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  • America: How We Got Here and Where We Are Now

    America: How We Got Here and Where We Are Now

    In this video Dan La Botz, an editor of New Politics, discusses two of his recent articles:

    These issues are also discussed in Dan’s article in the current New Politics (Summer 2026) titled: “A Referendum on Democracy? A Chance for a New Direction?”

    The interview was conducted by Traven Leyshon and Joseph Gainza for the “Bread and Roses Too” show on Vermont radio, wGDR. 91.1 FM

  • 81 Years in the Shadow of the Bomb

    81 Years in the Shadow of the Bomb

    Eighty-one years ago this week, on August 6 and August 9, United States dropped two atomic bombs  on Japan, the first on Hiroshima and the second on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 200,000 human beings and poisoning and sickening many others. The bombs were dropped unnecessarily since Japan had already been defeated; the islands could have been conquered with traditional strategies and weapons, but the bombs were dropped as a demonstration of U.S. power and a threat to the Soviet Union. Within four years, however, the Soviet Union also had the bomb and not long after so did other nations. Ever since we have lived with the threat of planetary annihilation.

    Now Trump has once again reminded us of the threat of a nuclear war. Last week former Soviet president Dmitry Medvedev and Donald Trump threatened each other and all of us with the use of nuclear weapons, Trump sending two nuclear summaries “to appropriate regions,” that is, closer to Russia. Eighty years later we still live with the threat of the destruction of all life on our planet.

    Six years ago, I wrote an essay titled “A Life in the Shadow of the Bomb,” which I republish here in an updated form, sure that my experience was shared by many others of my generation, and subsequently other generations. I publish it to encourage us to find a way to prevent nuclear war.

    A Life in the Shadow of the Bomb

    I am a child of the atomic age. The atomic bomb, that is, the threat of nuclear war and mass destruction, has been in my consciousness — sometimes in the background but frequently in the foreground — nearly all of my life.

    I was born on August 9, 1945 at the Lying Inn Hospital of the University of Chicago, the day that the second atomic bomb was dropped in Japan on the city of Nagasaki, killing tens of thousands of people. My birthplace, the U of C, was also the birthplace of the atomic bomb, which had been conceived there a couple of years before. Enrico Fermi and other scientists in the Manhattan Project carried out the first chain reaction on December 2, 1942 in a secret laboratory hidden in the university’s football stadium. Of course, when I let out my first shriek at the shock of birth and the awakening into life, I knew nothing of any of that.

    I first became conscious of the issue of nuclear war when I was eight years old. My parents had moved to Whittier, California, where my father was to manage a Co-op Grocery Store. The local public elementary school that I attended held “duck-and-cover” drills and we students had to get under our desks and put our hands over our heads. We were told this would protect us in the event of a nuclear attack. A duck-and-cover public service announcement of the era shows, among other scenarios, an elementary school class much like mine. I don’t remember ever discussing this with my teacher or my parents at the time, though I am sure that it is from that time that I began to experience the vague and chronic nuclear anxiety that so many of us of my generation felt and still feel.

    In 1957 Norman Mailer, after describing the post-war period in America, wrote about that vague anxiety in his famous essay “The White Negro”:

    It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American existentialist — the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled (at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves no research foundation for cancer will discover in a hurry), if the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.

    Obviously, I was too young to understand those ideas, but those feeling of existential angst and rebellious attitudes would come to me later.

    Throughout my elementary and secondary school years, first in Chicago and later when I lived in San Diego County, television frequently carried news or programs about the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC), a special force of bombers carrying nuclear weapons. We were told that SAC would deter war, but that if it failed to deter, American bombs would obliterate the Soviet Union, as was explained in the film “The Power of Decision” and other U.S. Air Force publicity into the 1960s.

    The military also publicized the U.S. Army’s defensive Nike Missile system deployed in and around cities throughout the country. I remember seeing Nike Missile bases in Chicago along Lake Shore Drive when I returned to visit my father’s family in the early 1960s. The Nikes we were told would defend us from incoming Soviet H-bombs.

    There were also TV shows and films about civil defense and fallout shelters. Some of these suggested that every suburban family should have a well-provisioned underground fallout shelter where mom, dad, and the kids could ride out the storm until the radioactive dust settled. New York, which had a population of 7.7 million, had 18,000 such shelters in 1963 and the Department of Defense had plans for 34,000 more. Where I now live in Brooklyn I occasionally see the yellow and black fallout shelter signs of the 1950s posted on some apartment buildings. Cities all over the country had the shelters. When the TV and radio told us or the alarms went off, we were all to hightail it to the shelter and wait for the all clear that would surely come.

    A small percentage of shelters were fortified underground bunkers stocked with emergency supplies, but these were rare and primarily built for high-ranking government officials. The majority of shelters, including nearly all those that were visibly marked, were known as “community shelters,” and by all accounts, they offered little special protection.

    Many of the New York City shelters reportedly became overrun with rats as big as dogs.

    At the time of the Berlin crisis in 1961, President John F. Kennedy told the country in a nationwide televised speech on July 25, that, “in the event of an attack, the lives of those families which are not hit in a nuclear blast and fire can still be saved if they can be warned to take shelter and if that shelter is available.”

    The president went on say: “We owe that kind of insurance to our families and to our country. … The time to start is now. In the coming months, I hope to let every citizen know what steps he can take without delay to protect his family in case of attack. I know you would not want to do less.”

    Though I do not remember it, in all likelihood I saw Kennedy make that speech, since I watched the national news every evening as we all did then. I was fifteen years old. Did I believe it? I don’t know. Talk of nuclear war and civil defense had by then become normalized, so I suppose I did.

    At the time people discussed, analyzed, and even wrote poems about bomb shelters. One of the questions — the Noah’s Ark question — was whether or not one would have to defend one’s shelter gun-in-hand from neighbors who had had not had the foresight to prepare for the hard rain that was gonna fall.

    But by the time I was in high school, I was aware that all of the duck-n-cover and fallout shelter stuff was nonsense. In part that was because I had read the 1950 book Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician by Dr. Michihiko Hachiya, director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital, who in his diary described the destruction and suffering caused by one A-bomb being dropped on his city.

    One H-bomb could take out the entire city of San Diego. Images of the A-bombs and H-bombs I’d seen in those films destroying actual Japanese cities or test sites with buildings built to be blown apart, were burned into my brain, sometimes actually worrying me, but more often just hovering in the background contributing to a lingering uneasiness.

    Giclee Print, , large

    The 1959 film “On the Beach” (based on Nevil Shute’s novel of the same name) imagined a Third World War in 1964 that because of a mistake or accident brought about global nuclear annihilation. The spectacular cast–Gregoary Peck, Ava Gardner, Anthony Perkins, and Fred Astaire–draws us into the human drama as hope gives way to despair and in the United State and around the world people take suicide pills. The film was as compelling as it was depressing.

    I was a junior in high school during the Cuban missile crisis in the fall of 1962 when it was learned that the Soviet Union had installed missile bases on Cuba that could carry nuclear warheads to the United States. Now, we learned, Soviet bombs were only 96 miles from the United States. President Kennedy demanded their removal. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and President Kennedy who negotiated the crisis held the fate of the world in their hands. For a couple of weeks, every night on television there were discussions of the dangerous developments and images of nuclear bombs. John F. Kennedy spoke to us through the TV, telling us we were on the “abyss of destruction.” Many people thought we might all be incinerated. When it ended, we were advised that we had escaped the “most terrible threat of holocaust since World War II.” When, we wondered, would it happen again?

    When I was in college, I read Kurt Vonnegut’s book Cat’s Cradle, a darkly comic book about the bomb, about science, technology, and morality. In the book, the dangers of the A-bomb are paralleled by those of the fictional substance ice-nine which has the capacity to turn all water to ice. The book had a big impact on those of us living in the 1960s.

    During the period from my high school graduation in 1963 until I finished college in 1968, nuclear war was not at the forefront of my consciousness. We all had other things on our minds. The television, that had been bringing us images of the civil rights movement through the early 1960s now brought us the Black urban rebellions and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Coming from a socialist, pacifist family, I had registered as a conscientious objector upon my graduation from high school in 1963 and for the moment had a draft deferment as a college student. The possibility of being called up and sent to kill or die in Vietnam pushed the more abstract idea of nuclear war further back into the recesses of my mind.

    After graduating from San Diego State College in 1968, I went for one semester to the Library School at the University of Chicago, returning to the place of my birth, the place of the bomb’s birth. One day, walking through the campus I came upon Henry Moore’s magnificent sculpture “Nuclear Energy,” located more or less on the site where the bomb had been developed. It seemed to me to depict both the atomic bomb and the human brain that conceived it. It appeared to be a tribute to the wonder of human intelligence and to its folly, to our genius and to our stupidity. Moore declined to say exactly what it represented or the source of the imagery.

    Moore, who was British, was himself an opponent of the bomb.

    When the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was launched in 1958, Moore was among its founder members. He had already sponsored its predecessor the National Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons Tests (NCANWT). He also supported disarmament groups local to his home in Perry Green such as the Hertford Group of Nuclear Disarmament, which he donated to in 1959.

    Such was Moore’s involvement in the CND that the critic John Berger proposed that his Falling Warrior, 1956–57 (LH 405) be used as their emblem, and a CND sponsored exhibition be held of the sculpture and its preparatory maquettes and working models. The exhibition was never held nor the emblem adopted, however, CND imagery would prove important to Moore.

    In any case, Moore’s sculpture moved me as it had moved others.

    The following year I returned to San Diego and attended the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) to study Literature with Fred Jameson, the literary critic, and occasionally sat in on classes of Herbert Marcuse, the Marxist philosopher. I find it interesting that I don’t remember any discussions of the issue of nuclear arms in those years at UCSD where (despite its implosion at the 1969 convention) SDS — Students for a Democratic Society — was still active on our campus protesting the Vietnam War and there was also a Third World Coalition of students of color protesting racism, while professors and graduate students discussed Marx, Freud, and Sartre day and night. There may have been some anti-nuclear discussions, but not that I remember. Perhaps because Richard Nixon became president and we had entered into a period of détente with the Soviet Union, the bomb became less of an issue. In any case, it was at that time that, after reading Sartre, that I came to think of myself as an existentialist; and perhaps it was living with the anxiety of the bomb, that brought me to that conclusion, as Mailer had suggested a dozen years before that it would.

    I left graduate school in 1971, and once again returned to Chicago as part of the International Socialists’ labor-organizing project, becoming a steel worker for a short while and for several years a truck driver, active in helping to organize Teamsters for a Democratic Union. We on the left — or at least in my part of the left — were well aware of the issue of nuclear warfare, but it seldom came up, since we were focusing on more immediate issues: civil rights, the Vietnam War, and workers’ struggles for a decent life. We on the far left at that time were all engaged in party building, but our various parties, which opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam, only occasionally took up the issue of the atomic bomb.

    Because I had grown up in a pacifist family, I was aware of the anti-nuclear weapons movement, of organizations like the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, better known as SANE, that had been founded in 1957. In a big city like Chicago where I lived throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s, one occasionally saw anti-nuclear-weapons activists demonstrating. Some came from the Quakers and the Unitarian Church or from some liberal Jewish Temple, some from the War Resisters League, while others were gray-haired idiosyncratic socialists. Occasionally there were some students, but the Peaceniks, as they were known, tended to be mature people, older folks. Compared to the young people in the streets demanding civil rights or protesting the Vietnam War, the peace and anti-nuclear movement seemed somewhat quaint. Of course, some of these folkloric Peaceniks were heroic draft resisters who had gone to prison for their beliefs and others became founders of the anti-Vietnam War movement. Another group, Women’s Strike for Peace seemed to be made up mostly of older women in the 1960s, but by the 1970s it had been transformed by the new feminism so that it combined the exuberance of the emerging women’s movement with the sense of urgency to end nuclear weapons.

    In 1970 the nuclear powers negotiated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and they said lead to nuclear disarmament. The non-nuclear states agreed not to acquire nuclear weapons and the nuclear state agreed to help them with the peaceful us of atomic power for energy. But Israel acquire nuclear arms around 1970, India in 1974, Pakistan in 1998, North Korea in 2006. The treath was a failure.

    The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (1987), supposedly banned U.S. and Soviet ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. Both sides violated the treaty.

    After the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the START treaty was intned to imit the deployed strategic nuclear warheads and delivery systems between the U.S. and Russia. Once again both sides violated the treaty.

    The problem with treaties was that none of the great powers trusted each other and we didn’t trust them either. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was adopted by the United Nations on July 7, 2017, it officially entered into force on January 22, 2021. Today U.S President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin both openly threaten to use nuclear weapons.

    It was in 1980s that the anti-nuclear movement suddenly took off. It was not nuclear weapons or nuclear war that so unexpectedly made things nuclear a big deal, it was the nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that led to a partial meltdown in a nuclear reactor releasing radioactive gases and iodine into the atmosphere. Local anti-nuclear power groups that had existed in various parts of the country prior to the Three Mile Island accident began to mobilize to shutdown nuclear reactors and to organize many local protests and a couple of large scale national demonstrations of between 100,000 and 200,000 people in late 1979. These demonstrations around nuclear power melded with the movement against nuclear weapons.

