Against the Current

Hands Off demonstration, Fremont, CA (Alex Chis)

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,...

The Trump administration fired Carla Hayden, the first African American and first woman librarian of Congress, by text message.

AFRICAN AMERICANS ARE under fire from the Trump regime on all fronts. President Trump says the Black population is receiving unfair advantages over most whites, particularly young white men.

The attack targets concepts of “wokism” (which originally meant awakening to realities of oppression and DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion)....

Trump's official White House portrait.

THE RISE TO power of Donald Trump and his minions has sanctified and energized a campaign to revive the kind of triumphalist, exceptionalist version of U.S. history that reigned over both academia and public culture from the late 1940s through the early 1960s.

To drive that campaign forward, the Trump regime has now launched simultaneous assaults against schools, libraries, museums, the National Parks Service, and even the National Archives.

The conservatives’ favored Cold War narrative celebrated America’s “exceptionalism” — its alleged ....

THE STRUGGLE FOR socialism is not merely about a person or group fighting for power — it is a moral and human emancipatory project. The way one fights for socialism has a connection to the kind of world one wants to build. Socialism has an ethical dimension that should be up front — human solidarity, not destruction, and the reduction of brutality wherever possible. We believe, like Gramsci, that socialism is mainly won by consent, education, and revolutionary mass engagement to qualitatively...

F-35 in flight. Donald Trump, commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, once proclaimed that the stealth bomber was "actually invisible."

IN 2020 TRUAX Field, located within Dane County, Wisconsin Regional Airport, was chosen as one of two sites for the Air National Guard Bureau’s “beddown” of approximately 20 F-35 fighter jets.

This decision was taken in spite of the U.S. Air Force’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) that selecting Truax to host the F-35 stealth fighter jet program would have significant adverse impacts — due to intense bursts of noise from daily takeoff and landings and toxic debris.

The F-35 is a stealth fighter plane capable of performing air-to-air.....

THE FIRST THREE F-35s arrived in April 2023. More will arrive over the next four years. No sound mitigation would likely occur until the final complement has arrived....

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....

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,...

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....

What's the future for New York City under Zorhan Mamdani's win?

Zohran Mamdani’s meteoric victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, and his pending general election success in November, sheds light on critical facets of the city’s and the broader U.S. political turmoil.

Mamdani’s campaign speaks to the cost-of-living crisis that makes NYC difficult or unlivable for much of its working-class population — particularly housing and transport costs, the absence of reliable and safe childcare, and food deserts. It also offers a response to the gangsterism of the Trump administration....

SOLIDARITY, A SOCIALIST, feminist and and anti-racist organization -- and sponsor of the journal AGAINST THE CURRENT -- demands the reinstatement of Professor Thomas Alter at Texas State University. Professor Alter, a tenured historian, was fired in....

Poster from Republic of New Afrika.

FOR NEARLY FIFTY years, the fugitive revolutionary Black nationalist Assata Shakur defied the monstrous system of racialized mass incarceration in the United States. Since the 1970s, more than seven million African Americans have been caged in the hellhole conditions of state and federal prisons. Nonetheless, Assata, likely framed for murder in 1977 in an act of political retaliation, died a free woman on September 25 in Havana, Cuba.

Assata escaped prison in 1979 and fled to Cuba, where she received asylum and continued to write and speak on revolutionary themes. The US government was desperate....

Javier Milei, president of Argentina (2024)

IN SEPTEMBER 2025, after having presided over the country since December 2023, the neo-fascist Javier Milei suffered an electoral defeat in an important vote. The result was the election in the province of Buenos Aires. This election renewed 46 seats in the provincial Chamber of Deputies and 23 in the provincial Senate. The Peronist opposition beat Milei’s party by 13 points and holds a majority in the Buenos Aires Provincial Senate. The capital province represents about 37-38% of the national electorate. The provincial elections in Buenos Aires always serve as a major test at the national level, including for Javier Milei this year....

MORE THAN FIVE years ago, on January 28, 2020, then-U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled his peace plan for Palestine at a White House ceremony attended by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The plan was drafted by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. During his election campaign, Trump had pledged to broker what he called the “Deal of the Century” between the Arabs and the State of Israel — a phrase Netanyahu echoed in his effusive praise of the U.S. president during the event....

WE WANT TO draw readers' attention to this important article by Dan La Botz, to begin a discussion of the dangerous escalation of the Trump regime's campaign to terrorize dissent and cripple progressive organizing. The murder of Charlie Kirk presents Trump with the pretext that the 9/11 attacks gave to the George W. Bush administration, for unleashing domestic repression and global war -- with such disastrous results for this country, Afghanistan, Iraq and the world.

While facts are slowly emerging, there is no indication that the shooter had any connection whatever with the organized left (or the right, for that matter) or any coherent ideology at all. Of course, this will not prevent the Trump gang from its post-Constitutional rampage against freedom of speech, or organization, or democratic rights in general. This is a dangerous moment not only for the left, but for our entire society. —The ATC editors

Jair Bolsonaro, the would-be Trump of Brazil -- or is Trump the would-be Bolsonaro of the USA?(Isac Nóbrega/PR)

U.S. IMPERIALISM IS reaching a new level under Trump’s second administration. Amid the instability of the U.S. economy and its global power, the American president is pursuing an openly aggressive foreign policy, combining threats, acts of aggression, and distancing the United States from multilateral bourgeois institutions that it once helped create.

South America’s largest country, Brazil fits squarely into this framework. In July, Trump announced the highest tariffs in the world against Brazil: 50% on all products. A month later, when the tariffs went into effect, about 700 products were removed from the list—but still, more than half of Brazilian exports remain subject to the tariffs....