Against the Current No. 237, July/August 2025

NO KINGS demonstration in Detroit, one of 2100 demonstrations. Giselle Gerolami

A BIG, BEAUTIFUL popular resistance is trickling up to some of the sites of political power, including the federal courts — although not fast or far enough, by a long shot. That’s been the important takeaway from the first 100-plus days of the Trump administration. But we’re barely at the beginning of what will be a long battle with ups and downs.

The June 14 “No Kings” rallies were both cheeky and inspirational....

17 April 2025:U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen was told it was impossible to meet with Kilmar Ábrego Garcia after he had been deported to a maxi-prison in El Salvador, but Ábrego Garcia's family and network publicized his case.

You won’t have your names when
 you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be
 deportees.
—Woody Guthrie
“Plane Wreck at Los Gatos,” 1948

SINCE HIS WRONGFUL kidnapping by the Immigration Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) in March, the world has had on its lips the name of Salvadoran American Kilmar Armando Ábrego Garcia....

29 January 2025: The return of displaced Palestinians from the south to the northern Gaza Strip. Photo: Jaber Jehad Badwan

ON MAY 21 a brutal and indefensible targeted killing of two young Israeli Embassy workers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, was committed at the Jewish Museum in Washington, DC.

In grappling with the issues arising from this murder, it’s with some qualms that the editors of Against the Current are devoting an amount of editorial space to this event while Israel’s U.S.-abetted mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians, in progress before and after, continues without a pause....

Dumb, dummer, dummest.

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S TARIFFS are on every­one’s minds. And for good reason: they represent a sharp departure from his party’s principles. But the economic debate over the tariffs’ usefulness tends to obstruct a more meaningful interpretation rooted in a world-systems analysis.

Tariffs cannot change the United States’ position in the world-system. So why the hullabaloo?...

The camera eye of HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence character that becomes the main antagonist in the Space Odyssey series of four novels by Arthur C. Clarke and two films by Stanley Kubick. Artist: Cryteria. CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) has become a topic of widespread controversy. What does AI actually represent, and what potential and dangers does it pose to the struggle for a socialist and sustainable future?

Against the Current is opening a discussion on various impacts of AI — including in production, technology, education, health care and warfare. We begin with this article by Peter Solenberger to introduce and frame the discussion, which will continue in future issues of the magazine.

ANATOMICALLY MODERN HUMANS evolved in Africa some 300,000 years ago. From our genus Homo ancestors we inherited upright posture, opposable thumbs, binocular vision, high intelligence, group living, language, use of fire, and tool-making. Humans have built on that foundation,...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) — Computer systems designed to simulate the human processes of learning and applying what is learned. Humans observe the world, generalize from their observations, and apply the generalizations in their activity. AI systems examine digitalized data, identify patterns in the data, and apply the patterns to new data....

15 September 2023, Detroit: UAW members launched their strike with a rally against the Detroit Three and then marched past GM headquarters. Photo: Jim West

UNITE ALL WORKERS for Democracy (UAWD) voted to dissolve at its general membership meeting on April 27, 2025. Many observers may be surprised that an organization which had made a unique contribution to the United Auto Workers (UAW) came to an impasse within six years of its founding.

Arguing in favor of dissolving, the UAWD Steering Committee majority wrote:...

Ekrem Imamoğlu had been in the regime’s crosshairs for some time as an electoral threat to the AKP.

IN THE EARLY morning of March 19, 2025, police arrived at the home Ekrem Imamoğlu, mayor of Istanbul and member of the People’s Republican Party (CHP).

Imamoğlu, along with a hundred others, was arrested on charges of corruption and aiding a terrorist organization (the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan, or PKK). As of this writing, Imamoğlu remains in detention in the notorious Sivilri Prison outside of Istanbul.

The arrest was not entirely unexpected. First elected mayor of Istanbul in 2019, and reelected to a second term in 2024, Imamoğlu is widely regarded as the primary electoral threat to Tayyip Recep Erdoğan, Turkey’s president and ....