    Then too, there is the fact that the era of U.S.-Soviet détente had ended and another Cold Warrior had been elected president: Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s anti-Communism was enough to make people worry about nuclear war, but his occasional off-hand remarks about using tactical nukes or fighting an actual nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union in Europe added to our anxiety.

    Then too the left took up the issue. In 1980, the great British labor historian E.P. Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class, who was also an anti-nuclear arms activist, published his pamphlet Protest and Survive. It was originally a parody of a British government civil defense pamphlet called Protect and Survive. The large English and European anti-nuclear movements, of which Thompson was a spokesperson, had reverberations in America. Another landmark of the anti-nuclear movement at the time was writer Jonathan Schell’s important The Fate of the Earth in which he argued that a nuclear war might destroy all human life and make the planet uninhabitable. We on the left now had a couple of tomes to educate us and provide a direction.

    All of this came together in 1982. I was working as an I.S. staff person and was in New York City on June 12, where I joined the demonstration that day of one million people in Central Park calling for an end to the nuclear arms race; at that time it was the largest political demonstration in U.S. history. Throughout the 1980s the anti-nuclear movement with its slogan — “Never Again” and brandishing Peter Kennard’s horrifying poster (left) — grew, and spread, and became more militant with thousands being arrested. It was about this time too that the Greenham Commons Women’s Peace Camp, protesting the British government’s installing nuclear cruise missiles at the Royal Air Force base there, caught everyone’s attention. Women chained themselves to the fence and many were arrested, and it lasted almost twenty years. The 1983 television film The Day After, about ordinary people and their experience of the the outbreak of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, was seen by 100 million people in 39 million households and also contributed significantly to the anti-nuclear arms sentiment at the time.

    In the mid-1980s, my wife Sherry Baron and I moved to Los Angeles where she did public health research at UCLA. I found work with Jobs with Peace, a remarkable campaign mounted by a number of unions and community organizations. Informed by the idea that the Cold War ought to be wound down, Jobs with Peace called for a transition from an economy based on military production — which in Los Angeles meant the aerospace industry producing fighters and bombers — to an economy based on production for society’s needs. The national Jobs with Peace Campaign was associated with SANE/Freeze, so one can say it formed part of the anti-nuclear movement. My work with Jobs with Peace had me knocking on doors in the harbor towns, Wilmington and San Pedro, talking with working class people about the need to make a transition while preserving union jobs, and the response was generally very good.

    In the late 1980s my wife Sherry and I moved to Cincinnati where she had gotten a job with the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), part of the Centers for Disease Control and soon we were raising two children. The city was conservative, a political backwater for the left and busy with our family, our involvement in politics declined until the police killings of Black men led to a rebellion there in 2001. Involved in organizing protests against racist police, the bomb was in the background.

    Still, we read the newspapers and followed international events and joined the movement against the first U.S. war on Iraq. I remained a socialist, now in Solidarity, a group formed by the merger of the I.S. and another two groups. We were aware of the tensions in the Middle East and that they might possibly lead to nuclear war and concerned about it, but once again there were other developments competing for our attention. The terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in September 2001 meant that Sherry spent a lot of time in New York City looking into the health affects on first responders and other workers in the area of the explosions as well as creating programs to help them. Once again a more immediate challenge pushed the nuclear question down on the agenda. Then there were the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we joined the protests against those wars, which terrible as they were, did not seem likely to lead to nuclear war.

    Some people believed that with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 there would be a “peace dividend,” since the United States would no longer have a mortal enemy. The government could spend less money on the military and more on social programs. And perhaps, said the optimists, it would be possible to phase out nuclear weapons. But that did not happen, though with the fall of the Soviet Union the anti-nuclear movements declined, perhaps because people believed war was now more unlikely. But nuclear weapons didn’t go away. As I am sure you know, at least nine nations have nuclear weapons and though five (the U.S., Russia, China, U.K. and France) have signed a treaty to stop the spread of nuclear weapons to other nations and promised — someday — to destroy their current stockpiles — there is no evidence that the number of nuclear weapons is being reduced. Four other nations — India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea — also have nuclear weapons but have not signed the treaty. Japan and Iran both appear to have the capacity to make a bomb, but have not done so.

    Now Turkey and Saudi Arabia want the bomb too and the Washington Post suggests that 2020 could be an “especially dangerous year.” What year, I wonder, has not been? In 1947, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists began to publish the “Doomsday Clock” indicating how close the scientists thought the world was to nuclear war and destruction. In January of this year they announced that we were 89 seconds from Doomsday. We must be even closer now.

    I have been and remain skeptical of the notion that the world’s governments, run as most of them are by groups of political gangsters who serve capitalist moguls, would ever take any step that limited or reduced their power by curtailing nuclear arms. Only a powerful international movement that seeks to change our economic and political system will make possible the elimination of nuclear weapons.

    So, we continue to live with the fear that a nuclear war might be triggered by some incident in the Middle East or in Punjab, in Ukraine or who knows where. And we continue to wear the button with the peace symbol that was created in 1958 by Gerald Holtom for the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

    Of course now we have the overriding issue of global warming, and pandemics like COVID-19 and perhaps next H1N1. And as in the past, current issues, like the rise of right wing parties throughout the world, push the danger of nuclear warfare into the background once more. Even though those parties’ ambitions may trigger another world war, this time an atomic world war.

    But here it is, August again. I will turn 80 in a few days and so will my age-mate the atomic bomb. You and I will continue, as we know, to live in the shadow of the bomb until we create a movement to rid ourselves of it.

  • Review: Debates in the DSA

    Review: Debates in the DSA

    A User’s Guide to DSA: 5 Debates that Define the Democratic Socialists
    Edited by Stephan Kimmerle, Philip Locker, and Brandon Madsen
    Labor Power Publications, 2025

    In the lead up to the 2025 Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Convention, members of the DSA caucus Reform and Revolution (R&R)1 published an edited reader, A User’s Guide to DSA: 5 Debates that Define the Democratic Socialists. The book sets out to familiarize uninitiated DSA members with the terms of political debates that are in play nearly ten years after the organization’s resurgence in 2016. Contributions are written by DSA leaders and partisans, either as original essays or reprints of essays that are scattered across the internet. For this effort, the book should be recognized as a democratic contribution to the DSA: information is critical for meaningful democracy.

    Disclaimer: the editors invited another comrade and I from the Tempest Collective to contribute to this book as commentators from outside the DSA. I wrote exhaustively on DSA when I was a member from 2017-2022. For several reasons, we declined to be part of this book. This review is at the request of New Politics.

    Overview

    The editors organize the sections according to five debates, which they define as:

    1. How to Fight Trump and Defend Working-Class and Oppressed People (70 pages)
    2. Electoral Strategy and the Democratic Party (100 pages)
    3. Labor Organizing and the Role of Socialists in the Workers’ Movement (40 pages)
    4. How to Change the World? (i.e. reform or revolution?) (50 pages)
    5. What is Socialist Internationalism? (90 pages)

    These debates are book-ended by an introductory section (“Setting the Stage: What is DSA?”, 50 pages) and some comparative international politics (“Looking Outside: The Experience of New Left Formations Internationally”, 30 pages).

    The space dedicated to each section gives us a sense of the relative weight placed on these issues. As might be expected, electoral politics make up the plurality of the book. Internationalism receives the next most discussion, largely a debate regarding “campism” or “anti-imperialism”, though it should be noted that the essays in this section are almost entirely a debate between Red Star caucus and Reform and Revolution2; Dan La Botz of Solidarity is the only contributor representing the perspective on “anti-campism” (historically Third Camp). Perspectives from the center or right groups are therefore absent, which may obscure more than it reveals for the average DSA reader.

    Understanding DSA

    Since A User’s Guide is aimed at DSA members, I think it makes sense to start with evaluating it as a guide. The book begins with an introduction from Kimmerle, Locker, and Madsen, who are all members of R&R. A User’s Guide lays out some of the questions that will frame the book and front loads their caucus’ positions on various questions. The introduction attempts to guide the reader into the debates while also inserting R&R’s perspectives.

    A User’s Guide then gives the editors’ overview of existing caucuses in DSA, grouped according to where they lie in DSA’s political spectrum. R&R defines these as the “Moderate Wing” and the “Left Wing”. This is a curious construction. Two wings: one left and one…middle wing? Both “wings” are made up of factions that have representation on the present national leadership, the National Political Committee (NPC), and it reads as though the editors are pulling their punches for the sake of internal politics. For some reason, they avoid calling this group the “right” wing and use the less agitational term “moderate” (even though that confuses the metaphor). The remaining caucuses listed as “other caucuses on the left” are not represented on the leadership.

    Regarding caucuses in DSA, the editors posit:

    “Some argue caucuses are divisive and lead to sectarian conflict. It is true that sharp political differences can cause such problems. But regardless of whether there are organized caucuses, there will be different political viewpoints within any healthy organization. The real question is, will these differences be expressed openly, and in a transparent fashion that allows members to democratically consider and decide between the different options?”

    It’s the correct point, but the reader is expected to take it as an article of faith that these differences are clear and transparent to the members of DSA. That a book like A User’s Guide is needed tells us that this is not the case. DSA’s publications don’t play this role, so most debates are not in direct dialog but are scattered across social media, caucus websites, and held between leaders in chapters or the national organization. R&R’s greatest contribution has been organizing online panels that frame questions directly and bring in speakers from assorted factions to clarify these positions.

    Information about the organization, let alone the positions of its caucuses, is not generally accessible to members unless they are part of a caucus that provides it to them. While organized caucuses are important for a multi-tendency organization, it is not a given that they enhance member democracy. A real tension exists between democratic potential and the actuality of backroom dealing between factions.

    History and Conjuncture

    The first collection of essays (“Setting the Stage: What is DSA?”) are not presented as a debate the way the rest of the book is but they situate the reader on the history and contemporary operations of DSA.

    An interview with Megan Romer, former DSA National Co-Chair and member of Red Star Communist Caucus, is a useful overview of how DSA conceives of itself and an honest balance sheet from a top leader. The first word on DSA is about its size and that it is a “big tent”. Romer says candidly of endorsed elected officials, “We’re not great at holding them accountable.” (34)

    The interview expresses contradictions of leadership in DSA, but Kimmerle as interviewer does not really tease this out. For example, Romer explains that on the one hand “we are really committed to doing democracy” (30), but then when asked why DSA doesn’t purposefully move towards breaking with the Democratic Party, Romer responds “A lot in DSA runs on momentum, and things happen because people are there doing them. It’s a little bit of a ‘do-ocracy’. Whoever shows up ready to do the work, that’s the work that gets done.” (40) Later, speaking of the International Committee’s orientation on immigrant rights, she likewise says, “I wish that decision had just been made collectively. It was actually the right decision, and it happened organically.” (40)

    This is a key insight when evaluating the democracy of DSA. Members may vote on their national representatives, but the elected leadership acknowledges that this is not where the power lies. When asked about whether the “left” majority elected in 2023 was able to enact its priorities, Romer responds, “I don’t think things have moved as fast or as far as we would want them to, but it’s a big ship that we aimed to turn around. Before I got elected, I would’ve said ‘change everything’. Well, it’s actually hard to change the direction of things…” (41).

    Bryan Watson’s essay, “A Bridge to a Mass Socialist Force”, analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of DSA. The essay is a sober accounting of DSA’s better and worse characteristics: it’s got thousands of people; it’s a membership organization that is “relatively democratic” (60); it’s the starting place for many young activists today. At the same time, Watson does not hold back in pointing out that “Much of DSA mistakenly believes that elections are the main way to change society” (61), and that “Unfortunately, the Red Star, [Marxist Unity Group (MUG)], and [Bread and Roses (B&R)]-led majority on the National Political Committee from 2022 to 2025…only very superficially changed DSA’s electoral approach.” (65)

    Laura Wadlin of B&R, one of the self-described Marxist caucuses, gives the sole account of DSA’s history. This is a significant weakness of the book. Wadlin’s narrative expresses the common sense of the DSA leadership layers, and without any critical engagement the book tacitly endorses her perspective.

    Wadlin deploys a great man, “Bernie”-centric history of DSA: “there are fundamentally two DSAs: pre-Bernie DSA (1982-2014) and post-Bernie DSA (2015-present).” (48) Wadlin maps the history of the “pre-Bernie” period onto the personal achievements of Michael Harrington and various “high profile leftist[s]” (49) such as Barbara Ehrenreich and Cornel West. The organization is largely dormant through the 1990s and 2000s until new, great individuals shaped the DSA of today. Wadlin names Maria Svart (National Director of DSA from 2011-2024) and Bhaskar Sunkara (founder of Jacobin magazine and—since 2022—president of The Nation magazine) as the two key figures that prefigure the “rebirth” of DSA. There are a few nods to movements like #Occupy, but these are freestanding acknowledgements that don’t relate back to Wadlin’s essay about DSA.

