Against the Current No. 236, May/June 2025

The resistance rising! Photo: Dan La Botz

THE ABDUCTION OF Mahmoud Khalil — the Palestinian graduate student and green card holder seized March 8 at his Columbia University residence — is now multiplied by other high-profile detentions and deportation threats, and dozens or even hundreds of unpublicized cases. Secretary of State Marco Rubio openly boasts as much.

These arrests and disappearances highlight a reign of terror confronting student visa and even green card holders. They pull together multiple interwoven aspects of the five-alarm civil and human rights emergency in the United States and the global U.S. empire:...

Hundreds of vets turned out March 14th in Washington, D.C. to oppose the dismantling of their vital healthcare system. They also participated in the April 5th Hands Off rallies.

ON MARCH 14, a much-decorated former Capitol police officer was on his way to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to join a protest against down-sizing of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) by the Trump Administration.

Among the thousands gathered there were more than a few American flag wavers, decked out in camo and other forms of apparel favored by military veterans. The mere sight of them gave Harry Dunn a “PTSD moment.”....

ALMOST A YEAR and a half after the Ohio citizens’ victory passing an amendment to enshrine reproductive rights into the state constitution, and five months after the presidential election, the abortion issue is no longer front and center for most Ohioans.

Anti-choice forces, however, have not stopped looking for ways to strip away these rights. And unfortunately,...

Betrayal at the Modern Language Association

“Boycott is not a threat, not a sword. It’s a tree, a light.” —Fady Joudah, “Shifting the Gaze: A Brief History of Censorship of Palestinian Literature in English,” a talk presented at the 2016 MLA Convention in Austin, TX, and archived on the MLA Members for Justice in Palestine website.

AT ONCE UTTERLY inhumane and singularly human, genocide poses difficult questions to the humanities.

Theodor Adorno’s assertion that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Prisms, 34) has occasioned much debate. Palestinians, martyred by as well as living through....

WHAT WOULD THE leaders of the Russian Revolution make of social media? And what might their experiences teach us?

In the middle of the 1890s in St. Petersburg — years before the historic victory of the Russian Revolution in 1917 — militant workers....

How to hold colleges responsibility for stopping sexual violence? The Promethean

AN APPREHENSION IS rising among U.S. anti-sexual violence activists. Four years after the first Trump administration massacred sexual assault survivor protections on college campuses by releasing harmful and exclusionary Title IX regulations, the Biden Administration — after failing three times ....

ANALYZING THE VARIOUS policies and assaults of Trump’s unprecedented blitzkrieg would takes many works. Here, important aspects of the reorganization of the American Empire will be left to others. I will limit my analysis to a few central points that suggest the limits to as well as extent of Trump’s bulldozers and the roots of opposition....

Canadian retirees meet with UNIFOR president before their last contract negotiations, raising the demand for increased pensions. Why not develop solidarity across borders?

THE UAW STATEMENT “In a Victory for Autoworkers, Auto Tariffs Mark the Beginning of the End of NAFTA and the ‘Free Trade’ Disaster” posted on the UAW website, presents a faulty understanding of the impact NAFTA had on the restructuring of the auto industry. It then outlines a disastrous strategy for auto workers, similar to a previous UAW administration’s call on members to save their jobs by voting for two-tier contracts.

In the 1990s corporate restructuring meant automation, selling off....

“JEWISH STUDENTS AT Columbia University chained themselves to a campus gate across from the graduate School of International and Public Affairs Wednesday, braving rain and cold to demand the school release information related to the targeting and ICE arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a former SIPA student.

“Democracy Now! was at the protest and spoke to Jewish and Palestinian students calling on the school to reveal the extent....

What are the longer-term implications of the attacks on vaccines? CC-BY-SA-4.0

AS SHOULD BE evident by now, the Trump administration has begun a full-scale attack on much of public health in the United States and globally.

Some of this is ideological — for example, when Kennedy, the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, attacks vaccines....

