Against the Current

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....

Malcolm X being interviewed by reporters in 1964. (New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection, Library of Congress)

MALCOLM X WAS assassinated 60 years ago in the Audubon ballroom in Harlem. Assassination is a political murder. Will the truth about the role of the New York Police Department and the FBI in the murder and coverup finally come out?

Malcolm X’s daughters are plaintiffs in a lawsuit in Federal District Court in New York City to expose the NYPD and the FBI. What will the New York mayor do?

The daughters have retained some of the great police misconduct litigators in the country including Chicago attorneys Flint Taylor and Ben Elson of the Peoples Law Office (PLO), Jonathan Moore and Luna Droubi,...

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...

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....

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....

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?...

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....

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....

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....

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....

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…

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....

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....