    There’s plenty to pick apart in this narrative, but I would direct the reader to two significant omissions. First, because the narrative is essentially a liberal one, it does not analyze how crises and capitalism had any role in DSA’s “rebirth”. The crisis of 2007 is not mentioned, which is critical for understanding the change in class politics in the 21st century and the ensuing crisis of the political center. This would be basic Marxist analysis.

    The problem with using a subjective explanation is that it doesn’t answer any of the underlying questions: why was there suddenly an audience for left politics? If the right people had been around in the 1990s, would the same growth have been possible for DSA? Obviously not, but that highlights the problem with the analysis for more recent history.

    The second item we have to point out is the complete omission of the “Bowman Affair”, which was the most profound crisis that the DSA faced post-2016. In short, DSA endorsed Jamaal Bowman when he ran for Congress in 2020. Strategically, this was part of DSA’s turn towards Biden’s “Build Back Better” and “Green New Deal for Schools”. Bowman, however, was a liberal Zionist who bucked DSA’s Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) Working Group when he was elected to the House of Representatives.

    In 2021, Bowman voted in favor of arming the Iron Dome (Israeli missile defense system) and then took a propaganda tour of Israel with top officials of the settler state. This led to a call to expel Bowman from DSA in the fall of 2021, which the NPC rejected. Instead, it suspended members of DSA’s BDS Working Group. Thousands of members quit DSA during the controversy. While DSA leaders played down the significance of the affair, it would be an important prelude to the renewed attacks on Gaza in 2023 and the campus protests across the United States. This is entirely written out of A User’s Guide.

    Yesterday’s Debates

    There’s plenty more one could say about the sections on electoral politics, labor, strategy, and oppression. Instead, I think it’s more helpful to point out that to the extent the book presents debate, they appear more about degree rather than kind. There’s effectively no debate any more about running democratic socialists in the Democratic Party3; long-time DSA leader David Duhalde’s “dirty stay” position is the common sense in DSA. Duhalde defines the “dirty stay” as,

    “…an observation that, despite DSA’s stated desire to become a political party, its members and activists largely balk at opportunities to do so, and instead continue to use the Democratic Party as an area of struggle instead of other options.” (173)

    As much as we might disagree with the embrace of the “dirty stay”, we can at least appreciate that it does not hide what its about: “I especially want us to stop pretending we are building a third-party when a better and more honest orientation already exists, one in which we are fostering a left-wing faction within the Democratic Party, the party which most members will gravitate toward anyway.” (175-176) The essays in A User’s Guide that continue to press for the “dirty break” thus represent a minority current at best, or a delusion about DSA’s activity at worst.

    I would argue that A User’s Guide therefore represents the results of earlier debates but does not capture the debates within DSA currently.

    The central debate at this point is about what kind of organization DSA aims to be. There has historically been tension in DSA has been between its activist layer, about ten percent of the membership and the majority paper membership. Since 2016, DSA’s strategy, articulated in the document Resistance Rising: Socialist Strategy in the Age of Political Revolution4, attempted to fuse electoral politics with extra parliamentary organizing. With the election of Zohran Mamdani, the influx of new DSA members who joined through the extensive canvassing effort increased the tension and led to debates about the bounds of membership in DSA.

    This does not appear as a debate as such in A User’s Guide, but it is acknowledged by Ty Moore, another R&R member, when he agrees with Eric Blanc’s call that DSA should essentially just be a Berniecrat organization. Moore says of Blanc, “This is an excellent proposal for how to concretely engage Zohran’s huge base… Yet the reaction on Twitter from a number of radical left activists in DSA was to oppose this as somehow a contradiction to building DSA. This is a textbook example of sectarian thinking that must be overcome.” (201) Notwithstanding the quality of debate from Twitter/X, it seems like just the kind of debate that should be fostered to clarify its terms.

    Notes

    1. The editors explain in their overview of DSA caucuses that they are members of Reform and Revolution (R&R), but they are now in a minority current that disagrees with the direction the caucus has gone. Labor Power Publications therefore does not appear to be directly related to R&R.
    2. Reform and Revolution attempt to position themselves somewhere between anti-imperialist “campism” and “anti-campism”, reflecting their heritage as a group descended from the Militant tradition and a Socialist Alternative (US) breakaway.
    3. https://tempestmag.org/2021/06/strange-alchemy/
    4. https://www.dsausa.org/strategy/resistance_rising_socialist_strategy_in_the_age_of_political_revolution/
  • AOC for President? Will She Run? Could She Win?

    AOC for President? Will She Run? Could She Win?

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the former waitress, member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and a New York City congresswoman, now in her fourth two-year term, won a recent poll on Democratic Party candidates for president in the 2028 election. In the New Hampshire poll, she won 22%, while former secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg got 21%, astronaut and senator Mark Kelly received 9% and California governor Gavin Newsom had 8%. An ally of Senator Bernie Sanders, whom she accompanied on his “Fighting Oligarchy” national tour, and of Zohran Mamdani, the DSA member who is now mayor of New York City, she has become the standard-bearer of progressives. So now everyone left of center asks: Will she run? Could she win? [1]

    The national mood makes such considerations possible. President Donald Trump is losing the war on Iran and doesn’t seem able to win or get out. He is once again imposing tariffs that act as a tax on American consumers. Gas prices are up again. Food is costly. Homes remain expensive. Trump’s popularity is at an all-time low. Even his base is turning against him. The Republican Party could lose the midterm elections this November and there is fear Trump might attempt to steal them, even launch a coup.

    Yet the Democratic Party’s popularity is about the same as Trump’s. Democrats and independents are uninspired by Democratic Party leaders like House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer who seem to have no new ideas and no fighting spirit. Most Americans seem to be increasingly alienated from the parties, from the establishment, and from the whole political system. Yet, DSA candidates have been winning elections and gaining some power in the Democratic Party. It is this that makes an AOC campaign seem both attractive and plausible.

    Yet an AOC presidential campaign would be difficult. Even many of her supporters think that she should run first for the Senate seat now held by Schumer. DSA itself is divided on AOC. While New York City DSA supports her, national DSA withdrew its endorsement of her in July 2024, believing she was insufficiently pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist, but if that was true in the past, it is not now. She is strongly pro-Palestinian, calls the Israeli war on Gaza genocide, and opposes military aid to Israel. Still the division in DSA itself is less important than other factors.

    The Democratic Party leadership, which acted forcefully to quash Sanders’ presidential bid, loathes the party’s progressives and socialists and would surely use its power to try to crush AOC. Whether or not they could is an open question.

    AOC is a woman and the United States has never elected a woman to the presidency, despite several strong candidates in the past. And she would have to overcome a strong anti-Latino prejudice whipped up by Trump and his followers. While AOC was born in the United States, and while all people from Puerto Rico, a U.S. colony, have been U.S. citizens since 1917, given the long history of U.S. racism and xenophobia and the recent growth of white Christian nationalism, she would still face a barrier of racial animus. AOC has experienced harassment, vandalism, and death threats from both right and left.

    Things in America are changing. A poll last year found 37% of Americans are favorable to socialism, while among young people the figure is about 60%. Still, a socialist for president would be a big leap.

    She says this, “They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. And my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.” She added, “Presidents come and go… but single-payer healthcare is forever, a living wage is forever, workers’ rights are forever.”

    First published on International Viewpoint, Jully 26, 2026

  • Jammu-Kashmir progressive organisations call for global solidarity

    Jammu-Kashmir progressive organisations call for global solidarity

    The people of Pakistan-administered Jammu Kashmir are facing one of the bloodiest episodes of state repression in recent history. A mass movement built around economic and democratic demands has been met with curfews, communication blackouts, live ammunition, and collective punishment.

    (more…)

  • The Streets Are Asking Questions the Leaders Cannot Answer in Ukraine

    The Streets Are Asking Questions the Leaders Cannot Answer in Ukraine

    Protest of government’s military decisions in Ukraine

    For the second consecutive day, Ukrainians are on the streets — in Kyiv, Lviv, Rivne, Odesa, Dnipro, Poltava, Mykolaïv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil, Zaporizhzhia, Kropyvnytskyi, Cherkasy, and in the diaspora. On 14 July, Ukraine’s parliament voted to dismiss the entire government of Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko. Among those who went with it was Mykhailo Fedorov — until January 2026 Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, then its Defence Minister, and in both roles the principal architect of Ukraine’s drone strategy. When the Koretskyy government was confirmed on 16 July, President Zelensky submitted no candidates for the posts of Defence Minister or Foreign Affairs Minister. Yevhenii Khmara, head of the Security Service (SBU), was named acting Defence Minister. It was that appointment — a security services figure placed at the head of a ministry Fedorov had been reforming around drone technology and distributed warfare — and what it revealed about the direction of military policy, that brought people into the streets. [1] The demands being raised go considerably further than any one government position.

    In Zaporizhzhia, protesters re-enacted the famous Repin painting of Zaporizhzhian Cossacks writing a defiant letter to a foreign ruler, then drafted their own open letter to Zelensky: reinstate Fedorov, dismiss Syrskyi. In Ivano-Frankivsk, the placards read: “Fedorov is Defence Minister!”, “Syrskyi, out!”, “The government is the people!” In Lviv, demands included a full independent audit of the Commander-in-Chief’s activities and the restoration of parliament’s role in forming the government. In Rivne: fight corruption.

    As Oksana Kozlova of the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine (ENSU, Belgium) puts it: “I would dare to say that they are standing up not so much in support of Fedorov, and even not that much against Syrskyi. They are protesting against an army with ’Skelia’, post-Soviet-style generals such as the 155th Brigade former commander, the criminal ’negligence’ in Vyshneve, the old guard apparatchiki enriching themselves through arms procurement, the absence of transparent digitalised reporting on military budget use, mobilisation squads that resemble mafia gangs, the persecution of independent media.” [2]

    This is not a protest for a minister. It is a protest against a system.

    The cardboard sign has become the symbol of Ukrainian wartime civic life — low-threshold, undeniable, effective. It appeared in July 2025 when the government tried to dismantle the independence of the anti-corruption agencies NABU (National Anti-Corruption Bureau) and SAPO (Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office), and parliament was forced to reverse course within nine days. [3] The cardboard sign is back now, in greater numbers and with a longer list of demands.

    Two days before Fedorov’s dismissal, activists from Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement), the Pryama Diya (Direct Action) student union and the Pasyazhery Kyiva (Kyiv Passengers) civic group were already outside city hall protesting a near-fourfold rise in public transport fares. [4]

    Families of soldiers have been on the streets since October 2023 demanding defined demobilisation terms and rotation after eighteen months of service. [5]

    Each wave has been distinct. Each has forced a retreat or a concession.

    A crisis with a military logic

    The confrontation that produced Fedorov’s dismissal did not begin with the cabinet reshuffle. It began with a Telegram post. [6] On 10 July, Oleksandr Syrskyi — Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces since February 2024 — published a text on Telegram claiming the situation was “far from a turning point in the war” and warning against underestimating the adversary. Nobody disputes the second point. But the first — the denial that anything has fundamentally shifted — is simply false.

    Since the summer of 2025, Ukrainian drones have destroyed a significant share of Russia’s refinery and hydrocarbon export capacity, striking targets deep into Russian territory. Russian advances at the front have slowed and, in several sectors, reversed. The Crimean peninsula is increasingly isolated. Putin’s demonstration of fear at the 9 May 2026 parade has become a political fact that the Russian ruler cannot undo. Ukraine’s 40-day operation, announced by Zelensky on 25 June, combines targeted strikes in Russian territory, front pressure and the continuing isolation of Crimea. Zelensky chose Syrskyi over Fedorov. The streets have responded.

    The connection is not accidental. As French APLUTSOC and ENSU member Vincent Présumey writes, citing the journal Diplomatie: drone warfare requires “a disseminated, not centralised, and democratic, cooperative framework” — the opposite of what Syrskyi represents. The revolution in drone, AI and robotics technology, which has been accumulating since the mass uprising of February 2022, crossed a qualitative threshold at roughly the same moment as the July 2025 cardboard revolution — as Présumey insists, “in no way a coincidence.” Democratic civic mobilisation and distributed technological warfare share a structural logic. Both require initiative from below. Both are weakenedby the apparatus of centralised command.

    This also explains what is at stake economically. As Jean Batou and I recently argued, the Western arms industry covets Ukraine’s drone expertise “exactly as they would a deposit of qualified labour or rare earths.” [7] The push for centralised procurement and large defence contractors serves not only Syrskyi’s military doctrine but the strategic interests of western firms like Rheinmetall. The two logics — authoritarian military command and oligarchic capture of the defence economy — reinforce each other.

    The political consequences of that reinforcement are already visible in the streets. By the second day of protests in Kyiv, a far-right current had appeared within the broader movement. Placards named Andrii Biletskyy — founder of Azov, member of Tryzub (the Bandera organisation), commander of the 3rd Army Corps, and leader of the National Corps party — as the preferred Commander-in-Chief. “Syrskyi is Soviet-era deadweight. Fedorov is digital. Biletskyy is results.” “Fedorov makes deep strikes. Biletskyy holds the front.” [8]These slogans do not represent the protest as a whole, but they document an organised far-right presence attempting to hegemonise a crisis that began elsewhere.

