Against the Current No. 238, September-October 2025

Chicago: May Day Defense of immigrant rights. (Sarah Jane Rhee)

IN THE UNITED States’ post-Constitutional twilight zone of the second Trump presidency, interlocking conflicts are converging. Neither the domestic nor global orders are any longer “rules-based” in the ways that have been previously assumed. The consequences are unpredictable but likely to be explosive.

Socialists of course are the sharpest critics of the United States’ much-acclaimed constitutional order with all its entrenched anti-democratic fences. And the “rules-based international order” for the global South has always meant imperialist domination and exploitation, crushing debt and carnage.

We recognize, however, that today’s attacks from the right and ultra-racist, Christian-supremacist....

Godfather of Trump University, Trump is insisting on his rules for private and public U.S. universities.

RIGHT-WING AUTHORITARIANS such as Donald Trump and his MAGA minions drive their ideological and political agendas by inventing fictions. The Indiana state government’s assault on higher education, led by Governor Mike Braun and the Republican super majority in the gerrymandered legislature, is a perfect example of this strategy, as the passage of three bills in the past year illustrates.

SEA202 (Public Law 113), HEA1001 (Public Law 213), and SEA448 (Public Law 138) rest on four fictions. First, the view that conservative students feel unwelcome at Indiana’s colleges and universities. Second, the perception that most tenured faculty are lazy and unproductive. Third, the claim that low-enrolling majors, many in the humanities and sciences, drain universities....

ICE invasion of Los Angles and mass arrests led to solidarity actions. (Promise Li)

MOST AMERICANS SUPPORT the idea that immigrants have enriched the United States, but are under the assumption that there is an “orderly” immigration process. They tend to believe that it is unfair that some have supposedly jumped the mythical queue....

• Use the $46.5 billion budgeted for building and reinforcing the wall on the southern border along with installing surveillance.

• Hire 10,000 more ICE agents and 8,500 Custom & Border Protection agents. Reassign government personnel to help ICE locate, detain and deport immigrants....

SUZI WEISSMAN: TODAY we’re joined by Flor Melendrez of Clean Car Wash, a workers center in the LA area. She’s here to talk about how immigration raids are impacting the carwasheros, who work in the car wash industry.

Flor Melendrez: Workers noticed surveillance happening near the car wash two or three days before the raid....

WITH FRESH ATTACKS on welfare programs in both the United States and Britain, passionate arguments have been made from various quarters of the left defending the state’s provision. Unquestionably welfare programs partly reflect historical hard-won struggles by working people and have constituted a valuable advance for the working class over the last century....

Italian partisans fighting in Milan, April 1945.

ON APRIL 29, 1945, Rossana Rossanda joined the massive crowds gathered on the Piazzale Loreto in Milan, Italy, where, more than 26 years earlier, Benito Mussolini’s Fascist movement began its wretched existence.

Rossanda, soon to enter the Communist Party ....

THAT THE MIDDLE East and North Africa (MENA) region is beset by tensions, rivalries and conflicts is beyond dispute. MENA is arguably the most militarized and penetrated world-region, with high military spending (especially by Algeria, Israel, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, UAE), and a slew of U.S. bases across the region.

Quite apart from the territorial and political legacies of European colonialism and....

THE TRAJECTORY WAS always clear to anyone who was paying attention, and knew how to filter out the noise of Donald Trump’s empty threats of “severe sanctions to destroy Russia’s economy,” let alone 500% tariffs on Russia’s oil customers, if there weren’t an “immediate cease-fire” in the Ukraine war....

AGAINST THE CURRENT is marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam, which concluded with the biggest defeat inflicted on U.S. imperialism. We are beginning by republishing Joel Geier's retrospective on the near-collapse of the U.S. army in Vietnam, which appeared in the International Socialist Review, issue 9, Fall 1999. It appears in the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL), Joel Geier Archive, downloaded from the ISR Archive Website. Thanks to the author for reprint permission, and to Lisa Lyons for her cartoons from the period.

“Our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse,...

Tariq Ali at the #StopTrident rally at Trafalgar Square, 27th February 2016. Photo: Asia Society

You Can’t Please All:
Memoirs 1980-2024
By Tariq Ali
London: Verso, 2024, 816 pages, $44.95, hardback.

Until We Fall:
Long Distance Life on the Left
By Helena Sheehan
New York, Monthly Review, 2023, 360 pages, $28, paperback....

This idyllic rendition of a farm scene obscures the horrific reality for the slave who produced for the sugar mills of 16th century Brazil.

ISASBEL WILKERSON’S 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, adapted as the film Origin by Ava DuVerney in 2023, presents an expansive study of the origin and function of racism in the United States. Wilkerson finds that ideologies of race serve to obscure the existence of a caste system that structures social hierarchies in America.(1)

Citizen Marx
Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought
By Bruno Leipold
Princeton University Press, 2024, 440 pages, $39.95 hardback.

THE AUTHOR OF this review recently facilitated for the Marxist Education Project a small study group reading Citizen Marx. This review is partly informed by that experience.

Written in an accessible style, Citizen Marx is useful for activists and scholars in establishing the historical context of Karl Marx’s revolutionary politics and parsing out Marx’s motivating principles.

In Bruno Leipold’s words, his purpose in writing Citizen Marx was to reclaim “the idea that freedom lies....

Frantz Fanon:
Combat Breathing
By Nigel Gibson
Hoboken, NJ: Polity Press, 2024, 356 pages, $24.95 paperback.

IT IS OFTEN said that the history of a work of art, politics or philosophy is the history of its interpretation, and the same can be said of the reception of the authors who compose them. This is especially the case with Frantz Fanon, born 100 years ago on July 20, 1925.

When his works first were first translated into English in the 1960s, Fanon was heralded for his uncompromising opposition to colonialism and support for revolutionary violence, with many viewing his works as a kind of manual of Third World revolution.

Teaching Palestine:
Lessons, Stories, Voices
Edited by Bill Bigelow, Jesse Hagopian, Suzanna Kassouf, Adam Sanchez and Samia Shoman
Rethinking Schools, 2025, 229 pages. $34.95 paperback.

TEACHERS ARE AT the forefront of the struggle over Palestine. Daily, many risk their jobs by helping students see beyond the distortions pushed by the dominant narrative about Israel — and those teachers do important political work by teaching students to think critically about both their own world and Palestine.

Both a great example of, and a tool set for, this work is the new book....

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
Director: Johan Grimonprez
Distributor: Kino Lorber, 2024.

NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV BANGS his fists on a UN desk to the rhythm of Max Roach drumming his “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.” This synthesized audiovisual motif in Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat captures some of the film’s exhilarating aesthetics as well as some of its complex artifice.

Khrushchev and Roach both denounced western imperialist violence against colonized people, albeit with somewhat different motives and modes. (Khrushchev’s call for decolonization did not extend to Soviet influence: we see footage from his visit to New York of protesters with signs opposing Russian rule in Ukraine and USSR action in Hungary.)...