Against the Current

INDUSTRIAL UNION BUILDING in the 1930s has long been the lodestar for the post-New Deal labor left. If organized labor in the United States could go from historic membership lows in the 1920s to an early 1950s peak union density of nearly one-third of all private sector workers, maybe that great leap forward could be… Continue reading Labor Day Lessons: Can CIO Best Practices Aid Union Organizing Today?

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… Continue reading Preparing the Left for Russia’s Future Crisis

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… Continue reading Venezuela’s Process & Fall: The Legacy of Hugo Chávez

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… Continue reading Prometheanism & Human Obsolescence

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… Continue reading The TWU Local 100 Experience

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… Continue reading High Drama on the High Seas

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… Continue reading Latin America: Patterns and Pendulum

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… Continue reading Ends and Beginnings: An Abolitionist Manifesto

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… Continue reading Choosing History: A Detroit Crucible

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. Trump has allowed the number of field compliance inspectors for federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to… Continue reading Gutting Health & Safety Protections: Gavin Newson Following Trump’s Lead

Ulm Five. In the July-August Against the Current, Annette Ohme-Reinicke discussed the case of the Ulm Five as part of her story on repression in Germany. Here is an update on the trial of the Ulm Five. THE ACCUSED ARE brought in one by one in handcuffs accompanied by a guard who stays and stands… Continue reading German Trial of Pro-Palestinian Activists

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… Continue reading The Paranoid Style in Pro-Israel Polemics

Operation Metro Surge led to mass resistance in the Twin Cities. In April 100,000 to 200,000 rallied at the State Capitol in St. Paul in a No Kings protest. FOR TWO MONTHS last winter, 4000 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unleashed an assault on the Twin Cities with a violent roundup of immigrants, prompting… Continue reading Rampage of the Surveillance State: What’s Behind the Minneapolis Indictments?

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. But amid a deeply unpopular ruinous war, and frightening insecurity for tens of millions of… Continue reading The Looming Election

TEMPORARY PROTECTED STATUS (TPS) for more than 350,000 Haitians living in the United States was overturned by the government, following a June 25 ruling by the Supreme Court to allow the termination. On August 6 all legal work permits ended, Mass layoffs will occur, leading to Haitians losing their homes. Overnight thousands of legal residents… Continue reading Revoking TPS: Trump Escalates Racist Assault

Here Where We Live is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund By Molly Crabapple One World: New York, 2026. 433 pages, $32 hardcover. MOLLY CRABAPPLE’S HISTORY of the Jewish Bund traces its rise and fate, from its inception in 1897 through the Russian Revolution into the interwar years and ending with the Holocaust… Continue reading A Movement’s Inspiration and Legacy

IN DECEMBER 2023, former State Department official, Josh Paul told CNN anchor, Christiane Amanpour that during his tenure in the foreign service, he learned of the rape of a 13-year old boy by Israeli officers while in captivity. In response to U.S. inquiries, the Israeli Government designated the Defense for Children International, the Palestinian organization… Continue reading How Israel has used sexualized violence as a weapon of settler colonialism from 1948 to today

The Colombian National Election Council declared Abelardo de la Espriella the winner in the presidential run off June 21. When on the campaign trail he saluted to the slogan “Steadfast for the homeland,” May 25, 2026. CC0 1.0 SPRAWLING OVER THE southern hills of Bogotá, Ciudad Bolivar is a vast proletarian neighborhood of 700,000 people.… Continue reading Colombia and Latin America: A New Stage of the Struggle

The Ragged Edge of Freedom: Race, Capitalism and Class Struggle in Slavery’s Borderland By Matthew E. Stanley New York: Monthly Review Press, 2026, 469 pages, $35. TO APPRECIATE THIS wonderful and hefty volume fully, or perhaps with a combination of appreciation and dread, it might help to have lived within or near the geographic zone… Continue reading Race and Class in the United States: Coal Miner Communities