    The question of who replaces Syrskyi, on what criteria, chosen by whom, is not a secondary personnel matter. It is the political content of the crisis. The left might not yet be contesting the question of military command, but the far right is steping in with an answer of its own.

    The demands that could win

    The protests are already raising demands that go beyond personalities. In Lviv, protesters called for the restoration of parliament’s role in forming the government. In Rivne, the demand was to fight corruption. These connect directly to the programme that Sotsialnyi Rukh and the Pryama Diya student union formulated during the July 2025 anti-corruption protests: “We demand the abolition of everything that allows those close to power to steal with impunity, both at the rear and at the front” — an independent anti-corruption investigation, real labour inspection, comprehensive social protection financed by taxation of the rich, financial transparency in times of war, “a fair state, not a state for corporations.” [9] The cardboard sign connects July 2025 to July 2026. The same forces are on the street. The demands have deepened.

    The street ptotests reflect majority feeling that Syrskyi should be dismissed and his conduct investigated. Fedorov himself said at his 16 July press conference that Ukraine cannot “win asymmetrically, with minimum losses” under the current command structure, and called for replacing both Syrskyi and the Chief of the General Staff. [10] He is right. The same hierarchical doctrine that drove Syrskyi to suppress Fedorov’s initiatives produced the failures that soldiers have been publicly documenting for two years. Under Syrskyi, the 36-month service rotation limit was stripped from the mobilisation law before its April 2024 passage. Mobilisation has operated through methods — street round-ups, coercion, the suppression of complaints — that corrode the democratic culture on which Ukrainian resistance depends. Soldiers from the 125th Brigade’s repair battalion — drone repairers, welders, excavator operators — were sent to assault positions with no relevant training; two died. Their collective statement was not a refusal to fight: it was an indictment of command decisions that wasted specialised capacity and killed people unnecessarily. Soldiers of the 48th Separate Assault Battalion publicly opposed their commander’s replacement at a critical combat moment. Patrick Le Tréhondat, translator and ENSU solidarity activist, who brought the 125th Brigade case to international attention, was correct: “Protests within the ranks of the Ukrainian army are not signs of weakness but indices of strength.” [11] Public challenges to military hierarchy that would result in summary punishment in Russia’s armed forces are, in Ukraine, expressions of the democratic vitality that distinguishes this resistance.

    Many feel that Fedorov should be reinstated — not as a personality beyond criticism, but because what his ministry was building must not be defeated by the right and far right. He championed the asymmetric strategy Ukraine needs. An audit of 7.2 billion dollars in defence overpayments was under way on his watch. His neoliberal failings are real, and Sotsialnyi Rukh has documented them consistently — most recently on the Labour Code his government was simultaneously advancing. [12] A critique of his record must be paired with concrete proposals for organising the defence economy in a democratic, cooperative way rather than through Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, deals with the western arms industry and untransparant oligarchic procurement. State coordination, transparency, worker representation, taxation of super-profits: these are the conditions for an efficient defence sector that serves society.

    The soldiers fighting this war have not waited for civilians to articulate their demands. They have been building their own. Veteranka — Ukraine’s first organisation of women veterans, now with over 3,000 members — spent years filling a gap the state refused to fill: producing free women’s uniform sets because the Ministry of Defence issued none until February 2024. Their legislative work has been equally concrete. Their campaign for Bill 13037, adopted by the Verkhovna Rada on 25 February 2026 with 276 deputies voting unanimously on Ukrainian Women’s Day, obliges commanders to investigate every case of discrimination and violence in the armed forces and formally defines sexual harassment as a disciplinary offence requiring emergency response within fifteen minutes. Their head Kateryna Pryimak states plainly what underlies all of this: “The army is the group in society with the fewest rights, and women in the army face the greatest restrictions.” [13]

    LGBT Military for Equal Rights, representing more than 700 openly serving LGBT+ personnel across 59 units, is fighting a different but structurally identical battle: the right to exist legally as the person you are while risking your life for the state. Their core demand is civil partnership rights that would allow soldiers’ partners to visit them in hospital, make medical decisions, inherit property, receive military pensions and arrange funerals. The case of Maria Zaitseva illustrates what the absence of these rights costs in practice. Killed in service, her partner Anna Honcharova could only see her body because “a comrade made arrangements.” When Maria received the Order of Courage posthumously, Anna was not notified — the award went to “next of kin,” a legal category that did not include her. Parliament has not passed the civil partnerships bill. The Parliamentary Speaker has stated it “is not a priority.” [14]

    In June 2026, the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU) announced the creation of the All-Ukrainian Union of Combatants, Military Personnel and Veterans. Mykhailo Volynets, KVPU president, described the new union’s purpose: veterans and military personnel “must not only enjoy society’s respect, but also have effective mechanisms to influence state policy and defend their civil rights.” [15] This is the first organisational link between the labour movement and the soldiers’ movement. Workers and soldiers share an interest in accountability, transparency, and protection against arbitrary power.

    Taken together, Veteranka, LGBT Military, and the KVPU soldiers’ union represent something the Ukrainian state has consistently failed to ensure: democratic infrastructure within the military. They are not lobbying for abstractions. They are naming specific failures, winning specific legislative changes, and building institutions to defend rights the state denies. They are doing, within the armed forces, what the left needs to do politically in these protests: not just demanding that the system change, but showing what the change looks like in practice.

    The defence sector as a whole needs democratic restructuring that goes further still. Sotsialnyi Rukh’s March 2025 statement “For a Ukraine Without Oligarchs and Occupiers” specifies: 50 per cent worker representation on supervisory boards of infrastructure, defence and mineral extraction enterprises; nationalisation of strategic enterprises under workers’ control; progressive taxation reaching 90 per cent on top incomes; confiscation of oligarch assets for the war effort. [16] Their October 2024 conference resolution insisted that “the unwillingness to nationalize production capacities, tax large businesses, and direct the budget towards rearmament makes it possible to prolong the war at the cost of significant human losses and constant mobilization.” [17]

    Ukraine’s domestic tax revenues currently cover only defence spending. Everything else — pensions, hospitals, schools — depends on foreign loans. This is a political choice, not an economic necessity. And it is the same choice that keeps the labour inspection toothless, the anti-corruption agencies under threat, and the soldiers’ demands unanswered.

    The protests have not yet fused these threads into a single programme. As Kozlova writes, the people on the streets “will not allow an arrogant mob to treat them as cattle born to obey. Not even under the pretext of military discipline.” That refusal is the foundation. But refusal alone does not decide who takes command, how the defence economy is structured, or whether the legal invisibility of women and LGBT+ soldiers outlasts the war. Sotsialnyi Rukh, Pryama Diya, Veteranka, LGBT Military and the KVPU soldiers’ union already have some answers to those questions. The challenge now is to make those answers the content of the protest — before someone else fills the gap.

    18 July 2026

    Source: ESSF.

    P.S.

    If you like this article or have found it useful, please consider donating towards the work of International Viewpoint. Simply follow this link: Donate then enter an amount of your choice. One-off donations are very welcome. But regular donations by standing order are also vital to our continuing functioning. See the last paragraph of this article for our bank account details and take out a standing order. Thanks.

    Originally posted July 20, 2026

    Footnotes

    [1] Euronews, “A crisis of his own: Zelenskyy’s wartime reshuffle backfires and leads to protests”, 17 July 2026, https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/07/17/a-crisis-of-his-own-zelenskyys-wartime-reshuffle-backfires-and-leads-to-protests

    [2] The 425th Separate Assault Regiment “Skelia” became a symbol of command abuse and impunity after an investigation documented systematic hazing, torture, and the despatch of ill-equipped recruits to front-line positions without training. See Adam Novak, “Ukraine’s Disposable Conscripts and Unaccountable Officers”, ESSF, 27 June 2026, https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article79187

    [3] Adam Novak, “The Rear Collapses: Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Demonstrators Confront Wartime Neoliberalism”, ESSF, November 2025, https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article77130

    [4] Olena Tkalich, “’Transport Is Not a Privilege!’: Kyiv Residents Protest Fare Rise”, ESSF, 14 July 2026, https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article79393

    [5] Adam Novak, “We fight, we have rights”, ESSF, November 2025, https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article77000

    [6] Vincent Présumey, “Notes politico-militaires sur l’évolution de la guerre impérialiste russe contre l’Ukraine depuis le 24 février 2022 et le moment présent”, Aplutsoc, 16 July 2026, https://aplutsoc.org/2026/07/16/notes-politico-militaires-sur-levolution-de-la-guerre-imperialiste-russe-contre-lukraine-depuis-le-24-fevrier-2022-et-le-moment-present/

    [7] Jean Batou and Adam Novak, “Europe as a Great Power is not Ukraine’s Friend”, ESSF, 30 June 2026, https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article79218

    [8] Mariya Nazarova and Yan Dobronosov, “’Syrskoho na Biletskoho’: u Kyievi tryvayt protesty cherez vidstavku Fedorova”, Telegraf, 17 July 2026, https://news.telegraf.com.ua/ukr/ukraina/5945587-sirskogo-na-biletskogo-u-kievi-trivayut-protesti-cherez-vidstavku-fedorova-reportazh-yana-dobronosova; “Na protesti proty vidstavky Fedorova zyavylysya plakaty iz zaklykamy zaminyty Syrskoho na Biletskoho”, Gordon.ua, 18 July 2026, https://gordonua.com/ukr/section-politics/news-na-protesti-proty-vidstavky-fedorova-zyavylysya-plakaty-iz-zaklykamy-zaminyty-syrskoho-na-biletskoho-18-07-2026.html

    [9] Pryama Diya (Direct Action) and Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement), “Ukraine: anticorruption protests”, ESSF, 23 July 2025, https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article75706

    [10] Podrobnosti.ua, “Posada radnyka prezydenta, dohany Drapatomy, konflikt iz Henshtabom: holovne iz bryfinhdu Fedorova”, 16 July 2026, https://podrobnosti.ua/2518090-posada-radnika-prezidenta-dogani-drapatomu-konflkt-z-genshtabom-golovne-z-brifngu-fedorova.html

    [11] Patrick Le Tréhondat, “Qu’on ne s’y trompe pas, la contestation dans les rangs de l’armée ukrainienne n’est pas un signe de faiblesse, mais un indice de sa force”, cited and discussed in Adam Novak, “Ukraine’s Disposable Conscripts and Unaccountable Officers”, ESSF, 27 June 2026, https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article79187

    [12] Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement), “Ukraine’s New Labour Code: An Obstacle to the Decent Work Programme”, ESSF, 4 July 2026, https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article79274

    [13] Adam Novak, “The political economy of Ukraine’s war and the politics of a coming bad peace”, ESSF, May 2026, https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article78849

    [14] Adam Novak, “We fight, we have rights”, ESSF, November 2025, https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article77000

    [15] KVPU, “Ukraine: A soldiers’ union is formed”, ESSF, 10 June 2026, https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article79016

    [16] Sotsialnyi Rukh, “For a Ukraine Without Oligarchs and Occupiers”, ESSF, March 2025, https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article74018

    [17] Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement), “Ukraine: Conference of Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement), 5–6 October 2024”, ESSF, October 2024, https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article72344

