Against the Current No. 239, November/December 2025

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)....

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....

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....

AS WITH MUCH else, the Trump regime’s attacks on public health come rapidly and somewhat erratically to try to keep the resistance off balance. Since this article was written, they sacked one leader of CDC and were faced with resignations by three others and a mass “clap out” and goodbye to these leaders as they left work for their final time.

People I am working with who have been active around COVID issues, however, point out that these same CDC leaders were part of efforts by...

THE TRUMP REGIME has attacked public health fairly massively as part of its overall efforts to transform the United States into an authoritarian state, ready for inter-imperialist war, that can attempt to weather climate change without a revolution....

Zarah Sultana, a Labour MP, resigned and announced her support for the formation of a new party.

THE LEFT IN Britain is in the midst of what could be the most important party formation since Labour was established in 1900. The process is proving slow and difficult, though the need could scarcely be more urgent.

The far right have gone from strength to strength over the past two years, and the Labour government are tailing them with less shame (and less electoral reward) than ever before. With the two-party system in an unprecedented crisis, the UK is on a treacherous path to a hard-right government, but there are exciting opportunities for the Left to turn the tide.

Saturday, September 13, 2025 was a red-letter day for British fascists. By many accounts, it was their biggest....

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 ....

To avoid the Confederate draft, a group of German men fled to Union-held New Orleans but were caught and killed near the Nueces River, 1862. Lithograph of funeral, Comfort, TX. Harpers Weekly, 9/20/1865.

IF YOU WERE to take a Texas History class, you would most likely hear about apparently larger-than-life characters like Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston, and events like the Texas war of independence, including the epic Battle of the Alamo and the Battle of San Jacinto, and, of course, the discovery of oil at Spindletop, which started the Texas Oil Boom.

In essence, you would be taught why everything in Texas is supposedly bigger and better, and how it is an exceptional state in a country....

THE FIRST HALF of this essay appeared in our previous issue, ATC 238. It was first published in International Socialist Review, Issue 3, Fall 1999. Thanks to the author for reprint permission, and to Lisa Lyons for her cartoons from the period.

Mutiny

“If an officer attempted to impose disciplinary punishment upon a soldier, the power did not exist to get it executed. In that you have one of the sure signs of a genuine popular revolution. With the falling away of their disciplinary power, the political bankruptcy of the staff of officers was laid bare.” —Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution(1)

THE REFUSAL OF an order to advance into combat is an act of mutiny. In time of war, it is the gravest crime in the military code,...

GROWING UP IN a working-class Polish neighborhood on Detroit’s west side, Ron Citkowski assumed he would go into the army as his father and uncles had. He registered for the draft there when he turned 18. But by the time he was drafted in May 1968, he was attending graduate school on a science fellowship at the University of Michigan — and against the Vietnam war....

The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads:
Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism
By Kevin B. Anderson
Verso 2025, 280 pages, $29.95 paperback.

THE LATE MARX’S Revolutionary Roads is, as Kevin Anderson tells us, a kind of sequel to his 2010 book Marx at the Margins. Both books focus, for the most part, on the “late Marx” and his increasing focus on race, gender, colonialism, and non-Western societies.

The book contributes to foregrounding a distinct “late Marx” as a readily available signifier, to be employed much like the familiar “early Marx.” Anderson argues that while Marx’s works of 1869-82 have historically received much less attention than earlier ones, this scholarship began to change in the 1980s....

Marx’s Ethical Vision
By Vanessa Wills
Oxford University Press, 2024, 320 pages, $45 hardcover.

CAN MARX TEACH us how we ought to treat one another, and how we ought to live? Can he help us distinguish between right and wrong, good and bad?

Surely, one would think, the answer is yes. After all, Marx denounces the “accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, [and] mental degradation” entailed by the accumulation of capital. And he exalts the “nobility of man shin[ing] upon us” through “the most splendid results [of] French socialist workers” in their development of human solidarity....

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AUSTRIAN DIRECTOR MICHAEL Haneke’s masterful 2005 film Caché (Hidden) has much to teach us about colonial repression, and the Gaza genocide.

When I first watched Caché around the time it came out, it struck me as an impeccably crafted, formally mind-bending, and yet merely superb thriller. I took it to be a film about surveillance, about bourgeois fragility and paranoia, and about its own ingenious narrative devices, which exploit the camera’s gaze to destabilize that of the viewer. The film was powerful but not transformative....

Money, Lies, and God
Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy
By Katherine Stewart
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025, 245 pages, $26.99 hardcover.

KATHERINE STEWART’S INTEREST in the Christian Right was triggered when she became aware of an insidious project of piggy-backing an evangelical propaganda machine, masquerading as a school club, in her daughter’s public school building.

This resulted in her 2012 book The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children. In 2020 Stewart wrote The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. In 2025, she has completed her trilogy with Money, Lies and God (ML&G)....

Joanna Misnik, like many of the '68 generation, was first radicalized by the U.S. war in Vietnam.

IN 1995 THE Fourth International (FI), having survived the fall of the Soviet Union, renounced the claim of being the “revolutionary vanguard party” of the working class. This signaled not dissolution, but a strategic reorientation in response to the decline of workers’ movements across the world.

In this endeavor, the FI would “welcome into our ranks revolutionary Marxist organizations which do not necessarily claim to be ‘Trotskyist’ nor identify with our history, but which join us on the basis of a real programmatic coming together.”

Today the FI has joined with revolutionary currents in different countries, including former Communist and Socialist Party elements, as well as Maoist and other Trotskyist milieus, in building new,....