Against the Current

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....

INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN’s DAY is June 1 in Ukraine, Russia, and 47 other countries. This Children’s Day, the Ukraine Solidarity Network (US) calls for the freedom and return of the tens of thousands of Ukrainian children whom Russia has kidnapped and for ending the mass starvation of millions of children in Palestine, Sudan, and other sites of widespread child hunger such as Haiti, South Sudan, and Mali....

Contrary to our Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, this is not the meaning of Artificial Intelligence.

[Against the Current is opening a discussion in our pages, and online, on the challenges and dangers as well as the potential represented by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Our July-August issue (ATC 237) will include an AI-for-beginners article by Peter Solenberger to initiate the coverage. Among the arenas of the AI debate is its controversial role in higher education. The authors of the following piece urge us not to fall into a binary pro-or-con attitude about AI in the academy.]...

Suzi Weissman interviewed Yassamine Mather on June 20, 2025 for Jacobin radio. Their discussion has been abridged and edited for posting here.

Yassamine Mather

Suzi Weissman: Welcome to Beneath the Surface. I'm Suzi Weissman and today I'm joined by Yassamine Mather, a longtime socialist critic of the Islamic Republic. She’s the acting editor of Critique, a journal of Socialist Theory, where I am also on that editorial board. Her research on Iran is within the framework of the Middle East Center at the University of Oxford, where she also works as a Scientific Developer in the Advanced Research Computing Department. Yassamine writes....

Yassamine Mather questions the western nuclear bomb narrative, discounts the chances of managed regime change and insists that Israel’s war is not only against the regime. Millions of ordinary Iranians are in danger and must be defended

In its compliance with the U.S. agenda, the media keep telling us....

Iran "supreme leader" Ali Khamenei, whose regime fatally miscalculated Israel's and U.S. imperialism's intentions.

ONE OF THE most famous sayings about revolutions is attributed to one of the most prominent leaders of the French Revolution during its most radical phase, Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (1767-1794): “Those who make revolution halfway only dig their own graves.” This saying also applies to armed conflicts, as historical evidence indicates that those who engage in these conflicts and confrontations half-heartedly against people they have declared to be their absolute enemies, thus inducing in these enemies a determination to crush them in return, are doomed to defeat. This is indeed the case with the “Islamic Republic” of Iran. Since its establishment following the overthrow of the Shah, it has declared its absolute hostility to what it calls the “Great Satan,” meaning the United States, and the “Lesser Satan,” meaning the State of Israel.....

ISRAEL'S UNPRECEDENTED ATTACk on Iran is a direct result of the impunity it has enjoyed while carrying out a live-streamed genocide in Palestine over the past 20 months. Under the false pretext of "self-defense," Israel has escalated its long-standing policy of Palestinian erasure into full-scale genocide. Now, it extends that aggression by bombing Iran,...

GEORGE FLOYD WAS murdered on May 25, 2020 when a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for 9-1/2 minutes while Floyd was handcuffed, pleading that he couldn’t breathe....

Erik Helgeson, vice-chair of the Swedish Dockworkers’ Union, Labour Day, Gothenburg. Photo: Daniel Bernman

Erik Helgeson asks whose “national security” is Swedish law really protecting?

SECURITY IS A funny elixir. The more of it that you have, the less there is for someone else… or that’s the conventional wisdom anyway. Erik Helgeson’s experience, however, proves otherwise.

Erik, 42, is the vice-chair of the Swedish Dockworkers’ Union and he cared deeply for the security of his members — and also for the safety of Gazan civilians, some of whom have been killed by weapons which may have passed through the port of Gothenburg, where he has worked for 20 years.

Erik cared so much in fact that in February of this year, he led a symbolic six-day blockade....

The General Industries Workers Union of South Africa (GIWUSA), a leftwing voice in the South African labor movement, posted the statement below following the May 21 White House meeting of Donald Trump and president Cyril Ramaphosa. Trump's sickening racism was on full display as he pressed the mythology of the "white genoicide" of Afrikaner farmers. On this occasion Trump even exceeded his everyday spectacle, presumably prompted by Elon Musk who's seeking to extort favorable concessions....

Teamster vs. Trump striker at the Marathon Petroleum refinery near Detroit last October. Photo: Jim West

The following discussion is part of a longer analysis published in Social Policy (Spring 2025), “From L4B to TAT. Challenging Union Political Endorsements Takes Rank-&-File Action,” which includes an account of the Labor for Bernie initiatives in the 2016 and 2020 presidential election campaigns. Steve Early worked for nearly 30 years as an International Union representative for the Communication Workers of America and helped co-found....

THE INDIAN ARMED Forces have launched “Operation Sindoor,” which has carried out strikes in as many as nine places spread over three cities in Pakistan occupied Kashmir and Punjab province. A counter-strike by Pakistan, also to be condemned, has led to lives lost in Poonch.

All this is an extremely worrisome development, though not entirely....

Flag-lowering ceremony at Wahgha/Attar border, looking from Pakistani side Photo: Kamran Ali CC BY-SA 3.0

ON THE MORNING of 7th May, when I answered my doorbell and went outside looking for who rang, my neighbor loudly asked me to turn off all my lights. This command signaled to me that we are living in a moment of war. Living near the Wahgha border, we heard a deafening noise around 8.30 am, followed by a blast. An Indian Harop drone, made by Israel, struck a close by military installation....

Map of the Civil War in Sudan, updated April 16, 2025. Pink controlled by Sudanese Armed Forces, green by Rapid Support Forces, yellow by Sudan People's Liberation Movement–North (al-Hilu) and brown by Sudan Liberation Movement (al-Nur) Elijah Pepe, CC BY-SA 4.0

Two years have passed since the war broke out in Sudan between the two sides of the military regime that the country inherited from the infamous Omar al-Bashir. While the situation in Sudan does not get even a tenth of the global media attention that the ongoing Zionist genocidal war in Gaza receives, the scale of the human catastrophe there is equally horrific. The death toll from the military-on-military war is estimated at more than 150,000, while the number of displaced people stands at approximately 13 million, and the number of those threatened with severe famine reaches 44 million — a record number that makes the war....