  • How Love Survives Loss

    How Love Survives Loss

    NP editor’s intro: This reflection is written by a refugee who left Gaza
    at the end of 2023. It was forwarded to us by a regular contributor who
    has known her for around a dozen years.
    My sister spent more than twenty years as an elementary school teacher.
    To her students, she was far more than a teacher. She was a friend, a
    mentor, and a caring mother who never hesitated to offer guidance,
    encouragement, and compassion to her little students. All she ever
    wanted was to finish her years of teaching, retire, buy a piece of land,
    and build the home she had always dreamed of for herself and her
    children—a home with a large garden where she could plant the trees and
    flowers she loved. She retired at the end of 2022. Then, in October
    2023, the war in Gaza began. Her dreams slipped away, not only the dream
    of buying that piece of land, but even the simple dream of living in
    peace, free from the constant fear of losing the people she loved.
    In May 2025, my sister, her husband, their son, their daughter, and
    their three grandchildren were killed when a missile struck their home
    in the Al-Amal neighborhood of Gaza. They left behind four grieving
    daughters and their youngest son, Mohammed, who had fortunately left
    Gaza in April 2024 to continue his university studies in Egypt. The war
    gave my sister no chance to say goodbye, and it gave us no chance to say
    goodbye to her or to the rest of her family. Eight lives were taken in
    an instant. The youngest was only four years old. The oldest were my
    sister and her husband.
    Now, more than a year after their deaths, I still have not cried for my
    sister as deeply as I thought I would. I have not grieved her as fully
    as I expected because, somehow, she is still alive to me. I still hear
    her voice in my memory. I still find myself expecting my phone to ring
    and her name to appear on the screen, or imagining that she will walk
    through my front door the way she always did, with her peaceful smile. I
    know she is gone, but my heart has not yet learned how to live in a
    world where my sister no longer exists. Perhaps that is why my grief
    still feels unfinished. Not because I miss her any less, but because a
    part of me still waits for her to come back, as though love itself
    refuses to believe what happened.
    For almost a year now, Mohammed has been coming to my home. I am his
    aunt, and I try to make it a place where he can spend time with family,
    enjoy the meals he loves, and feel that he still belongs somewhere.
    After losing his parents, his brother, his sister, and his nieces, I
    want him to know that this is his home too, and that my sons and
    daughters are now his brothers and sisters. Mohammed is in his twenties
    and has always been a shy young man. Even with close family, it took
    time before he felt comfortable enough to simply be himself. What
    strikes me most is how every familiar scent of food brings back a memory
    of his family. Whenever I prepare a meal he has requested, he often
    walks into the kitchen and says, “This smells like sunset during the
    war, when my mother used to cook this.” Sometimes he says, “This is the
    smell of ten o’clock in the morning, when my mother used to fry potatoes
    and falafel for breakfast.” Other times he smiles and says, “This smells
    like Friday lunch, when we all gathered after Friday prayers to eat
    together.” Or he says, “This is the smell of Eid—the meat, the fried
    liver for breakfast, and the aroma that filled our home.” I rarely
    respond. I simply smile, carrying a sadness too deep to be expressed in
    words.
    His memories have made me wonder: Do scents bring the dead back? I am
    sure they don’t. But perhaps they bring back the life that was once
    shared with them. A familiar scent can unlock an entire world: a mother
    standing in her kitchen, a family gathered around the table, the comfort
    of an ordinary morning, or the joy of Eid. In a single breath, the
    people we have lost seem to draw close again as love has found another
    way to remain present. Perhaps that is the gift of scent. It does not
    summon the dead. Instead, it preserves them gently within those who
    loved them. It keeps their laughter, their habits, and the warmth of the
    homes they created alive in our hearts. Every time Mohammed stands at my
    kitchen door and tells me what a meal reminds him of, I realize that,
    for a brief moment, his family is with him again—not in body, but in
    memory, in love, and in the familiar scent of home. Perhaps that is how
    love survives loss, through the memories carried in a photograph, in a
    familiar voice, or in a certain scent.
  • Italy: The Murderous State, Presumed Innocent

    Italy: The Murderous State, Presumed Innocent

    Protesting killing of Abderrahim Fakir

    The death of Abderrahim Fakir in a working-class neighborhood of Bologna on Sunday, July 20, sparked outrage, leading thousands of people to demonstrate to demand “Truth and Justice”; this death is reminiscent of that of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020…

    Shooting Burglars in the Back

    On July 15, 2026, Mario Roggero was definitively sentenced to 14 years and 9 months in prison for killing two of the three burglars who had attacked his jewelry store, armed with a toy gun and a knife, as they were fleeing. The footage is crystal clear: the robbers had already left the store, were not threatening anyone, and the jeweler shot them multiple times.

    The entire right and far-right of the government are rallying around Roggero, who is seeking a presidential pardon—already supported by Justice Minister Carlo Nordio, outside any legal framework. Matteo Salvini says he is considering running him as a candidate in the next elections in order to grant him parliamentary immunity. The League is taking this opportunity to introduce a bill that has been a priority for the party since at least the 2018 elections, aimed at expanding Article 52 of the Penal Code, which deals with self-defense.

    Congressman Claudio Borghi has thus introduced this proposal:

    “Any reaction to a criminal act is not punishable, regardless of the proportionality of the means used, the persistence of the danger, and the strictly defensive nature of the conduct.”

    Giorgia Meloni, for her part, was quick to declare that the sentence was disproportionate. Mario Roggero has quickly become the “national hero” of Italy’s right-wing and far-right political spectrum, which remains firmly in power in the absence of serious opposition.

    As for Elon Musk, he is waging a campaign on X against the Italian judges, who he claims should “be imprisoned” for handing down this verdict—in the same vein as his support for Marine Le Pen (“the only hope for France”), whom he claims is a victim of the French justice system.

    Rise in police violence

    On July 17, 2026, several hundred people protested in Venice against the U.S. Ambassador to Italy, Tilman Fertitta, whose mega-yacht — 117 meters long and 30 meters high, as imposing as a six-story building — had dropped anchor right in the middle of the Festa del Redentore, one of the city’s most important festivals, partially blocking residents’ access to the fireworks display. The protesters, dressed in children’s swim rings (frogs, unicorns, and turtles), were violently charged by the police.

    On July 19, Abderrahim Fakir, a 43-year-old Moroccan national who had arrived in Italy from Casablanca at the age of 7, was killed by two police officers in Bologna, in the working-class neighborhood of Pilastro; there, too, the images are as clear as they are unbearable: wounded in the head and in a state of confusion, he pleads for help while two police officers hold him down, handcuffed and facing the ground, after spraying pepper spray in his face; four paramedics watch this man die without intervening… Remember, “I can’t breathe,” said George Floyd, just before he died in Minneapolis.

    On July 20, following the violent death of Abderrahim Fakir, a massive crowd flooded the streets of Bologna, called out by the Democratic Party mayor, Matteo Lepore, to demand truth and justice—while, for the first time since the Security Decree-Law, pushed by the Meloni government, went into effect, police officers and healthcare workers were protected by the “criminal immunity shield” (a more radical law on the presumption of legality for law enforcement shootings had just been passed by the French Parliament by a vote of 313 to 199, supported by the National Rally, The Republicans, and Macron’s supporters). Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi then felt compelled to argue that Italy was not a “police state”…

    A license to kill?

    As Cecchino Antonini explains https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article77985: “The security decree also expands the ‘criminal shield’ for law enforcement, that is, the legal protections for officers who commit offenses in the line of duty under circumstances of necessity. Following President Mattarella’s remarks, the government clarified that this protection applies not only to officers but to anyone in similar circumstances. Indeed, it is worded more cautiously: any person who commits an offense when there is an “obvious cause for justification” is not entered into the ordinary registry of persons under investigation, but into a separate registry, with an expedited procedure that should result in the case being dismissed within thirty days, unless the prosecutor decides otherwise. Politically, this measure introduces a principle of preventive legitimization of the use of force, and the “shield” risks having selective effects by further exposing people considered foreign or marginalized, such as young people and migrants.”

    French law is more radical, as it involves a reversal of the burden of proof by presuming the legality of the act from the outset—which is legally far more radical, and it is precisely this that has led opponents to label the French law a “license to kill.”

    Democracy Gutted

    Democracy thwarted, democracy suspended, democracy gutted: a new political era is dawning in Italy, the United States, and also in France. The piece-by-piece construction of an absolutist governmental sovereignty, which is taking hold by methodically disarming each of the powers that could stand in its way.

    The methods may differ on either side of the Atlantic, but the goals remain hopelessly the same: to strip constitutions of their meaning; to undermine elections (in Italy by proposing a new electoral law that, by combining a disproportionate majority bonus with closed-list systems, guarantees an overwhelming majority for the outgoing right-wing and far-right coalition while giving party leaders the de facto power to decide who sits in Parliament; in the United States, by already doing everything possible to hinder the exercise of the popular vote, and even contesting the results of the midterm elections—as Donald Trump did in his latest speech); undermining the “red” judiciary; attacking democratic freedoms and rights; targeting migrants—and with them, all the exploited—by promoting mass deportation, and incarceration; ensuring control over a single narrative by curtailing the right to information and freedom of expression.

    Such is the case with the various attempts to silence the press (Trump attacks television networks and newspapers), which becomes merely a conduit for a single narrative (a report by a RAI journalist on the death of Abderrahim Fakir was censored by the network). Taken together, these policies paint a picture of the future: the transfer of all legitimate decision-making to a single center, with no authority left capable of challenging it, and the gradual, almost silent erosion of any institutional or social countervailing power.

    This is a gradual shift of the political center of gravity toward a head of government (a monarch and his inner circle) whose actions must be free of any obstacles. A process that began around the turn of the 2000s in Italy and is now accelerating on the Peninsula and elsewhere. On July 20, the rising figure to the right of Giorgia Meloni, General Roberto Vannacci, with his new party “Futuro Nazionale”—which he describes as the “true right” campaigning for “remigration ”—illustrated his “project” by posting a AI video on social depicting the killing, against the backdrop of the Roman Empire, of Elly Schlein of the Democratic Party and Giuseppe Conte of the Five Star Movement.

    In the Face of Increasingly Authoritarian States: Organize and Fight

    On July 16, 2026, under the leadership of Marco Rubio, a “global” summit was held, bringing together more than sixty countries. Its focus: the “resurgence of political terrorism”; Italy sent its Undersecretary of State for the Interior, Nicola Molteni, a member of the Lega. “Political terrorism” is a concept first introduced by the Nixon administration in the context of the Vietnam War, targeting primarily left-wing organizations (ranging from those fighting for civil rights to the Black Panthers).

    Today, it has been revived by the security decree “Combating Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” (NSPM-7), on the basis of which the first harsh prison sentences have already been handed down in Texas. This “Antifa Summit” introduced the new concept of “far-left terrorism,” (FLT) which, as stated in a White House press release, must “will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

    Following this summit, the U.S. State Department released a new report on “ Cuba’s “campaign of subversion against the United States”which reads like a blacklist of left-wing groups and activists: “ Many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history — from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses — can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence,” https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/after-political-terrorism-event-us?publication_id=7677&post_id=207813534&isFreemail=true&r=1om0z2&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email. The list includes New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, Democracy Now! journalist Amy Goodman, Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, as well as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Black Lives Matter…

    The steamroller of the powerful right-wing coalition has begun rolling right before our eyes, brandishing the specter of its old demons—the “Reds”—in the face of any social resistance. Its real goal, is to undermine our hard-won freedoms and rights by criminalizing those who are fighting today for equality and emancipation.

    Marx and Engels wrote as early as 1847:

    “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.”

    Today, the powerful of this world—whether they call themselves centrists, right-wingers, or far-right—have resumed this fight with redoubled energy against democracy, which hinders their absolute freedom to enrich themselves as they see fit.

    It is therefore time to move from the spontaneous organization of resistance to sustainable forms of organization, uniting labor, feminist, anti-racist, and environmental movements on a democratic, class-based foundation, clearly defending an inalienable set of rights and social demands aimed at equality and the collective ownership of our common goods. To achieve this, we must rebuild ties across borders by reviving a militant, enduring internationalism.

    The total state is on the march. It is up to us to grasp the full extent of this reality and equip ourselves to counter it by situating our struggles today within the long-standing fight of the working classes for democracy and social justice.

     

     

     

  • Nicaraguan President Ortega Says, “No More Elections”—What’s Next?

    Nicaraguan President Ortega Says, “No More Elections”—What’s Next?

    Nicaraguan President announes there will be no more elections.

    Daniel Ortega, the 80-year-old president of Nicaragua, announced on July 19, the anniversary of the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979, that, “There will be no more elections.”. Speaking to a cheering crowd of as many as 100,000 people in the Plaza of the Revolution, Ortega said his government was abolishing elections and political parties to present a U.S. inspired counterrevolution that would bring to power the former dictator Anastasio Somoza’s followers. “The history of parties created by the Yankees and the Samocistas attempting to take power is over. Never again.” With this announcement, Ortega has put the last nail in the coffin of the revolution, the final hammer blow in a long process.

    It might be more accurate to say that Ortega abolished the pretense of elections, which long ago ceased to be free and fair. Since Ortega returned to the presidency in 2007—he had also been president from 1985-1990—he transformed his politics and those of the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN). He broke with the leftist Theology of Liberation wing of the Catholic Church and turned toward the conservative hierarchy. He and his wife Rosario Murillo married in the church and launched a campaign against abortion. Ortega and other Sandinista leaders enriched themselves and allied with the country’s wealthy businessmen and landlords. He changed the constitution so he could serve another term and then changed it again to make his wife his co-president. He put family members and close friends in charge of the FSLN which became simply a loyal electoral base. Ortega’s government established a modus vivendi with the United States, avoiding conflict while engaging in criticism of the colossus of the North only to maintain its radical reputation. In the last twenty years under Ortega, Nicaragua became a regular capitalist country with an authoritarian government.

    When in 2018 protests against government cuts to pensions merged with demands for democracy from young people in the largest demonstrations in the history of Central America, Ortega sent the police, the military, and the FSLN enforcers, suppressed the movement, killing 350 people and jailing over 700. After that, to Ortega was done tolerating any kind of opposition. Beginning in February 2023, he revoked the citizenship first of 222 political prisoners who were banished from the country, and then of 94 prominent dissidents, who also lost their citizenship and were expelled. Altogether, 450 people were denationalized and had their property confiscated. All of this repression was carried out in the name of defense of the Sandinista Revolution.

    (There is a longer history of Ortega’s and the FSLN’s problems with democracy that I discuss in my book What Went Wrong? The Nicaraguan Revolution: A Marxist Analysis and in an article summarizing the book in New Politics).

    What will the United States do?

