Against the Current No. 242, May/June 2026

The UAW accepted two-tier wages and benefits in 2006 concession bargaining. The 2023 contract finally ended the wage difference, but did not restore full benefits. (Jim West)

THE U.S. LABOR movement over the past half century has experienced more defeats — and even more failures to fight — than victories. Defeats are not permanent, though. And neither are victories. What we learn from them often lasts far longer than the specifics of the event itself.

In January, 1919, following the suppression of what became known as “the Spartacist Uprising” in Berlin, Rosa Luxemburg wrote:...

Detroiters rally against Gaza genocide. (Jim West)

FOR THE FIRST time in 30 years, the State of Michigan Retirement System (SMRS) is free of Israel Bonds, ending this long-term financial relationship following a year-long statewide divestment campaign by Michigan Divest. Our victory is a testament to the power of Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions (BDS) organizing and widespread public support for Palestine....

Strait of Hormuz.

APRIL 16 — IF the war on Iran ended right now, by all accounts it would take many months to stop the ever-greater damage to the world economy, particularly but not exclusively to nations of the Global South and Asia. Repairing energy production and infrastructure in the Gulf is probably the work of years.

This is not counting thousands of lives already lost in Iran and Lebanon, and irreplaceable....

No Kings Rally in front of Romulus warehouse with Michigan State Representative Dylan Wegela speaking.

IN MICHIGAN, MORE than 300 Romulus High School students walked out of school protesting the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) this February 11. The students alerted school officials about their plan, and the Superintendent commended the students for their organization and respect.

The walkouts followed a January 28 article in Bloomberg Report that mentioned Romulus, a city of 25,000....

Bruce Springsteen sang his new song, "Streets of Minneapolis" at the rally. (Randy Furst)

ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA — Millions of Americans took to the streets March 28 to protest the Trump administration and its assault on democracy, in likely the most massive turnout of demonstrations on a single day in U.S. history.

Organizers of the No Kings protests estimated that eight million people demonstrated. Protests took place in 3300 cities and towns across the nation, according to organizers....

THIS SPRING DELEGATES were elected to the United Auto Workers Constitutional Convention that will be held in mid-June. As the UAW website notes, the convention will “make critical decisions, including constitutional amendments and resolutions on workplace and social issues.”

The convention will also make nominations for the International Executive Board (IEB) elections that will take place in the fall. A slate, headed by current president Shawn Fain, has just been announced. It includes...

Like autoworkers, Starbucks baristas work for the same corporation across borders. Why not organize across them as well?

“TARIFF” MAY BE Trump’s the most delightful word in the English language, but for workers, it represents a danger. It’s like accepting a two-tier wage structure to keep one’s job. Been there, done that.

When Shawn Fain supported Trump’s auto tariffs, he made the mistake of thinking that a narcissistic businessman could develop a policy in workers’ interests. For Trump, tariffs....

Blue Collar Empire:
The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade
By Jeff Schuhrke
Verso, 2024, 352 pages, $29.95 paper.

Teamsters Metropolis
By Ryan Patrick Murphy
University of Michigan Press, 2025,
258 pages, $29.95 paper.

TWO HISTORICAL WORKS written from newly uncovered CIA and FBI archives — Blue Collar Empire by Jeff Schuhrke, and Teamsters Metropolis by Ryan Patrick Murphy — detail the interventions of the U.S. government in the labor movement abroad and at home through diametrically opposed representations of legitimate unionism.

Respectable unionism, defined by bureaucratic cooperation aligned with national interests, is posed against countercultural unionism, which is solidaristic, militant, oftentimes left-wing, and unruly....

ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SIX DAYS: In a mere 166 days, just over five months, Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party (or Nazi Party) destroyed what remained of a constitutional, parliamentary system and transformed Germany into a one-party fascist dictatorship....

No Race, No Country:
The Politics and Poetics of Richard Wright
By Deborah Mutnick
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025, 312 pages, $13.37 paper, $36.20 hardback.

Baldwin: A Love Story
By Nicholas Boggs
New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2025, 720 pages, $23 paper, $36 hardback.

