Against the Current No. 241, March/April 2026

Detroit: Peoples Assembly volunteers put together whistle kits designed to alert community members when ICE is nearby. (Jim West)

THE FIRST LESSON of recent horrors is that an imperialist government claiming the “right” to blow up boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific — with no evidence that they’re engaging in “criminal activity,” let alone posing any kind of “threat” — will also commit street executions of its own population.

Not only that: Government will proclaim “absolute immunity” for these murders, the regime will....

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,...

Chicago, January 25, after the murders of Rene Good and Alex Pretti. (Linda Loew)

THE DECISION BY the Trump administration to invade Minnesota with 3,000 immigration and border patrol agents in late 2025 and 2026 has provoked one of the most extraordinary resistance movements in recent U.S. history.

The murders of two American citizens by masked agents, attacks on peaceful protesters, along with the cruel seizure of thousands of immigrants, including children, many with legal status, most with no criminal records, has shocked the conscience of Twin Cities residents, fueling an opposition movement that was still running strong in mid-February when this article was written....

THE MAYORAL VICTORIES of Zohran Mamdani in New York City and Katie Wilson in Seattle, and a sprinkling of other democratic socialist successes in local races around the country provide rays of hope for socialists at an otherwise very grim time.

Indeed, as Trumpism runs amok at home and abroad and as authoritarian movements seem poised to undermine democracies across the world, it seems counterintuitive that it would be the United States — where the socialist movement has long been among the...

In the spirit of Tecumseh — continuing the fight against oppression.

IN THE WAKE of the murders of community defenders Renee Macklin Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents, commentators have scrambled to understand these acts of violence. Predictably, administration officials work to equate community defense with domestic terrorism,” alleging against documented video evidence that Pretti and Good menaced the agents who murdered them.

Many others have defended participation in efforts to safeguard....

Special Education is necessarily expensive. It requires smaller classrooms and policies that allow children with disabilities to flourish. (Jim West)

THE FIRST TRUMP administration already approached education with an agenda focused on deregulation, expanded school choice, and reduced federal involvement.

None of that was subtle. Whether people liked those priorities or not, special education — an area defined by federal safeguards, compliance structures, and funding obligations — was inevitably affected....

SINCE THE BLACK Lives Matter (BLM) protests of 2020, issues of police and carceral reform have been the subjects of major debates within U.S. politics. Critiques of the nature of policing and prisons became mainstream to the point where abolitionist slogans like “Defund the Police” were the focus of electoral rhetoric and policy debates.(1)

Although the agitational power of BLM as a national catalyst of radical political change would dissipate, many grassroots organizations established in the wake of the protests continue to push for reform of the carceral system....

Ukrainian women demonstrate for term limits on military draft.

LAST YEAR I celebrated International Women’s Day in Lviv in Western Ukraine. It was the first women’s march since the end of COVID and the beginning of the Russian reinvasion in 2022.

More than 100 women gathered at the city hall, marching to the civic center’s Opera House and back. As I was the oldest woman in the crowd,...

Dedicated to the children of Gaza, who deserve all good things in life.

GENERAL FRANCISCO FRANCO’S fascist coup against the democratically elected Second Spanish Republic in 1936 was executed with the latest killing technology of the time.

With the help of Nazi German Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion and fascist Italy’s air and naval power, Franco used aerial bombardment as a weapon of terror aimed at overwhelming and demoralizing his “enemy” — the poorly armed Spanish...

Kishwar Naheed in her office.

BORN IN in 1940, Kishwar Naheed had a transformative experience at age eight when she witnessed the return of several girls to her hometown of Bulandshahr, Pakistan.

As she beheld the bruised and bleeding girls who had been kidnapped months earlier during the partition riots, Naheed ceased to be a child and became a woman (“Interview”). Feminine solidarity came to define her life as in this excerpt from “I Feel In My Bones:”

My mother cut
like water through
rocks of grief,
drop after drop after drop.
My mother endured
like the moon
every phase of pain....