    President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, while actively reasserting U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere and particularly in Latin America are unlikely to do anything in the short term. The United States is at present occupied with an enormous, costly, and difficult war against Iran, one that it is losing so badly that it is now turning to attacking civilian targets, leaving itself open to charge of a war crime. Niangua, unlike Venezuela doesn’t have enormous oil resources, and unlike Cuba, it never nationalized its economy, making it a threat to capitalism. Ortega has been careful to maintain a working relationship with the U.S. and to leave channels open for negotiations. A capitalist economy and foreign trade and investment—both of which Nicaragua has—are far more important to the United States than democracy.

    How will the Nicaraguan people react?

    We should not expect to see any immediate reaction to Ortega’s decree fom the Nicaraguan people.

    The tens of thousands in the Plaza of the Revolution, cheered and applauded the announcement, many no doubt feeling that they had better. There are silent opponents of the Ortega regime, some conservative and some social democratic, but given the repression they do not feel they can say a word. Opponents who have been expelled or migrated abroad maintain informal networks but have only tenuous connections to those who remain in the country. There is no united opposition either within or outside of Nicaragua.

    The powerful and wealthy who run Nicaragua, a nation of 7.1 million people, sit atop a society of poor people. Despite the regimes claims of economic development and the welfare of the people, Nicaragua remains the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Only Haiti is poorer. Some 25 to 30 percent of the population, mostly in the rural areas live below the country’s own poverty line. Not surprisingly, doctors and hospitals with adequate staff and supplies are available only to the better off who live in urban areas. But while there are severe social problems, at the moment there are no outbreaks of protest from below.

    When the Nicaraguan people do decide to act to improve their lives and to establish democracy, we should be prepared to help them.

  • The dismissal of Fedorov is not the main issue. The future of Ukraine is

    The dismissal of Fedorov is not the main issue. The future of Ukraine is

    The reshuffle in the Ukrainian government has triggered heated debates. Many discuss personalities: whether Mykhailo Fedorov was an effective minister, whether he became too influential, or whether President Zelenskyy seeks to eliminate potential rivals.

    These questions may be politically relevant. But they miss the deeper issue.

    The real question is what kind of state Ukraine is becoming under the pressure of a long war.

    Sotsialnyi Rukh has consistently criticized Fedorov’s neoliberal agenda. His vision of the “digital state” has too often meant deregulation, outsourcing and weakening labor protections while celebrating Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurship. Workers have every reason to remain critical of this model.

    Yet opposing neoliberalism does not mean supporting the growing political influence of the military command.

    Reports suggesting that the Commander-in-Chief played a decisive role in determining the composition of the civilian government should concern everyone committed to democracy. Military leaders are accountable for military operations. Civilian governments must remain accountable to society.

    The strategic debate goes far beyond one minister.

    Ukraine faces two competing approaches to a long war.

    One approach seeks to compensate for Russia’s numerical superiority through ever larger mobilization, tighter centralization and procurement concentrated among a limited number of large defense producers.

    The other seeks to compensate for Ukraine’s demographic disadvantage through technological innovation, distributed production, competition between developers, rapid adaptation and extensive use of drones, robotics and digital systems.

    For Ukraine, this is not simply a question of military doctrine.

    Russia can afford enormous human losses. Ukraine cannot.

    Every experienced soldier is also a worker, engineer, teacher, doctor or parent whose knowledge will be indispensable for rebuilding the country after the war. A successful defense strategy must therefore maximize Ukraine’s technological advantages while minimizing unnecessary human losses.

    This is not only a military necessity. It is a social necessity.

    At the same time, technological modernization cannot become another excuse for neoliberal restructuring. The defense sector must serve society rather than private monopolies. Innovation should strengthen public capacity, decent working conditions and democratic accountability—not enrich a new generation of oligarchs or foreign investors.

    Ukraine needs both democracy and innovation.

    It needs civilian control over the armed forces.

    It needs technological modernization without neoliberal dogma.

    And it needs a strategy that defends not only the state’s borders, but also the people who will have to rebuild the country once the war is over.

    The future of Ukraine will not be decided by choosing between competing factions of the political elite. It will be decided by whether the country can defend itself while preserving the democratic and social foundations worth defending.

     

    [This article originally appeared on the website of the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine.

  • Electoral setback in Colombia opens a new phase of struggle

    Electoral setback in Colombia opens a new phase of struggle

    The razor thin loss of the left in the presidential election in Peru and the left’s rejection of the legitimacy of the election of US citizen and ultra-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia have set the stage for a new period of social and class conflict in Latin America.

    The political temperature in Colombia continues to rise following the contested official election results that have made extreme-right wing candidate Abelardo de la Espriella the presumptive president elect.

    President Gustavo Petro has rejected the electoral results and called for national demonstrations on July 20 th , the day the new congress is to be seated. He wrote on X,

    “The president of Colombia does not recognize the legitimacy of the incoming government. Abelardo did not win the elections.

    “The national majority is called upon this July 20th to raise the cry of national independence in all public squares.”

    Since the elections

    On June 24, three days after the final round of Colombia’s presidential election, Senator Ivan Cepeda, the presidential candidate of the left-wing Pacto Historico and Alianza por la Vida, conceded the presidential race to Abelardo de la Espriella, the right-wing candidate and now the presumptive president elect of Colombia.

    Cepeda said, “At this stage of the scrutiny of the ballots and voting, I have decided to accept the results of that process. They indicate that Abelardo de la Espriella is the new president of the Republic. I do it as an act of democratic responsibility… However, acceptance of the electoral result does not mean giving up the truth or remaining silent in the face of events that we consider serious and that marked this presidential campaign.”

    Then, just six days later, Cepeda demanded that de la Espriella renounce his US citizenship and his ties to US intelligence and police agencies as a condition of assuming the presidency of Colombia. De la Espriella is a citizen of Colombia by birth, a naturalized citizen of the United States who has sworn to renounce all allegiances to all other countries, and also a citizen of Italy.

    Cepeda called on the judicial authorities to act to protect Colombian sovereignty and called on the people of the country to engage in peaceful civil disobedience if de la Espriella does not renounce his ties to the USA.

    President Gustavo Petro’s rejection of the election results and call for demonstrations began with the statement that,

    “We have all the information regarding the IP server located in Los Angeles, California, owned by the Bautista brothers, which was integrated into the vote counting operation. Algorithms were used that substantially altered the vote count in favor of Abelardo. The algorithms that rigged the election results were used with the voter registration lists of those who never vote, replacing them with voters who could vote multiple times or with no registered voters at the polling stations.

    “The polling stations abroad where Abelardo obtained 177,000 more votes than Cepeda had poll workers from Colombia who were not residents of the US or Spain, which is illegal. These polling stations also included voters brought in for the World Cup who were able to vote seven times using the names of those who never vote.

    “The same thing happened in several regions of Antioquia and Medellín, in Norte de Santander, and at polling stations in northern Bogotá…. “The company that supplied the Bautista brothers with flawed algorithms and other support is an Israeli private intelligence firm called BlackCube.”

    The opaque vote collection and counting software is owned by a private firm known as Thomas Greg and Sons. The company is owned by the Bautista family, Colombians now based in the United States. They have close ties to right-wing establishment politicians in both the United States and Colombia, and some of them have been convicted of financial crimes in the USA.

    Separately, Petro announced that the government has uncovered evidence that a prominent Trump supporter in the United States named Dan Newlin had illegally donated $1.8 million to de la Espriella’s campaign. Newlin is a criminal defense attorney who has offices in Florida, Illinois, and in Medellin, Colombia. Trump had nominated him to be US ambassador to Colombia, but the nomination was rejected by the GOP dominated Senate Foreign Relations committee.

    De la Espriella’s political position is rapidly deteriorating before he can even take office. Now, he says that his first action in office will be to issue a decree to establish an “urban defense force” reminiscent of Convivir, the legal cover used in the past by the Colombian paramilitary militias and death squads.

    Although the situation in the country is very fluid and uncertain, tensions are rapidly rising between the left and right in Colombia, and between Latin American countries and the United States.

    Who really won the election?

    The National Election Council’s official vote count gave Abelardo de la Espriella 12,959,542 votes, less than 1% more than the 12,708,712 votes of Senator Ivan Cepeda. The voter turnout of 63.6 % was a record for this country.

    The final complete official results were announced even though there had already been more than 57,000 challenges to irregularities such as vote buying and electronic fraud before Petro’s own announcement.

    The widespread incidents of various types of fraud and irregularities had already led many supporters of the Pacto Historico to question Cepeda’s concession.

    Luis Guillermo Perez Casas, a leader of the Pacto Historico, is heading the effort to collect evidence throughout the country at acciondenulidad2026@gmail.com. Casas is a human rights lawyer who served as Secretary General for the Americas of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH). So far, nearly 200,000 Colombians have signed up to help the effort.

    A wide variety of irregularities and frauds have been recorded in addition to those related directly to US intervention. They include votes cast by dead people and children, photos of votes used to collect payments from vote buyers, officials of the registrar of voters preventing poll watchers from doing their jobs, and changes made to vote certifications after they had been filed.

    If the vote count is not overturned, de la Espriella will take office on August 7. Until then, the current leftwing president, Gustavo Petro, will remain in office although he has already begun the transitional process of handing over the government to de la Espriella.

    Under Colombia’s constitution, the losing candidate of the final round of voting for president automatically becomes a member of the country’s newly elected Senate. Nevertheless, the right is now talking about trying to block Cepeda from taking his seat in the senate if Cepeda does not recognize the official election results. If seated, Cepeda will become the President of the Senate (with powers similar to the Senate majority leader in the USA) since the Pacto Historico has the largest block in the Senate. The members of the newly elected Senate and Chamber of Representatives will be seated on July 20.

    A Polarized and Divided Country

    This election continued trends apparent in the last election: while the multiparty system lives on in the legislative branch and in departmental and municipal governments, Colombia’s multiparty system is collapsing towards a new two-party system in presidential elections and the center is disappearing.

    The new binary system is not a repeat of the old system of the Liberal Party and Conservative Party. Those old parties were led by different sections of the ruling class which had evolved from before the country’s struggle for independence. Their corrupt but violence plagued rule was transformed with the inauguration of the country’s 1991 constitution.

    Instead, those two old parties and the various factions and machines of which they had been composed are now coalescing into one new right wing ruling class conglomeration.

    They still hate each other as much as ever, but more than they hate each other, they fear the growing power of the working class and the oppressed. That power is coalescing into the new political party called the Pacto Historico.

    The Pacto Historico is the current incarnation of a series of electoral coalitions of the left which formed for reasons more closely related to electoral law requirements and a drive to elect leaders of the left than from any serious desire to create a unified party of the working class and the oppressed. Despite its often reactive, haphazard, and improvised history, the Pacto has become a very close approximation to a mass party of the working class and oppressed. Its voter base consists mostly of the urban working class, and the organizations which support it include the country’s unions, much of its indigenous and Afro-descendant populations, and large parts of the feminist, LGBTQ+ and environmentalist movements.

    A good approximation of the ascendant growth curve of the left in Colombia is found in its presidential election results which you can see in the chart below.

    Year Candidate Party First Round Second Round
    votes % votes %
    2002 Luis Eduardo Garzon Polo Democratico Independiente 680,000 6.16%
    2006 Carlos Gaviria Polo Democratico Alternativa 2,613,000 22.03%
    2010 Gustavo Petro Polo Democratico Alternativa 1,331,000 9.14%
    2014 Clara Lopez Polo Democratico Alternativa 1,958.5180 15.22%
    2018 Gustavo Petro Colombia Humana 4,855,069 25.09% 8,040,449 41.77%
    2022 Gustavo Petro Colombia Humana/Pacto Historico 8,542,020 40.34% 11,292,758 50.42%
    2026 Ivan Cepeda Pacto Historico/Alianz a por la Vida 9,688,361 40.90% 12,708,712 48.70%

    It’s worth noting that in 2010 and 2014, the Green Party ran presidential candidates which took votes away from the candidates of the Polo Democratico (In 2010 Antanas Mockus received 3,134,000 votes or 21.51%, and in 2014 Enrique Peñalosa received 1,064,000 votes or 8.27%.) Those were the only elections in which the Greens ran presidential campaigns in this country.

    The Cabinet of Los que Siempre (Those who have always)

    Much has been made of de la Espriella’s slickly packaged campaign, use of social media and artificial intelligence, and clever campaign slogans. Although all of this is true, the keys to his victory lay in the fact that he was an unknown quantity who appeared to be conservative and on the right. Unofficially and behind the scenes, his campaign united the political machinery of the right-wing parties to mobilize the conservative layers of Colombia’s middle class.

    He campaigned as a political outsider, using the campaigns of Donald Trump in the USA, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Javier Milei in Argentina, and Rodolfo Hernandez here in Colombia (the candidate of the Colombian right who lost the 2022 presidential election) as his templates. As in those campaigns, de la Espriella is far from being an outsider, but he was a blank slate to the public. His dark past as a front man for the paramilitary AUC, as an attorney for drug dealers, money launderers and corrupt politicians, and as a close collaborator of the DEA and FBI, only began to become public as the campaign neared its end.

