Against the Current, No. 243, July/August 2026

America at 250: Our rights and our lives are on the line!

THE UNITED STATES of America marks its 250th anniversary in July 2026 with its multiple divided legacies. As we know, the country was founded in the perpetuation of racial slavery, in genocide of the Indigenous nations, in ambitions of vast colonial dominion — and simultaneously in the struggles against those things, producing contradictions persisting throughout its history.

This January 19, 2024 Hamburg antifascist demonstration was one of a series of national actions against the far right. CC0 1.0

CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANIZATIONS and activists in Germany are coming under increasing pressure. Some activists are being barred from working in the civil service, and several campaigns have had their bank accounts frozen.

The political influence of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (the infamous Verfassungsschutz) is increasing, and freedom of speech is under attack. In addition, funding for democratic initiatives have been eliminated, and in some cases....

SINCE DONALD TRUMP returned to office, a series of shocking far-right disasters have snowballed. These include open violations of international law under the banner of “anti-drug” operations, a “decapitation strike” to intervene in Venezuela and arrest President Maduro, along with threats to seize Greenland, and launching his “excursion” in Iran.

His pursuit of racist policies at home are reflected in ICE’s abuses of power and acts of violence. All this reflects how Trump’s far-right position is heaping harm and upheaval on the world’s geopolitical landscape....

Across the United States tent encampments set up by students in solidarity with the victims of Israeli bombing in Gaza were forcibly destroyed. "Campus free speech" is a cynical right-wing mantra while imposing political repression and intimidation. JIM WEST

THE MOST RECENT assault on U.S. higher education did not begin with Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025. It began at least two decades earlier and was long foreshadowed. The current right-wing assault had long precedents, of which the much more limited McCarthyism of the late 1940s and 1950s was not alone.

The crisis of university education today has multiple facets: affordability and access, relevance to students’ intellectual development and careers, degradation of faculty rights....

In the Spirit of H. Chandler Davis:
Activism and the Struggle of Academic Freedom
Edited by Michael Atzmon, John Cheney-Lippold, Gary D. Krenz,
Melanie S. Tanielian
Michigan Publishing: Disobedience Press, 2026, 198 pages,
$24.95 paperback.

AMID MOUNTING AUTHORITARIANISM on U.S. college campuses in the last few years, lessons from America’s history of anti-left, anti-socialist state repression are needed now more than ever.

In the Spirit of H. Chandler Davis: Activism and the Struggle of Academic Freedom offers readers probing analyses and vital insights into threats to democracy in this country, past and present. It challenges us to consider the extent to which current violations of academic freedom find their parallel in the purges of....

Strait of Hormuz: Nice oil shipping lane there. A real pity if something would happen to it...

PERHAPS DONALD TRUMP was misunderstood: He always promised that the war with Iran would end in “Unconditional Surrender,” but didn’t mention that it would be by him.

But seriously, Trump and some of his advisers are furious with Benjamin Netanyahu for suckering the U.S. president into launching the war on the absurd promises of instantaneous military victory, rapid Iranian regime collapse and installation of a client....

The opening march of the antifascist conference filled the streets of Porto Alegre with banners and signs.

THE MOST IMPORTANT success of the 2026 antifascist conference in Porto Alegre, Brazil was the one I know that I felt as a participant. It was a tremendous achievement of the organizing committee to bring together a mass gathering of militants to chant, march, talk, debate, learn and celebrate together....

THE PEOPLE OF Puerto Rico have been a colony of U.S. imperialism for nearly 130 years.

We have been and remain a people deprived of the political power to make crucial decisions that affect their lives, with a unilaterally specialized economy controlled by foreign capital, a colonial economy that has never generated....

Sushovan Dhar, from CADTM-India, speaking about how imperialism normalizes domination and violence.

THE CURRENT GLOBAL moment is marked by a dangerous convergence of three broad trends: the rise of authoritarian nationalism — at times exclusive ultra-nationalism, the growth of far-right movements, and renewed imperialist competition between global and regional powers.

These developments are not isolated phenomena, but deeply interconnected expressions of a broader crisis of global capitalism and political legitimacy.

Historically, fascism has emerged during periods of deep social and economic instability. When inequality intensifies, democratic institutions weaken, and ruling elites face challenges to their authority, authoritarian and reactionary forces often gain ground.

Mireille Fanon-Mendès France of the Frantz Fanon Foundation and former UN expert (standing), speaking at the March 29 antifascist plenary. To her left is Fernanda Melcciona (deputy, MES/PSOL) and to her right is a representative from Colombia’s Pacto Historico.

WHAT DOES THE succession of serious events that have been constantly shattering the balance of international relations and, above all, dismantling all the peremptory norms of international law in recent months tell us?

• Starting with the illegal kidnapping of President Maduro and the abduction of Congresswoman Cilia Flores, the Trump administration’s implementation of a state policy against migrants amounts to a declaration of war against....

Langston Hughes (c. 1925) by Winold Reiss, on display in the Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC BU-SA4.0

THE 250TH ANNIVERSARY of the United States will be marked by grand festivities nationwide, especially in Washington, D.C. Speeches will be made. Fireworks will burst. Marching bands will blare down Constitution Avenue.

Yet coming amid a new, deeply unpopular war with Iran, reactionary assaults on democratic institutions, and declining living standards for U.S. workers, all this pageantry will no doubt strike many Americans as profoundly tone deaf.

Many others, of course, will welcome the celebrations, reassured in the belief that the nation remains fundamentally good despite its flaws. Among such people, nationalist sentiment will perform its customary ideological role, obscuring....