Against the Current, No. 244, September/October 2026

Good news: not everyone is hurting!

MIDTERM U.S. ELECTIONS are traditionally predictably unpredictable, the main question being how much loss the party of the sitting President will suffer. Conventionally that should go double or triple for the Republicans this November....

Cero Rico, near Potosi, Bolivia. It has been mined since 1545 for silver. Extractivism is still the basis of Latin America's economy. Mhwater at Dutch Wikipedia

RECENT ELECTIONS ACROSS across Latin America appear to have placed the hard right firmly back in power. While the landscape may appear to be dim for the left, other factors signal glimmers of hope.

Four interrelated developments define the current political panorama. First, and most important, is the January 3, 2026 U.S. invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of president Nicolás Maduro (and Donald Trump anointing....

Kseniia Kagarlitskaya with her father, Boris Kagarlitsky.

AGAINST THE CURRENT spoke with Kseniia Kagarlitskaya at the international anti-fascist conference in Brazil, in March 2026, where she was attending as part of a small group from Russia and Ukraine.

Ivan Drury Zarin conducted this Interview with Kagarlitskaya about Putin’s incarceration of her father Boris Kagarlitsky, and her group Freedom Zone. Visit their website for updates and information on how to donate....

Mikhail Lobanov speaking at a rally in Moscow. Links

IVAN DRURY ZARIN conducted this interview for Against the Current with Mikhail Lobanov, Russian democratic socialist politician in exile and one of the organizers of Radical Democracy, at the international anti-fascist conference in Porto Alegre, Brazil in March 2026.

In 2018, Mikhail Lobanov won a seat in Russia’s parliament,...

Mushroom cloud rising over Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945. The U.S. authorized aerial bombings over Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed between 110,000 and 210,000 people, mostly civilians. The nuclear weapons developed since then are far more destructive. Photo: Charles Levy

“We live in an age of conflicts, an age of biological weapons, chemical warfare, atomic fallout and nuclear bombs . . . Every man, woman, and child lives, not knowing if they shall see tomorrow’s sunrise.”
— Martin Luther King, Address at the Thirty-sixth Annual Dinner of the War Resisters League, 1959.(1)

MLK’s WARNING FROM nearly 60 years ago continues to be true. As psychologist Robert Lifton once wrote, vulnerability is the “central existential....

Günther Anders in California in the early 1940s.

“We can make hydrogen bombs but are insuffi-ciently able to imagine the consequences of what we produce. Our capacity to feel, likewise, limps behind our deed: We can bomb hundreds of thousands into the ground but cannot sufficiently mourn them or feel remorse.” —Günther Anders (1956)

LONG NEGLECTED IN the Anglophone world, the ideas of the German-Jewish technology critic and anti-nuclear militant Günther Anders (1902-1992) have become, over the last decade, an increasingly ubiquitous presence in a transatlantic public sphere.

Understandable trepidation about “existential threats” to humanity like the climate crisis,...

“ON TUESDAY, JUNE 16, 2026 the federal government attempted to repress our movement against state repression by targeting 15 Twin Cities organizers with conspiracy charges.

“SOLIDARITY IS FOREVER....”

Buttons by artist Ricardo Levin Morales

WE ARE CURRENTLY in the midst of a kind of revolution, though a revolution from the right. The institutions of the administrative state have been hollowed out.(1)

The rule of law, which was always a kind of polite fiction, is now an obscene joke. Two of our three branches of government are only questionably relevant to state action. The institutions of civil society, including the news media and the universities, are being bullied by the national government....

DONALD TRUMP’s ATTACKS on worker health and safety protections are notorious, but less well known is that Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom in California has mimicked Trump in likewise understaffing and underfunding Cal/OSHA, the state’s worker safety agency....

Jewish Voice for Peace protest at Joe Biden's State of the Union Speech, March 2024.

“To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors.” —Jewish Labor Bund leader Marek Edelman (1919-2009)(1)

“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs.” —Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973)....(2)

Communes and the Venezuelan State:
The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis
By Anderson M. Bean
Bloomsbury Publishing, New York, 2022, 172 pages. $36.85 hardcover.

Venezuela in Crisis:
Socialist Perspectives
Edited and translated by Anderson M. Bean
Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2026, 332 pages. $27.95 paperback.

IN THE FIRST decade of the 21st century, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela had the most radical government and most developed social...

Riding with the Revolution:
The American Left in the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1925
By Dan La Botz
Leiden: Brill, Historical Materialism 313, 2024, 574 pages,
Haymarket paperback 2025, $27.

Las Adelitas, women fighters in the revolution.

RIDING WITH THE Revolution: The American Left in the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1925 ties a divergent set of characters to a well-explained narrative of the Mexican Revolution and of its different currents.

Dan La Botz, the author of several books on Mexican history and labor, recounts the stories of the various Americans, such as John Reed, Lincoln Steffens, and Bertram Wolfe who entered a fractious Mexican political scene which the book clearly explains.

Particularly impressive is the way the author is able to do justice to a variety of viewpoints,...

Take Back the Power:
The Fall and Rise and Fall of NYC’s Transport Workers Union
Local 100, 1975-2009
By Marc Kagan
Brill, 2026, 452 pages, $157 hardcover
(Haymarket paperback edition in 2027).

JANUARY 3, 1984 was author Marc Kagan’s first day on the job as a New York City Transit worker. He begins his story there at the training center, filling out paperwork, signing a union card, meeting future co-workers, getting assigned to a subway repair shop.

Four years earlier he had “joined the working class,” he explains. Now at 27, “an enthusiastic communist,” he had at last landed a job in “one of the ‘strategic industries’ that the leftist organizations which had emerged during the late 1960s saw as the key to class struggle and revolution.”...

Crucible
By John Sayles
Melville House Publishing, 2026, distributed by Penguin Random House,
496 pages, $32.99 hardcover, paperback available December 2026, $21.99.

WHEN THE New York Times asked John Sayles if Crucible, his novel about Detroit in the early 20th century, confirmed him as a writer of “historical fiction,” his answer highlighted a defining trait of his work. “History is great,” as he put it, “because somebody has already worked out a plot and a timeline for you.1

In Crucible, that plot focuses on the Ford Motor Company between 1927 and 1945,...

Their End is Our Beginning:
Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition
By brian bean
Haymarket Books, 2025, 280 pages, $19.95 paper.

IN MAY 2006 in Oaxaca, Mexico, teachers and their families assembled for a “festive but militant protest occupation” of the city’s central square, which had become an annual fixture of contract negotiations. When the governor sent police to clear the encampment with tear gas, it ignited popular outrage at economic conditions and neoliberal policies:

Over 350 organizations joined the teachers’ union; the encampment was rebuilt, barricades erected, and popular assemblies convened to organize a mobilization....

The Six Mile Circle
A Sea Story
By Syd Stapleton
Marline Publishing, 2026, 233 pages, $18.99 from Amazon.

A FAMILIAR STATISTIC provides the context for the literary genre that Six Mile Circle represents: Approximately 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by bodies of water. For most of us, the Earth we tread is not at all like most of our planet. For lubbers like myself who are aware of that paradox, nautical fiction can be irresistibly fascinating....

Lenin’s Comintern Revisited
By John Riddell
Leiden, Brill: .Historical Materialism, 2026, xiv + 321 pages,
bibliography and index, Haymarket paperback $30.99.

READERS WILL FIND inside this austerely presented and written book a rich vein of political analysis from the documents and debates of the Communist International (CI), or Comintern as it came to be known, as it sought to analyze and shape tumultuous events during the period of victories and defeats following the 1917...