    His campaign was built on lies. A man who had professed to be an atheist, he embraced religion and appealed especially to the growing evangelical churches of the country. He has placed two of their leaders in his new cabinet.

    Knowing that the conservative petty bourgeoisie of the country had turned their backs on the traditional right-wing leadership, he promised he would make no deals with the traditional political parties and form a government of “los que nunca” (‘Those who never’ which means something like “the have nots” in English.) The slogan was a promise to rid the country of the corrupt right-wing politicians while remaining true to conservative values.

    His choice of a vice president should have told his voters that this was a lie.

    The new Vice President, Jose Manuel Restrepo, is a Colombian blue blood who is the descendant of three presidents and who was Minister of Finance in the scandal ridden government of Ivan Duque. Restrepo appears to be the de facto leader of the new government. Since the election, de la Espriella has disappeared from public view while Restrepo is constantly in the news and is leading the transition team of the new government.

    If the choice of Restrepo did not alert de la Espriella’s voter base to his bait and switch game, his cabinet appointments have. His newly minted ministers mostly served in the right-wing governments of Alvaro Uribe and Ivan Duque, and key members are drawn from the elite of two of the most corrupt family dynasties of Colombia’s right: the Char family of Barranquilla which now controls the party known as Cambio Radical, and the Pastrana family which dominates the Conservative Party. That party’s patriarch is former President Andrés Pastrana who is famous for his 33 entries in the Epstein files.

    The Cabinet of Los que Siempre (Those who have always)

    Faction Name Ministry Notes
    Char Family Elsa Noguera Minister of Transportation Husband is a convicted drug dealer
    Char Family Rodrigo Lara Restrepo Minister of the Interior His father was a Minister of Justice who was assassinated at the orders of Pablo Escobar.
    Char Family Mauricio Gómez Minister of Foreign Commerce
    Pastrana Family Miguel Gómez Martínez Minister of Finance Grandson of Laureano Gomez, the most extreme right wing President in the history of Colombia.
    Uribe Machine Iván Cancino González Minister of Justice (Uribe, Gilinski, Odebrecht)
    Uribe Machine Lorena Angarita Minister of Technology, Information and Communications internet activist and senatorial candidate with no apparent education or qualifications
    Uribe Machine Paloma Valencia Mines and Energy Official Presidential candidate of Alvaro Uribe’s Centro Democratico
    Evangelicals Viviane Morales Minister of Education Former Procurador
    Evangelicals Jaime Andres Beltran Minister of Housing Former Mayor of Bucaramanga removed from office for violating election laws.
    National Salvation Party Retired General Jorge Eduardo Mora López Minister of Defense Career military officer closely connected to DEA. Removed by Petro from chain of command after he was investigated, but not convicted, for corruption. Senatorial candidate for the extreme right wing National Salvation Party
    Unaffiliated Fabio Alberto Arjona Hincapié Minister of the Environment A supposed environmentalist who supports fracking as well as strip mining of sensitive environments in the Andes

    Plans and Threats

    De la Espriella has made many promises and threats which involve aggressively using executive decrees rather than going through the legislative processes beginning with his attempt to use the transition process to witch hunt members of the current government.

    Much of what he wants to do requires legislative action under the Colombian constitution, and other goals are flatly unconstitutional. While his campaign claims that all of the parties in the legislative branch except the Pacto Historico and the Alianza Verde have agreed to support the new government, this has not been confirmed by all of the party leaders, and even if they do, it is unlikely that they will be able to control all of their own parties’ legislators.

    De la Espriella says he wants to diminish the size of the state, transfer powers and revenue from the central government to the notoriously corrupt departmental and municipal governments; encourage private investment, mining and fossil fuel; and launch a major offensive against armed groups and drug-trafficking organizations. All in the first 100 days of his government.

    He also plans to resume aerial coca eradication using bioherbicides, build 10 Bukele style mega-prisons, revoke decrees against the use of the armed forces against civilian populations, subsidize the private health care system with an additional 10 trillion Colombian pesos, and launch a witch hunt against Gustavo Petro, officials who have served in his government, and the Pacto Historico.

    More than these publicly advertised measures, de la Espriella has proposed to roll back the pension and land reforms of the Petro government, and despite his public pronouncements to the contrary, is expected to try to roll back the major gains in the minimum salary made under Petro’s government and improvements made to public education.

    Where did the votes come from?

    Regardless of whether de la Espriella’s election is legitimate and regardless of how many votes were falsely attributed to de la Espriella, Colombia is clearly divided into four major political sectors: the approximately 16,000,000 people who were eligible to vote but did not, the almost 10,000,000 politically active working class and oppressed voters of the Pacto Historico in the first round of voting, the 12,000,000 politically active middle-class and upper middle-class voters who voted for the right in the first round of the elections, and about 2,000,000 politically active swing voters.

    A close look at the statistics and maps reveals that the Pacto Historico’s votes came from the poor and working-class neighborhoods of the big cities and from the Afro-Colombian and Indigenous regions of the country. In contrast, the votes of the right come from the middle class and upper middle-class neighborhoods of the big cities, and from the small cities and towns in the Andean region of the country which are still dominated by the old political machines. These same areas also account for much of the politically inactive population. Swing voters can be found everywhere but are mostly concentrated in the middle-class neighborhoods of the big cities.

    This election revealed two big changes in the electorate. First, a large number of people who had never voted turned out at the polls, and most of these new voters supported the Pacto Historico. Second, the middle classes shifted to the right. The Pacto Historico’s winning margins decreased in some cities including Bogotá and in middle-class and upper middle-class precincts throughout the country.

    This shift can be attributed to several factors. First, despite falling crime rates, the mainstream media has spent four years amplifying every crime committed in every city of the country and blaming Petro’s government for them. Second, Petro’s program of Paz Total (Total Peace) has failed to bring about the disarmament and demobilization of the armed groups that control the illegal drug trade and some isolated rural areas of the county. Third, the conflict between Petro’s government and the private health care industry has resulted in delays and denials of health care among patients who pay for premium health care services, and this has angered much of the
    middle classes.

    Fourth, the large increase in the minimum salary has caused the monthly administration fees in condominium complexes to go up and has increased the pay for the millions of women who work as maids and house cleaners. This has infuriated these voters even when they would be embarrassed to say so.

    From 1970 to 2026 This election echoes the tumultuous election theft of 1970 but is very different in many, many respects. From 1958 to 1974, the two traditional parties of the Colombian ruling class, the Conservatives and Liberals, ruled the country in a more or less friendly power sharing agreement. Each party agreed to let the other party rule and take the lion’s share of the spoils of office for four years, and to then take over for their own turn at stealing from the public trough.

    This agreement was called the National Front. In 1970, it was the Conservative Party’s turn to win the presidential election, so the Liberal Party did not run a presidential candidate. Unfortunately for the two parties, the former military dictator, Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, who had been turned out of power by the National Front agreement, decided to run against the Conservative Party candidate, Misael Pastrana.

    Pinilla was winning the election when the government stopped reporting results, then declared a state of emergency, and then declared that Pastrana had won the election. For days after the election, there was fighting in the streets, and schools and business were closed.
    Three years later, a new guerrilla movement, the April 19 Movement (Movimiento del 19 de abril, M-19), was formed in reaction to the election theft. Its most important aim was to fight for the simple democratic right of one person one vote. As a youth, Gustavo Petro joined M-19, and not much later, Ivan Cepeda joined the legal political party that it became after it demobilized in 1990. Both the Pacto Historico and the Alianza Verde are in important ways descended from M-19.

    This time around, the right-wing will have a much more difficult time stealing the election. For one thing, Gustavo Petro is still president and commander in chief of the Colombian military, police and intelligence agencies. Even though the right wing maintains a powerful network within the miliary, police and government bureaucracy, it is far from having the control it exercised in 1970.

    On the other hand, the Colombian left now has a mass party which did not exist in 1970, and most of the left has come in from the cold from its terrible detour into guerrillerismo.

  • Understanding the rise of Afrophobia in South Africa — and how we resist it

    Understanding the rise of Afrophobia in South Africa — and how we resist it

    A man is attacked with a sjambok at an anti-immigrant March and protest in Jeppestown in May 2026. (Photo: Ihsaan Haffejee/GroundUp.)

    Afrophobia in South Africa is often presented as a problem of ‘foreigners versus locals’, as though it emerges naturally from cultural hostility or competition between poor people. But this explanation hides the deeper political and economic realities that produce anti-immigrant violence and xenophobic mobilisation. The rise of Afrophobia in South Africa cannot be understood outside the context of deep inequality, unemployment, dispossession, political manipulation, and the failures of post-apartheid transformation.

    It is not simply about prejudice. It is about how social anger is redirected away from systems of exploitation and towards vulnerable people who are themselves victims of those same systems.

    South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. Decades after the end of apartheid, ownership of land and wealth remains concentrated in the hands of a small minority. Approximately 72% of arable land is owned by a very small, predominantly white section of society. In such a context, millions of people struggle daily to secure livelihoods, housing, healthcare, and employment. Yet, instead of addressing these structural inequalities, political elites and sections of capital often channel public frustration towards migrants and refugees.

    The politics of attacking migrants

    Afrophobia, therefore, functions as a political diversion. Rather than confronting the state’s failures to transform property relations, create decent work, or provide social security, migrants become scapegoats for broader crises produced by capitalism and neoliberalism. The unemployed South African worker is encouraged to blame the Zimbabwean street vendor, the Ethiopian spaza shop owner, or the Somali trader, instead of asking why wealth remains concentrated, why services collapse, and why economic opportunities are so scarce.

    The timing of anti-immigrant violence reveals this political dimension clearly: xenophobic attacks often intensify around local and national elections; political factions mobilise communities by promising to remove ‘foreigners’ and redistribute shops or opportunities to locals. In some cases, communities themselves threaten politicians with ‘doing xenophobia’ if promised removals are not carried out. Xenophobia thus becomes a political weapon—a bargaining tool used in struggles over local power and patronage.

    Groups such as Operation Dudula and political formations like the Patriotic Alliance have built support by exploiting this anger. But these movements are not spontaneous expressions of working-class frustration; they are carefully cultivated campaigns, tied to broader right-wing networks and funded by sections of capital and elite interests. Their purpose is to redirect legitimate social discontent away from the economic system itself and towards migrants.

    Accordingly, Afrophobia is not simply produced ‘from below’. Anti-immigrant politics is often driven by middle-class and elite actors. Universities, media organisations, politicians, and commentators play a crucial role in constructing the migrant as a threat. The media repeatedly associates migrants with crime, illegality, and disorder. Once nationality is constantly highlighted in reports about crime or social problems, an association forms in the public imagination: migrant equals criminal; foreigner equals danger.

    Migrants are not outsiders 

    A destroyed tuck shop run by an Ethiopian family in Rosettenville. (Photo: Ihsaan Haffejee/GroundUp)

    This discourse obscures the reality that many migrants are deeply embedded in local communities and economies. Migrant-owned spaza shops, for example, often thrive because they meet social needs ignored by larger corporations and formal retailers. They sell affordable goods close to where people live, extend credit to struggling families, and develop relationships of trust and mutual support with township residents. In places like Hermanus, communities often viewed Ethiopian shopkeepers as assets because they provided accessible and affordable food and services.

    At the same time, big business frequently perceives these small-scale migrant traders as competitors. Local authorities and large commercial interests in Hermanus allegedly collaborated to harass and criminalise migrant traders. This demonstrates another important truth: Afrophobia is not only about culture or identity. It is also about economic competition and the defence of entrenched interests.

    The issue of “illegality” is central to this politics of exclusion. Anti-immigrant campaigns frequently portray migrants as undocumented criminals flooding the country. Yet many migrants initially entered South Africa legally and later became undocumented because of the dysfunction and hostility of the Department of Home Affairs. Applications are lost, permits are delayed, and people are effectively rendered illegal through bureaucratic exclusion. The category of the ‘illegal immigrant’ is therefore often politically manufactured.

    Despite the intensity of xenophobic rhetoric, everyday life in working-class communities is more complex and contradictory than media narratives suggest. There are tensions, certainly, but there are also countless acts of solidarity and cooperation between South Africans and migrants. In many townships, locals protect migrants from attacks, organise together for housing and services, and build relationships rooted in shared survival.

    An example of this solidarity is the story of Ethiopian traders protected by South African women during periods of anti-immigrant violence. These women risked their own safety to shelter and disguise a migrant trader because he had become part of their community. He had sold them blankets on credit, built relationships with them, and become woven into their everyday lives. This story reveals that solidarity is not abstract. It grows through shared struggles, mutual care, and human connection.

    How we can resist

    What, then, can be done to push back against Afrophobia?

    First, we must reject nationalist retaliation and cycles of revenge. Responding to xenophobia by attacking South African businesses elsewhere on the continent is reactionary. Such reactions only reinforce the divisions that right-wing forces seek to cultivate. Afrophobia can only be defeated through deeper continental solidarity, not reciprocal hostility.