Survival is a Promise:
The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
By Alexis Pauline Gumbs
New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2024, 528 pages, $18.60 paper, $25.60 hardback.

Something to Do with Power:
Julian Mayfield’s Journey Toward a Black Radical Thought, 1948–1984
By David Tyroler Romine
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025, 304 pages, $25.90 paper, $39.85 hardback.

I. Creative Resistance

Richard Wright never shied from writing about the violence that came from white supremacy. (Gordon Parks)

COMING OF INTELLECTUAL age in the early 1960s, I was one of those whose “doors of perception” were progressively cleansed of the middle-class socialization typical of an American childhood in the McCarthy years. Nonetheless, my awareness that something was gravely amiss in the “Ozzie and Harriet” conformity of the “consumer’s republic” of Eisenhower and Kennedy did not derive from psychedelic drugs.

Instead, my source was close encounters with the avantgarde, Left-wing Black Art of the post-World War II era. This was a cultural undercurrent of the burgeoning new radicalization at work in the interstices of the prevailing Cold War climate, a percolating resistance that opened one’s mind and imagination to vistas promising a more authentic and meaningful life....

British troops firing on American troops at Lexington, April 1775. (Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2004670199/)

FOR CONTRADICTIONS AND contradictory legacies, one can hardly top the American Revolution.

There is much in the history of the era to stir the heart and make one proud to be an inheritor of such a country. And yet this history is also replete with conmen, cads, racists, and rapacious profiteers. And they were sometimes the same people!

Ken Burns’ latest excavation of our heritage takes on this period in all its complexities and — while ultimately landing on the side of the revolutionaries — doesn’t shy away from peeling back the patriotic patina to reveal the rot underneath.

There is nothing more patriotic than men and women willing to risk their lives for the chance of a better life for others and for the future of their (imagined) country. There were many such people who took up arms to fight the British, inspired by the ideals of a movement struggling to “break the chains of slavery” with which the metropole fettered the colonies.

Many of these people began, as well, to take this idea more literally and fought for an end to the enslavement of Black people....

A User’s Guide to DSA:
5 Debates That Define the Democratic Socialists
edited by Stephan Kimmerle, Philip Locker, and Brandon Madsen
Seattle, WA: Labor Power Publications, 2025, 459 pages. Hardback: $25; paperback: $15; e-book: $9.50. See www.labor-power.org.

2025 DSA convention marked growth and challenges. (Links)

THIS VALUABLE COLLECTION serves a dual function. Most obviously, it connects readers with the largest organization on the U.S. Left today — Democratic Socialists of America.

DSA membership has skyrocketed from a few thousand mostly aging and inactive old-timers to 100,000,,,,

Fear and Fury:
The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage
By Heather Ann Thompson
Pantheon Books: New York NY, 2026, 560 pages, $35 hardback.

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON is the Pulitzer Prize winning author known for her work Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971, as well as Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City. She is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker where she writes about the criminal justice system.

Thompson’s groundbreaking new book, Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage, explores the racial dynamics of rage....

King of the North
Martin Luther King‘s Life of Struggle Outside the South
By Jeanne Theoharis
The New Press, 2025, 400 pages, $22.99 paperbaack.

THIS MUST-READ biography sheds new light on Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. The author, Jeanne Theoharis, previously wrote the New York Times bestselling The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of City University of New York.

In King of the North she describes King’s battles against northern segregation, racism and police brutality, as an effort that had its origins in his experiences as a graduate student in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts....

The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025)
Director: Kaouther Ben Hania
Producer: Nadim Cheikhroua, Odessa Rae, James Wilson

THE VOICE OF Hind Rajab dramatizes the experience of workers at the Palestine Red Crescent Center who spoke with the five-year-old Palestinian girl of the title. She was the child who spent hours trapped in a car with her dead family members who were killed by Israeli troops as they tried to obey evacuation orders.

It’s an inevitably moving film, telling a familiar story from a less-familiar angle. As a film about work, it emphasizes the importance of labor that is genuinely useful as well as the pain of workers burdened by....