A Criminal Imperialist War

— Against the Current editors

Middle East strikes, 2/28/2026. https://creativecommons.org/ publicdomain/zero/1.0/

THE U.S.-ISRAELI WAR of “regime change” against Iran opens a fresh stage of catastrophe in the Middle East. This entirely illegal war -- under both U.S. and international law -- is an imperialist adventure with unknown global consequences.

The peoples of the region will pay an enormous price, and it will become clear that this war is not separable from the Trump regime’s ongoing war on the rights of the U.S. population and assaults on the nations in the Americas.

As media and political attention is diverted from Palestine, Israel’s continuing Gaza genocide and military-settler ethnic cleansing....

Resistance Is Essential!

— The Editors

Detroit: Peoples Assembly volunteers put together whistle kits designed to alert community members when ICE is nearby. (Jim West)

THE FIRST LESSON of recent horrors is that an imperialist government claiming the “right” to blow up boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific — with no evidence that they’re engaging in “criminal activity,” let alone posing any kind of “threat” — will also commit street executions of its own population.

Not only that: Government will proclaim “absolute immunity” for these murders, the regime will....

From ATC authors and friends

Trump’s State of the Union: Doubling Down?

— Gilberto Araujo

Trump before giving his State of the Union speech in February 2026. He did not use the speech to motivate the bombing of Iran just a few days later. (White House photo)

EARLY EACH YEAR, the President of the United States delivers the State of the Union address before Congress, presenting an assessment of the country and outlining future priorities.

That Trump’s most recent speech, on February 24, was a horror show comes as no surprise when Trump is involved. What does deserve attention, however, is that the president escalated his rhetoric at a moment when his policies are increasingly isolated and his popularity is declining — unlike the situation a year ago....

Jesse Jackson (1941-2026): An Assessment of a Civil Rights Icon

— Malik Miah

JESSE JACKSON’s DEATH has brought about a look back at his life and what it shows about progress and retreat for civil rights and freedom. Jackson was a bridge from the civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr, to today’s activists against the Trump MAGA white nationalist movement.

Today the victories of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s — the winning of civil rights (1964), Voting Rights (1965) and other laws ending legal segregation and discrimination — are being reversed. We are experiencing a counterrevolution against equality for peoples of color, with African Americans a special target.

Black history is denied....

DSA’s “rank-and-file strategy” Has '60s Roots at UC Berkeley

— Steve Early

From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor:
A Collective History of the International Socialists
edited by Andrew Stone Higgins
Haymarket Books, available March 2026.

"The lessons of the International Socialists can help point us in the right direction by sharing what has worked and what has failed in past decades" —Andrew Stone Higgins

SOME DSA MEMBERS are still pondering how they should relate, personally and collectively, to the labor movement. Should they try to become agents of workplace change while serving on the staff of local, regional, or national unions?...

Cuba's Precarious Situation

— Samuel Farber

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....

No to ICE. ICE Out Now!

— Randy Furst

I CONCUR WITH Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. The withdrawal of 700 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from Minnesota is not fast enough.

The ICE invasion has been cruel and racist and totally unnecessary. The demand should be: “ICE out now!”

This issue hearkens back to a debate that took place within the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the years before I joined the Star Tribune as a reporter, I was involved in that movement. At a couple of junctures, I served in public relations for the National Peace Action Coalition, a major American antiwar organization, that organized large, legal demonstrations against the war....

Can Trump ICE the Press? Prosecuting Journalism in Minneapolis

— Randy Furst

Kimmel, on "Jimmy Kimmel Live," introduced Don Lemon by announcing he was "arrested for committing journalism." ABC

WEBSTERS DICTIONARY DEFINES defines fascism as “a system of government characterized by rigid one-party dictatorship, forcible suppression of opposition, private economic enterprise under centralized government control, belligerent nationalism, racism, and militarism, etc.”

We aren’t there yet, but it sure feels like elements of it, especially if you live in Minnesota these days....

Twin Cities Outrage and Resistance

— Randy Furst

Day of Truth & Freedom, Downtown Minneapolis, January 23. (Lone Shaull CC BY 4.0)

LIKE MOST MINNESOTANS and residents of Minneapolis, the assault by ICE is personal to me. I’ve lived here since 1971. We are aghast and angry and fed up....

New Doctrine of U.S. International Policy Under Trump, or Neo-fascism at the Helm of the World's Leading Military Power

— Éric Toussaint

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....

Trump in Greenland: Old-fashioned Colonialism and Acceleration of the Climate Catastrophe!

— Yorgos Mitralias

Almost everyone is currently talking, and rightly so, about Trump's clearly stated intention to occupy and annex Greenland “by hook or by crook.” However, no one has even mentioned what would be by far the most important and serious consequence of this imperialist and colonialist act of unbridled Trumpism: the enormous....

Speaking Loudly, Carrying a Big Aircraft Carrier: The Donroe Doctrine and The Return of Naked Imperialism

— Pedro Paulo Zahluth Bastos

1. Chronicle of an Announced Attack

THE UNITED STATES’ military intervention against Venezuela, culminating in Nicolás Maduro’s kidnapping on January 3, 2026, has been in preparation for a long time. In an article published in February 2019, entitled “Donald Trump, the End of Globalism, and the Crisis in Venezuela,”(1) I argued that the then-president revealed with unprecedented candor the true objectives of U.S. imperialism: not the defense of democracy or human rights, nor the (selective) respect for international treaties based on liberal ideology, but control over resources with strategic and economic value. Already at that time, Trump openly criticized his predecessors for not having “taken the oil” from Venezuela or Iraq, or the rare minerals from Afghanistan, making explicit a predatory logic that liberal discourse traditionally concealed....

Why Syria Needs Better Governance... and a New Kind of Opposition

— Joseph Daher

Teachers struck for several weeks, demanding permanent employment, reinstatement of those sacked and salaries to match soaring prices.

LARGE RALLIES IN support of Syria’s ruling authorities were organised last month across various cities controlled by Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government. Whilst they were presented as demonstrations ‘against division’ and for the unity of the country, sectarian slogans were heard amongst protesters.

It was a similar case for the massive demonstrations celebrating the first anniversary of the Assad regime’s fall. These events highlight....

Joint Political Statement: Solidarity Against Communal Violence, Fundamentalism, and State Complicity

— Communist Party of Bangladesh (Marxist–Leninist) and Radical Socialist (India)

Burnt offices of independent newspaper Prothom Alo in Karwan Bazar, Dhaka, Bangladesh. (Photo: SAKIB HOWLADER, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

We, the Communist Party of Bangladesh (Marxist–Leninist) and Radical Socialist (India), condemn in the strongest terms the current wave of communal violence, religious fundamentalism, and attacks on democratic and secular spaces in South Asia, particularly in Bangladesh, and the dangerous political repercussions these developments are producing in India…

Ecosocialism or Extinction: defending life, building free territories and Ecosocialism from and for the Peoples

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,...

An Interview with Tom Alter: History Is Now!

— Suzi Weissman interviews Tom Alter

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....

Latin America: The target of Trump’s neocolonial offensive

— Ana Cristina Carvalhaes & Luís Bonilla-Molina

Symbol of U.S. imperialism, Udo Keppler, cover of Puck magazine, June 29, 1904.

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....

See all the articles by ATC authors and friends not printed in ATC.