39.85 hardback.

I. Creative Resistance

Richard Wright never shied from writing about the violence that came from white supremacy. (Gordon Parks)

COMING OF INTELLECTUAL age in the early 1960s, I was one of those whose “doors of perception” were progressively cleansed of the middle-class socialization typical of an American childhood in the McCarthy years. Nonetheless, my awareness that something was gravely amiss in the “Ozzie and Harriet” conformity of the “consumer’s republic” of Eisenhower and Kennedy did not derive from psychedelic drugs.

Instead, my source was close encounters with the avantgarde, Left-wing Black Art of the post-World War II era. This was a cultural undercurrent of the burgeoning new radicalization at work in the interstices of the prevailing Cold War climate, a percolating resistance that opened one’s mind and imagination to vistas promising a more authentic and meaningful life....

ON APRIL 29, the far-right Supreme Court majority, in a 6-3 decision, declared that using race to limit inequality is unconstitutional. The argument discards 250 years of legal segregation and the struggle for equality. It guts the 1965 Voting Rights Act by outlawing electoral maps that provided minority representation, particularly in the states that carried out racial gerrymandering. It is the Court’s third attempt to neuter the Act, considered the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement....

Q&A:

STUDENT ACTIVISM ON American campuses in response to the war in Gaza has become a national debate over where to draw the line between political dissent and antisemitism.

Even as many universities have moved to restrict, disperse or discipline protest activity, demonstrations — and the arguments about how to describe them — have continued, raising questions about free speech, campus safety and whether criticism of Israel is being conflated with anti-Jewish hatred.

Alan Wald, the H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, is a historian of the 20th-century U.S. cultural Left. He discusses parallels to Cold War-era campus politics, Zionism and how debates over the meaning of antisemitism shape campus protests over Israel and Palestine....

Feyenoord v. Ajax — soccer fans' rivalry takes on "antisemitic" overtones in an ominous political climate.

LARGELY BY COINCIDENCE, my partner and I live a couple of blocks down the street from Rotterdam’s major synagogue (which is not that major; Rotterdam was never a big Jewish center, and most of its Jews were killed in the Holocaust).

During the night of March 19-20, this synagogue was the target of an attack. The attack on the Rotterdam synagogue ....

The cry for "Woman Life Freedom" is an emancipatory slogan. (Middle East Institute)

A REVOLUTIONARY FEMINIST position on Iran must refuse the false and damaging binary that demands choosing between defending the Islamic Republic and endorsing US-imperialist and Zionist intervention. This is a constructed choice designed to collapse political judgment into campism. It converts solidarity into a competition of moral allegiances and leaves ordinary people,...

CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio

BY A REMARKABLE historical coincidence, the name of the present U.S. president can intuitively be abridged as Don, which is the equivalent of Sir or Lord, historically used in Sicily in designating powerful landowners and later applied to Mafia bosses. This designation became widely known in the United States and globally with Francis Ford Coppola’s film series The Godfather,...

KUNAL CHATTOPADHYAY IS a retired professor of comparative literature at Jadavpur University. He has been active as a Fourth Internationalist since 1980. He is a leader of Radical Socialist, the Indian section of the Fourth International (FI), and editor of its publication. Solidarity is the U.S. section.

Kunal has written many articles for Against the Current, the Solidarity Webzine, International Viewpoint, Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières,...

SINCE THIS INTERVIEW was conducted on January 28, 2026, the Milei government’s Chief of Staff Manuel Adorni took over the administration of El Garrahan Hospital. Adorni announced he would fire 10 leaders, including Norma Lezana, and sanction another 29 members of the union that led a militant two-month strike last fall. They succeeded in breaking through the austerity orientation of the Milei government. Adorni’s announcement is an attempt to prevent internal processes through which union...

Keith Michael Baker,
Jean-Paul Marat:
Prophet of Terror
(U. of Chicago, 2025). 930 pages. $50.00.

A shorter and slightly older version of this review was published in March-April 2026 ATC.

The adage “You can’t judge a book by its cover” makes a valid point, of course, but covers do often provide useful clues to a book’s contents. Until this book by Keith Michael Baker appeared in late 2025, there had been only two biographies of Jean-Paul Marat in the English language published in the previous ninety-nine years.(1) So now there are three, and it so happens that I have a couple of horses in this race: I am the author of the other two.(2) At the risk of pro?ering an odious comparison, I think comparing the three covers yields something of value here....

Imperial Crosshairs

"Very sick" president sets sights on next target, Cuba.

THE IMPERIALIST CRIME spree of the Donald Trump presidency spreads globally and regionally — from the U.S.-Israeli Gaza genocide, to potential new war on Iran, to the takeover of Venezuela, to annexationist menaces against Canada and Greenland — and now Washington’s intensified drive to strangle and starve Cuba.

The aggression is escalating rapidly, with weekly or even daily moves. Even in the short time since the following article by Samuel Farber was written, the United States in fact has imposed the effective blockade of oil shipments to Cuba, including issuing demands, to which the government of Mexico has apparently capitulated, to cut off Mexican oil shipments.

Already beset with crippling energy shortages and blackouts, Cuba now faces the real threat of economic collapse....

THE PUBLICATION OF the new U.S. national security doctrine in early December 2025 marks a sharp break with the past due to its openly militaristic, authoritarian, and ideologically reactionary nature. Under the guise of strategic realism, the Trump administration is now embracing a logic of unapologetic imperial dominance, fueled by neo-fascist references, climate denial, and an explicit rejection of human rights and multilateralism. In this Q&A, Éric Toussaint analyses the document, placing it in its historical, economic and ideological context. He highlights the major implications for....

Auricelia Arapiun

“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,...

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....