WE CAN ALL give a sigh of relief that a ceasefire seems to have taken place even if its duration remains uncertain. To intelligently assess the likely future trajectory of India-Pakistan relations, especially concerning the possibility of armed conflict erupting, it is all the more necessary to understand the past pattern and trends of behavior over time that can explain how we have arrived where we are today....

The spectacle of Donald Trump’s tirade at his White House meeting with president Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa was met with appropriate revulsion against the racist and lying U.S. president. Less well known are the views of the left in South Africa and its critical stance toward the government.

The following statement was issued by ZASO, Zabalaza for Socialism, an ecosocialist, feminist and anti-racist organization founded in South Africa in December 2023. ZASO aims to unite the left and...

Nikki Giovanni was a product of the Black Arts Movement.

NIKKI GIOVANNI WAS among the most influential figures of the very influential Black Arts Movement from which she rose to international prominence. Few writers and even fewer contemporary poets attained her audience and profile.

Not many poets have their lives documented on film, to say nothing of having that film take the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. A public intellectual since the late 1960s, she is still who many think of when they think of poetry. Many readers, like myself, revere the likes of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, but they love Nikki Giovanni....

Bushehr Nuclear Plant, Iran. Hossein Heidarpour CC BY-SA 4/0

THIS INTERVIEW WITH Juan Cole was conducted before the Israeli attack on Iran that launched the new catastrophe in the Middle East, while the genocide in Gaza continues without letup. These excerpts from University of Michigan Professor of History Juan Cole’s observations on the Middle East are from a more extensive interview conducted by Suzi Weissman for Jacobin Radio, May 20, 2025....

University of Michigan students march off campus to bring the BDS message to the Ann Arbor community. Kathleen Brown

THIS DISCUSSION IS excerpted from an extensive interview with Alan Wald conducted by Suzi Weissman on Jacobin Radio, April 18, 2025. In addition, another fuller version of Alan’s remarks appears in more detailed form, with documentation, in the essay “The Instruction of History” in the new pamphlet Operation Mind, edited by Silke-Maria Weineck and Rebekah Modrak (Ann Arbor: Disobedience Press, 2025).

Suzi Weissman: Today, Alan Wald joins us to unpack the Trump offensive....

New York Times captured University of Michigan graduating students waving Palestinian flags at the May 2024 commencement ceremony in the Big House and put on its May 5, 2024 front page.

HOW DO WE to conceptualize the current political moment in U.S. higher education, and how can we organize a response? I address these questions from my perspective as a sociolegal researcher and an associate professor at the University of Michigan.

The reflections that I share here draw on my experience as an engaged scholar, and specifically on the engagements over the past two years that I and my fellow faculty members have undertaken to defend our university and our students against unprecedented attacks.(1)

My perspective in the current political moment in U.S. higher education is informed by my own spatial position as a resident of southeast Michigan....

The Rediscovery of America:
Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History
By Ned Blackhawk
Yale University Press, 2023, 616 pages, $22 paper.

“SCHOLARS HAVE RECENTLY come to view African American slavery as central to the making of America, but few have seen Native Americans in a similar light. Binary, rather than multiracial, conceptions dominate studies of the past in which slavery represents the antithesis of the American idea.” (3)

Ned Blackhawk continues: “Exiled from the American origin story, Indigenous peoples await the telling of a history that includes them. It was the garden homelands, after all, that birthed America.” (3)....

Workers of All Colors Unite:
Race and the Origins of American Socialism
By Lorenzo Costaguta
University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2023,
230 pages, $28 paperback.

Black Socialist Frank J. Ferrell introducing Terence Powderly at Knight of Labor convention, Richmond, Virginia, 1886. Library of Congress

IN THE GILDED Age following the end of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, Socialists in the United States immediately faced unique issues of race, ethnicity, national oppression and liberation. Lorenzo Costaguta has taken a close look at the ensuing debate in the last quarter of the 19th century.