Die My Love (2025)
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
Written by Lynne Ramsay, Enda Walsh, and Alice Birch
Produced by Martin Scorsese, Jennifer Lawrence, Justine Ciarrocchi, Molly Smith, Thad Luckinbill, Trent Luckinbill, Andrea Calderwood
Distributed by Mubi

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025)
Directed & Written by Mary Bronstein
Produced by Sara Murphy, Ryan Zacarias, Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie, Eli Bush, Conor Hannon, Richie Doyle
Distributed by A24

MOTHERING UNDER CAPITALISM is a nightmare. And that’s even for those with the advantages of being married heterosexual cisgender white citizens who are not financially destitute. Such is the implication of two recent films written and directed by women.

Die My Love is about an aspiring writer and stay-at-home mother of an infant, living far from her original home, near the family of her often-absent husband; If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is about a professional-class woman caring for her sick child while her husband is away and their home becomes unlivable....

Eleni Varikas speaking in Paris in 2017.

This article, written by Alan Wald, is on behalf of the Against the Current editorial board.

ELENI VARIKAS, A revolutionary Marxist-Feminist French-Greek professor of political philosophy, best known for her pioneering use of the concept of gender in French research, died of heart failure in Paris in early January 2026. She was 76 years old and the life partner of Michael Löwy, the French-Brazilian Marxist sociologist and philosopher. Both were contributors to ATC and good friends of its sponsoring organization, Solidarity.

For those of us who knew Eleni personally, our memories are like precious gemstones. Who can....

Trump on a bad day. (Donkey Holey) CC BY 2.0

THE RISE OF Donald Trump’s extreme right-wing authoritarianism, particularly during his second presidential term, has given rise to a multitude of interpretations of the social and political nature of his rule. This is especially the case among those who have claimed that Trump’s regime represents a variety of fascism....

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) is as ubiquitous as it is uninvited in our lives, colonizing virtually every electronic device and platform that we have become accustomed to using.

I cannot write this text without my wordprocessing software attempting to complete my words and sentences for me....

The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution:
Comparing Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass in Real-Time
By August H. Nimtz and Kyle A. Edwards
Leiden: Brill, 2024, 425 pages, $185 hardback
Haymarket edition 2025, $28 paperback.

IN JANUARY 1865, writing on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association, Karl Marx composed one of the more remarkable missives in the entire history of socialism.

Congratulating the people of the United States of America on the recent reelection of Abraham Lincoln as president, Marx boldly urged the Lincoln Administration, “if resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your reelection is Death to Slavery.”...

Karl Marx in America
Andrew Hartman
The University of Chicago Press, 2025
594 pages, $39 hardcover.

ANDREW HARTMAN’S KARL Marx in America intends to probe “the meaning of Karl Marx in America.” Situating that investigation, both historically and sociologically, Hartman begins “by asking why Marx looked to the United States as a rich source of material about capitalism.” (2)

Hartman then explores the application and implication of Marx’s work from the late 19th century up to the present, especially alert to the numerous uses and misuses of Marx’s critical insights into capitalism in general and the specifics of the political economy in the United States....

Jean-Paul Marat:
Prophet of Terror
By Keith Michael Baker
University of Chicago Press, 2025, 930 pages, $50 hardback.

NOTE: ATC will print a longer version of this review in the coming weeks so check back!

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 99 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 proffering an odious comparison, I think comparing the three covers yields something of value here....

Fascism American Style
Edited by Zachary Sklar and Michel Steven Smith
Introduction by Jim Lafferty
OR Books, 110 pages, 2025, $18 paper, $10 e-book.

EDITED FROM POCASTS originally aired on “Law and Disorder,” From the Flag to the Cross weighs in at 110 pages — the length of a short book or a long pamphlet. FTC consists of seven short essays plus the editorial voice of retired attorney Jim Lafferty. All are well known voices on the American left.

Collectively, these short, easily accessible essays resemble separate pieces to a jigsaw puzzle more than a sustained political argument. But if there is an overarching political subject, it is given away in the book’s subtitle:...