Welcome to Against the Current

The bimonthly was launched in 1986 to promote analysis and dialogue from activist movements for social, political and economic justice, and from engaged scholars on the left. Our perspective is “socialism from below,” rooted in the struggles for self-emancipation of the working class and oppressed peoples as the foundation for a new society without exploiters or oppressors.....

BY ALL POLITICAL leading indicators, Donald Trump is taking down the Republican Party to its most shattering electoral debacle in decades. “Presiding,” if that’s a word for anything Trump does, over the entirely preventable health and economic COVID-19 calamity, he’s proving himself willing to sacrifice anything for his own interests....

SIX MONTHS SINCE the worst health crisis in 100 years began, there is no sign that it is under control in most parts of the world. In the United States, it has created mass unemployment, exposed the vast rifts between the rich and poor, and promises to widen them unless the social movements impelled by Black Lives Matter and teacher/community organizing can continue to reframe the political, social and economic landscape.

Until mid-March, when governors and mayors took drastic steps, with orders to shelter in place, closing businesses and schools to slow the spread of the virus, many people continued their lives with a growing sense of fear of what would happen....

THE U.S. POSTAL Service, a publicly owned institution with a large (630,000) unionized workforce and a history dating to 1775, is facing a financial crisis that could present a real opportunity for the Trump administration to enact its program of privatization as well as weakening its employee unions.

As payments and correspondence have shifted....

ONCE AGAIN A young Black man, 29, is shot in the back on August 23 by a white cop in the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin, about 40 miles north of Milwaukee where the majority of African Americans in that state live.

The man, Jacob Blake Jr., had intervened in a street dispute between two women. The cops arrived and immediately challenged Blake. Two of them shot taser guns at him.

Then when he walked to his car where his three young boys of 3, 5 and 8 years sat in the back seat alone, the white cop grabbed Blake’s shirt and then fired seven shots at his back with four hitting him. Afterwards, the cops said Blake had a knife on the car’s floorboard…

THIS ARTICLE IS adapted from Robert Brenner’s article* in the May/June New Left Review, which is Part I of a two-part article on the economy. That article is well footnoted while this tells the story without them.

THE FEDERAL RESERVE’S March 23rd declaration that it intended to provide loans to non-financial corporations was decisive in indicating the Fed’s assumption of leadership of the government’s corporate bailout. It signaled what was expected of Congress and the Treasury. It also specified the intended level of support for big business in the coronavirus economic crisis.

On cue Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that the centerpiece of their just-approved bill, soon to be called the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security or CARES Act, was a giant rescue of non-financial corporations, amounting to half a trillion dollars…

This review essay was published on the Boston Review website, June 11, 2020.

The Romance of American Communism
By Vivian Gornick
1st edition 1977; 2019 edition with new introduction by the author
Verso, $19.95 paper.

THROUGHOUT THE LATE 20th century, assorted political gravediggers worked overtime to entomb the legacy of U.S. Communism. In hindsight they may strike us as having protested altogether too much, as those were decades when, like today, most activists on the far left referenced Moscow and its aging authoritarians mainly as punch lines to political jokes. Yet the terror that the pro-Soviet Old Left might inspire new forms of radicalism ran deep among the intellectual establishment that had emerged during the High Cold War and continued to take root in its wake. These anointed gatekeepers, from the reactionary James Burnham to the liberal Sidney Hook, wanted their version of the legacy of the left—in short, a horrific one—so fixed in the cultural firmament that all roads of inquiry would lead straight to the 1949 collection The God That Failed: A Confession, that touchstone of disillusionment with Communism…