Socialists were soon divided into two general approaches that largely coincided with the division between Marxists: those who favored concentrating on organizing the trade union movement and the non-Marxist Socialists who favored a focus on electoral politics.

Pro-electoral Socialists often tended to support so-called “scientific” racialism, while those who advocated a trade union strategy....

The Containment:
Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North
By Michelle Adams
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2025, 528 pages, $35 hardcover.

MICHELLE ADAMS IS a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, who grew up in Detroit. Her new book The Containment explains the continuing effect of Milliken v. Bradley and its prohibition of a metropolitan Detroit cross-district desegregation order.

The Supreme Court made that decision in 1974, more than 50 years ago. The decision made clear that Jim Crow-type legal segregation in the North was still very much alive....

Special needs children constitute approximately 15% of Detroit's public school students. Photo: Jim West

Today’s Detroit, with a population of 645,000, is half of what it was then, and the percentage of Black families stands at 77%. Children represent 25% of the city’s population, with 44.2% of them living below the poverty line. That’s more than double the state’s rate.

Of the 95,350 children in Detroit schools, 48,271 attend public school while 50,460 are enrolled in the charter schools. But one in four schoolchildren attend public and charter schools outside the city limits....

The Architecture of Modern Empire
By Arundhati Roy and David Barsamian
Haymarket Books, 2023, 249 pages, $22.95 paperback.

“THE MINUTE YOU allow the state to take away your freedoms, it will. So whatever freedoms a society has exist because those freedoms have been insisted upon by its people,” says Arundhati Roy in a conversation with David Barsamian in 2002.

Two decades later her words have stood the test of time, and her appeal to people to become “extremely troublesome...

Gaza Catastrophe
The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective
By Gilbert Achcar
University of California Press, August 2025, 240 pages, $22.95 paperback.

“IN WHAT SENSE is Israel’s genocidal on­slaught on the Gaza Strip a consequence of the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023?”

Gilbert Achcar poses the question at the beginning of his new (August 2025) book Gaza Catastrophe. His answer encapsulates the catastrophe in one paragraph:

“The best way to answer this question is to resort to an allegory. Imagine a Native American who, having intended to set a few houses on fire in a nearby white settler colony, inadvertently sets off the gigantic blast....

Enter Ghost
By Isabella Hammad
Grove Atlantic, 2024, 336 pages, $18 paperback.

“I EXPECTED THEM to interrogate me at the airport and they did.”

That is the strong opening line to a new novel by Isabella Hammad. The line immediately situates us, knowing the author is Palestinian, in a larger and fraught context. The “they” referred to as the interrogators must be Israeli officials, and the Palestinian protagonist is seeking to enter or re-enter Israel....

Burnout:
The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat
By Hannah Proctor
Verso, 2024, 263 pages. $24.95 paperback.

“EVER TRIED. EVER failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

This line from Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho could be read as the history of the Left, a history of defeats with a seemingly never-ending persistence and desire to get back up and try again.

But what happens when we don’t have the capacity to try again, when the structures of exploitation and oppression are so overwhelming that we can’t even get out of bed,....

Mickey 17
Written and directed by Bong Joon Ho;
produced by Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner,
Bong Joon Ho, Dooho Choi; distributed by Warner Brothers; 2025

BONG JOON HO’S Parasite (2019) was the first Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. That’s a hard act to follow, and his next film, Mickey 17 (2025) has found a tepid reception from critics. But it’s a sprawling, gorgeous, mostly comic tale of worker exploitation and collective resistance for the age of end times fascism.

Mickey 17 adapts the 2022 science-fiction novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton. Mickey (played by Robert Pattinson) is an “Expendable” on a mission to colonize the icy planet Niflheim. As an Expendable, he does the most dangerous....