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:...

ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SIX DAYS: In a mere 166 days, just over five months, Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party (or Nazi Party) destroyed what remained of a constitutional, parliamentary system and transformed Germany into a one-party fascist dictatorship....

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....

THIS ARTICLE TAKES a look at striking features of the immigration system historically with a view towards its latest phase during Trump’s second presidential administration, and how we might respond by building rapid response networks rooted in local community.

The article begins with a “Historical Background” section. If you’d like to read that later, you can skip to Part II, “A Lower Public Profile?”

I. Historical Background

The grim continuity of Trump’s...

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.

Mass protest won the Voting Rights Act. The WSCOTUS (White Supremacy Court of the United States) majority has abolished it. (ACLU)

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....

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....