President Bernardo Arévalo

[The following excerpts are taken from an April 11, 2025 “Update on Recent Developments in Guatemala issued by the Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA. Politics in Guatemala are sharply divided between president Bernardo Arévalo and institutions supporting the former rightwing administration —ed.]

GUATEMALA IS SUBJECT, like the majority of its neighbors in the region, to the new U.S. tariff plan imposed by President Trump on April 5th. Under the plan, Guatemalan products entering the United States ....

Fredric Jameson

SINCE HIS DEATH on September 22 of last year at the age of 90, Marxist theorist and cultural critic, Fredric Jameson has been the subject of numerous tributes and remembrances. Arriving from divergent spaces, they include left and liberal publications like The Nation and Jacobin, Marxist theorists Alex Callinicos (for Socialist Worker) and Boris Kagarlitsky from prison in Russia (for Links International), and many others.

Noteworthy too are the approving remembrances published by such heavy hitters of the bourgeoisie as The New York Times....

Nuclear is Not the Solution:
The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change
By M.V. Ramana
Verso, 2024, 272 pages. $29.95 hardcover.

LIKE THE PROVERBIAL bad penny, the threat of nuclear power keeps popping up, over and over again. No matter how many times the population of the Earth rejects it, every generation seems to be confronted by a fresh “renaissance” of this abominable idea that just won’t die.

From the perspective of the general public — our perspective — it’s not a glorious renaissance but a recurring zombie invasion.

When book browsers come across M.V. Ramana’s title Nuclear Is Not the Solution,....

Dark Days
By Roger Reeves
Graywolf Press, 2023, 240 pages, $26 hardcover.

IT IS QUITE possible that between the writing of this essay and your reading it, the United States will have entered a dark age. At the least, this darkness refers to our sudden plunge into a state of not knowing what’s happening, who is being harmed, and how to prepare.

This uncertainty, being kept in the dark, evokes all the fears: What are Musk and Trump doing? What are they slashing now? Who are they firing? Who are they courting or hailing? Disrespecting, eliminating or degrading?

The darkness also refers to the dimming of the light....

Against Racial Capitalism:
Selected Writings of Neville Alexander
Edited by Salim Vally and Enver Motala
Pluto Press, London 2023, 320 pages. $31.95 paperback.

IN 1991 I moved from Harare, Zimbabwe to Johannesburg, South Africa. The move was occasioned by a job offer from Khanya College, which operated under the slogan “Education for Liberation.”

Like many radical educational initiatives of the day, Khanya was a brainchild of legendary socialist and former political prisoner Neville Alexander. Though the details of my experience are for another day, suffice to say that my time at Khanya transformed my understanding of socialism and popular education for life....

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. A Reckoning.
By Peter Beinart
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025, 172 pages, $26 hardcover.

PETER BEINART HAS a highly varied history. More than 20 years ago, he worked for a decade for the conservative-leaning liberal weekly The New Republic where he became its principal editor from 1999 to 2006. He has moved a great deal to the left since those days and is currently one of the editors of Jewish Currents, a Jewish socialist and anti-Zionist publication....

Everything Is Possible
Antifascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism
By Joseph Fronczak
Yale University Press, 2023, 249 pages + notes and index, $35 hardcover.

EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE is a fascinating, thought-provoking if somewhat convoluted history of the “left,” as Joseph Fronczak, a Princeton history professor, defines it. It is not always easy to follow as people and events appear and reappear several times in different contexts. His prose tends on the florid side and his enthusiasms sometimes overwhelm....

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here:
The United States, Central America and the Making of a Crisis
By Jonathan Blitzer
Penguin Press, 2024. 544 pages. $21 paperback.

TYPICALLY MISSING IN the charges and counter-charges around the “border crisis” between the two mainstream parties is either empathy or any serious analysis of why nationals deemed “illegal immigrants” embark on the extremely risky journey to the United States.

How desperate does a person have to be to subject themselves and oftentimes their under-age offspring to the prospect of potentially getting robbed, raped or, in the worst-case scenario, even killed?...