Against the Current

Good news: not everyone is hurting!

MIDTERM U.S. ELECTIONS are traditionally predictably unpredictable, the main question being how much loss the party of the sitting President will suffer. Conventionally that should go double or triple for the Republicans this November....

Jewish Voice for Peace protest at Joe Biden's State of the Union Speech, March 2024.

“To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors.” —Jewish Labor Bund leader Marek Edelman (1919-2009)(1)

“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs.” —Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973)....(2)

Mushroom cloud rising over Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945. The U.S. authorized aerial bombings over Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed between 110,000 and 210,000 people, mostly civilians. The nuclear weapons developed since then are far more destructive. Photo: Charles Levy

“We live in an age of conflicts, an age of biological weapons, chemical warfare, atomic fallout and nuclear bombs . . . Every man, woman, and child lives, not knowing if they shall see tomorrow’s sunrise.”
— Martin Luther King, Address at the Thirty-sixth Annual Dinner of the War Resisters League, 1959.(1)

MLK’s WARNING FROM nearly 60 years ago continues to be true. As psychologist Robert Lifton once wrote, vulnerability is the “central existential....

INDUSTRIAL UNION BUILDING in the 1930s has long been the lodestar for the post-New Deal labor left.

If organized labor in the United States could go from historic membership lows in the 1920s to an early 1950s peak union density of nearly one-third of all private sector workers, maybe that great leap forward could be repeated again, sometime in the future?

Other than the public sector worker upsurge of the late 1960s and 1970s — which has propped up (with less success over time) overall unionization rates ever since — there has been little....

Ulm Five.

In the July-August Against the Current, Annette Ohme-Reinicke discussed the case of the Ulm Five as part of her story on repression in Germany. Here is an update on the trial of the Ulm Five.

THE ACCUSED ARE brought in one by one in handcuffs accompanied by....

FOR TWO MONTHS last winter, 4000 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unleashed an assault on the Twin Cities with a violent roundup of immigrants, prompting a mass, nonviolent grassroots resistance movement that eventually involved hundreds of thousands of protesters. The Trump administration was forced to retreat....

TEMPORARY PROTECTED STATUS (TPS) for more than 350,000 Haitians living in the United States was overturned by the government, following a June 25 ruling by the Supreme Court to allow the termination.

On August 6 all legal work permits were terminated, Mass layoffs will occur leading to Haitians losing their homes. Overnight thousands of legal residents will become “illegal.”

Haitians waiting for hearings will be forced to wear iron monitors, a reminder of slavery.

Haitians, even children, are seen by the government as “the worst of the worst.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) moved quickly to end TPS protections, though the State Department says it is unsafe....

Here Where We Live is Our Country:
The Story of the Jewish Bund
By Molly Crabapple
One World: New York, 2026. 433 pages, $32 hardcover.

MOLLY CRABAPPLE’S HISTORY of the Jewish Bund traces its rise and fate, from its inception in 1897 through the Russian Revolution into the interwar years and ending with the Holocaust Era.

In reconstructing this vibrant social movement among Eastern European Jews, she unveils for contemporary readers a world inhabited by leftwing, anti-Zionist activists.

For Crabapple, however, the Bund’s story constitutes more than resurrecting the past. As she points out....

IN DECEMBER 2023, former State Department official, Josh Paul told CNN anchor, Christiane Amanpour that during his tenure in the foreign service, he learned of the rape of a 13-year old boy by Israeli officers while in captivity. In response to U.S. inquiries, the Israeli Government designated the Defense for Children International, the Palestinian organization that documented the abuse, a terrorist organization.

The Colombian National Election Council declared Abelardo de la Espriella the winner in the presidential run off June 21. When on the campaign trail he saluted to the slogan "Steadfast for the homeland," May 25, 2026. CC0 1.0

SPRAWLING OVER THE southern hills of Bogotá, Ciudad Bolivar is a vast proletarian neighborhood of 700,000 people. On July 20, the first of Colombia’s two Independence days, it was the center of a national celebration of the country’s independence, replete with military ceremony -- combined with the start of a mass campaign of resistance against the unprecedented attack against Colombian sovereignty represented by U.S. interference in the presidential election that appears to have placed an extreme rightwing candidate, Abelardo de la Espriella, in the office of the presidency of this country.

More than 100,000 people filled the parking lot of the Gran Plaza El Ensueño shopping mall and all the surrounding streets for blocks, to hear the farewell speech of outgoing President Gustavo Petro, the first ever leftwing president of this country....

The Ragged Edge of Freedom:
Race, Capitalism and Class Struggle in Slavery’s Borderland
By Matthew E. Stanley
New York: Monthly Review Press, 2026, 469 pages, $35.

TO APPRECIATE THIS wonderful and hefty volume fully, or perhaps with a combination of appreciation and dread, it might help to have lived within or near the geographic zone explored so intensively. The “borderland” of the title actually covers a large chunk of Illinois and Indiana, with frequent references to Ohio.

Would-be farmers and merchants streamed in during the first half of the 19th century, often traversing westward and northward from the upper South, bringing along their genetic Anglo-Saxonism and their cultural politics....

Europe is in the middle of a heatwave, which is reflected in this satellite image showing daytime land surface temperatures. The image was captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission on Tuesday 26 May. European Space Agency CC BY-SA 3.0

IN LESS THAN two months, Europe has been hit by three heatwaves that are exceptional in terms of their early onset, intensity, duration and geographical extent.

The health impacts are numerous and dramatic: respiratory problems caused in particular by ozone formation (from nitrogen oxide emissions from internal combustion engines — ozone levels exceeded safe limits in June for 300 out of 450 million Europeans); cardiovascular events; infectious diseases; acute kidney failure; air pollution from forest fire smoke....

By the time Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre was released in October 2025, Giuffre’s story and the larger story of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes were well known. The book was published a few months after her untimely death by suicide in April 2025.

The book was the result of years of intense collaboration between Giuffre and writer Amy Wallace. Wallace worked tirelessly to speak in Giuffre’s voice and the result is a powerful testament to Giuffre’s strength and resilience but also a poignant reminder of the devastating and lifelong impact of sexual abuse on survivors....

Palestinians from Tantura are expelled to Jordan, June 1948. Benno Rothenberg/ Meitar Collection/National Library of Israel/The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection/CC BY 4.0

MUCH ATTENTION AND controversy has surrounded the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg and its exhibit “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present.” Indeed, there was a veritable tsunami of criticism before the exhibit even opened....

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.

It is time to arrive at a shared understanding of what kind of socialism we want to build — and how.

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....