    Second, organising must begin where ordinary people actually are. Rather than lecturing communities abstractly about Pan-Africanism, cosmopolitanism and humanism, activists must connect anti-xenophobic politics to people’s immediate struggles—for jobs, housing, healthcare, education, and dignity. Migrants and locals often face the same structural conditions of poverty, unemployment, and dispossession. Effective organising must reveal these shared interests and common enemies.

    This means ‘fusing struggles’. Campaigns against evictions, unemployment, environmental destruction, and austerity must consciously include migrants, rather than treating them as separate categories. International NGOs sometimes reinforce divisions by isolating migrants as special humanitarian subjects, instead of integrating them into broader community struggles. This can unintentionally deepen resentment rather than solidarity.

    Third, there is a need for cross-border organising across Africa. Capital already operates across borders, exploiting workers and resources throughout the continent. Communities resisting displacement, environmental destruction, and neoliberal restructuring must also build transnational alliances. Pan-African solidarity cannot remain rhetorical; it must be grounded in shared political struggle.

    From colonial borders to Pan-African solidarity

    Such a struggle will have to confront the contradiction at the heart of African governments’ approach to migration. While many states have signed the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AFCT), very few have ratified protocols guaranteeing free movement for African people. Capital is allowed to move freely, but workers and poor people are criminalised for crossing borders. Challenging Afrophobia, therefore, also requires demanding freedom of movement and opposing the hardening of borders inherited from colonial rule.

    Underlying all of this is a broader political vision. Afrophobia is rooted in exclusionary ideas of citizenship and belonging that were shaped by colonialism and reproduced by postcolonial states. To resist it requires imagining African identity differently—not as something fixed by borders or passports, but as an open and evolving process rooted in shared humanity and collective struggle.

    Finally, young people are central to building this alternative future. Thus, political education and cultural work among African youth is crucial. If Afrophobia is learned through media, politics, and everyday narratives, then solidarity must also be taught and cultivated. Young people need opportunities to think critically about migration, identity, inequality, and Pan-Africanism from an early age.

    The struggle against Afrophobia is therefore inseparable from the struggle for social transformation itself. It is a struggle against inequality, exploitation, dispossession, and political manipulation. It demands that we refuse the false divisions imposed between ‘locals’ and ‘foreigners’ and instead recognise the shared conditions shaping working-class lives across the continent.

    In the end, the real question is not whether migrants belong in South Africa. The real question is whether we will allow elites and political opportunists to divide ordinary people, while the structures that produce poverty and inequality remain intact. The answer to Afrophobia lies not in stronger borders or harsher exclusion, but in solidarity, justice, and a genuinely emancipatory Pan-African politics.

    First published by Amandla.

  • Video of Webinar on How to Be Anti-War in a Multipolar World

    Video of Webinar on How to Be Anti-War in a Multipolar World

    The Northeast Los Angeles Alliance for Democracy held this webinar on June 21, 2026 with Iranian American, Cuban, Ukrainian American socialist feminist speakers.  It was moderated by MaryLinda Moss of the NELA Alliance for Democracy.
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  • Fourth of July at 250: The On-Going Struggle for Equality, Democracy, and Justice

    Fourth of July at 250: The On-Going Struggle for Equality, Democracy, and Justice

    I have written this essay because I have been irked by the media’s discussion of whether or not our country has fulfilled the ideals of its founding fathers. So, I wished to clarify just what their ideals were.

    The United States has been from the beginning the site of an enormous, long-drawn-out struggle between the wealthy property-owning ruling classes and the working classes. The ruling elite sought to expand its wealth and power and its control over other social classes, especially the laboring classes, and over time it built a powerful capitalist state and a vast empire. The laboring classes sought to gain economic and political power to improve their well-being and the prospects for their families. The conflict has been long, uneven, and intermittent, with periodic outbursts of struggle from below and episodes of reactionary repression from above. On July 4, our 250th birthday as a nation, we should celebrate the underdogs, the dissidents, the rebellious who fought and continue to fight against exploitation and oppression, and stand for equality, democracy, and justice.

    Why the American Revolution?

    The wealthy classes in the British North American colonies decided in the late eighteenth century that they no longer wished to share with Great Britain’s monarch, nobility, and capitalist class the wealth that the colonial elites accrued from the exploitation of slaves and wage laborers and from the seizure of indigenous lands. The wealthy colonists objected to British political control of the colonies, to paying British taxes, and to British prohibition of colonial expansion into Indian territories to the West. The colonial ruling classes wanted to exploit the land and working peoples for their own benefit and didn’t want to have to share that wealth with the British elite any longer. The time had come, the American wealthy classes believed to take it all for themselves. It was that avaricious desire that led to the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. They couched their demands in terms of freedom, of liberty, rhetoric that appealed to many people in the colonies, but those words meant freedom for themselves and their enterprises, the freedom to exploit and accrue profit.

    The United States was born as twins that grew to be rivals like Cain and Abel. In the North, the rulers were capitalist farmers employing wage labor, commercial classes of merchants and traders, and already the very first industrial enterprises, textile mills employing women, children, and immigrants. In the South the rulers were the owners of plantations and slaves, a seigneurial class that dominated the system of plantation slavery dependent on English and American bankers and merchants both for investment and the sale of their product and the realization of a profit, but a distinct economic and social system. The two wealthy elites, representing the two systems, capitalism and slavery, struggled for control of the state from 1789 to 1861, when the Civil War broke out to determine who could control North America. Capitalism proved victorious and slavery was abolished. But we have gotten ahead of our story.

    The colonial elites before the Revolution and while still under British rule had the experience in their respective colonies of republican forms of government, local assemblies and legislatures dominated by wealthy farmers and businessmen or slave owners, so it was relatively easy for them to envision a post-revolutionary government that would have similar characteristics. The revolutionaries, dominated by the wealthy property owners and their lieutenants, lawyers and journalists, created a series of such a national republican government, first the As the Continental Congress (1776-1761), then the Confederation (1781-1789) and finally the United States government established by the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, a federal republic, representing a compromise between the capitalists and the slaveocracy.

    The Founders’ Struggle against Democracy

    The American “Founding Fathers” worked to prevent the rise of democracy which they feared and loathed. Alexander Hamilton argued that democracy meant “mob rule;” it was “a disease.” He wrote that, “The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right.” Elbridge Thomas Gerry, a merchant who was one of the Founding Fathers, stated that, “democracy was the worst of all political evils.” James Madison, one of the key intellectuals and political leaders, wrote in the Federalist, No. 10 that pure democracies have historically been “spectacles of turbulence and contention,” so a form of government to be avoided at all cost.

    The anti-democratic views of the founders were embodied in the U.S. Constitution which ignored or excluded more than half the population. Women, who made up almost half of the population (48.8%) were politically non-existent, with virtually no rights whatsoever. The Black slaves who comprised almost one-fifth of the population (18.8%) had no rights either. Nor did the Indians who made up 7% of the population. That is, the vast majority of the population were not really citizens. At the time of the establishment of the United States, he states, which determined who would be allowed to vote, generally established property requirements based either on landownership or wealth. Only Vermont had no such requirements. The wealthy white men who founded the country not surprisingly made it a wealthy, white man’s republic.

    The Constitution theoretically established three co-equal branches of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—from the beginning the presidents played a dominant role. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk and others in the early republic usurped power in the interests of expanding the authority of their class and the power of the state. Andrew Jackson, for example, defied the Supreme Court and supported Georgia in expelling the Cherokee Indians. In the legislative branch, the Senate was not initially democratically elected by the people but rather senators were chosen by state legislatures. The Supreme Court, whose members were appointed for life by the president and confirmed by the Senate, wielded enormous power. Only the House of Representatives was directly elected by “the people,” which at the time meant by white men who had property.

    The People’s Fight for Equality, Democracy and Justice

    While the capitalist and slavocracy ruling classes strove to keep all power in their own hands, from the beginning working people, and those oppressed because of their race or because of their female sex, fought for equality, democracy, and justice. We cannot even begin to mention all of the battles between the country’s founding and today, but it is worth mentioning one of the first because it set the pattern. In its first years, the U.S. government imposed a tax on whiskey to pay the costs of the revolutionary war. In 1791-94, farmers in Western Pennsylvania refused to pay the tax and some 500 of them armed themselves and revolted against the tax collectors. President George Washington and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, to make clear the power and the purpose of the new government, personally lead an army of 2,000 troops to crush the farmers’ rebellion. In the South, slave rebellions, Gabriel Prosser’s conspiracy of 1800, Denmark Vesey’s Conspiracy (1822), Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831), were violently suppressed, their leaders and many participants executed.

    American history subsequently became a history of petitions, protests, and rebellions to which we owe whatever limited equality, democracy, and justice that we have achieved. The first wave feminists of Seneca Falls (1848) and the women’s suffrage movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, won political and economic rights for women, including the right to vote in 1920. The abolitionist movement and the Civil War (1862-65), the brief period of Black Reconstruction (1867-77), and the civil rights movement of the 1950s-60 finally won political rights in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And the great labor strike wave of the 1930s won for workers the rights to union recognition, to bargain collectively, to negotiate labor union contracts in the National Labor Relations Act (1935). None of these rights were won fully, completely, or permanently, but the passage of laws embodying them represented a step forward. The persistence of the capitalist system, entwined with racism and sexism, prevented us from fully achieving those goals of equality, democracy and justice.  So, we must also struggle for the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of democratic socialism.

    The Struggle Continues Today

    On July 4, 2026 working people and the oppressed still face a capitalist ruling class, but one that evolved, posing new threats. Our country has become an oligarchy with an authoritarian political system. Fascism, some sort of neofascism, has become a real possibility.

    Today’s leading capitalists come from the high-tech industries developed in Silicon Valley and now spread throughout the country. The latest development, Artificial Intelligence (AI), threatens to reorganize our economy, our military, and our political system. Climate change, particularly global warming, driven by the coal and petroleum industries, threaten both agriculture and industry, and the lives of millions on this hottest Fourth of July ever. And America’s imperial adventures in Iran may lead to other conflicts, which could bring about the use of nuclear weapons by nuclear powers such as Israel, Russia, China or the United States. All of this on top of the continuing exploitation of working people and the oppression of people of color and women in our own country.

    We should on this July Fourth be proud of the No Kings demonstrations, of the Fighting Oligarchy rallies, but also of every small civic protest, every little strike, every group small or large that stands up against the corporations, against the government, and thus fights for themselves and for all of us below. If we see things this way, then I think we can say, Happy Fourth of July.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • How to Respond to the June 2026 U.S. Agreement with Iran

    How to Respond to the June 2026 U.S. Agreement with Iran

    Below are excerpts from Frieda Afary’s presentation to a webinar entitled “How to Be Anti-War in a Multipolar World” sponsored by the Northeast Los Angeles Alliance for Democracy. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rgz456NfSV9WEQmMTNojgZk_vrUaQvap/view

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  • Extreme 30-Year Prison Sentence for Artist Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada in the Prairieland Case (TX) Highlights Federal Attack on Freedom to Dissent

    Extreme 30-Year Prison Sentence for Artist Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada in the Prairieland Case (TX) Highlights Federal Attack on Freedom to Dissent

    Fort Worth, Texas – Judge Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee to the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, today sentenced immigrant and artist Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada to 30 years in federal prison over possessing and moving a box of zines—politically expressive pamphlets. His case, informally known as “Prairieland,” has attracted extreme skepticism from civil rights organizations including the Freedom of the Press Foundation and National Lawyers Guild, and is part of a growing number of cases in which federal prosecutors are pointing to the possession of First Amendment–protected materials as evidence of criminal support for terrorism.

    Speaking prior to sentencing in the courtroom, Sanchez Estrada stated, “I worked really hard every day in this country, and I believe in human rights and helping others in need. I donate money and art to help animals and other people… I’m a father, a husband, and a teacher. But I’m not a terrorist.”

    In sentencing Sanchez Estrada, Judge O’Connor rejected motions for acquittal or a new trial filed by Sanchez Estrada’s public defender, Christopher J. Weinbel, that highlighted the state’s failure to identify how the literature in question constituted evidence or prove that Sanzhez Estrada intended to conceal it. Writing in the rejected motion, Weinbel noted plainly that prosecutors “relied entirely on stacked inferences and speculation, which the Fifth Circuit consistently rejects as proof. [T]he Government’s own admissions highlight that the object of the offense was unknown, leaving the jury to speculate about what constituted the alleged evidence.”

    Reacting to Sanchez Estrada’s sentencing, attorney Moira Meltzer-Cohen, who represents people arrested in the course of First Amendment activities, asserted, “This entire prosecution has been calculated to test the state’s ability to quell dissent. But the way forward is not silence, it is courageous solidarity with those who are being punished on the basis of their protected beliefs, associations, and activities. And as devastating as this has been for those affected, I do believe their rights will be vindicated in the post-conviction process.”

    Seven other Prairieland codefendants received sentences as well, ranging from 50 to 100 years in federal prison. One of them was Sanchez Estrada’s wife, Maricela Rueda, who received an astounding sentence of 70 years, exacerbating the strain on their family and leaving their teenage daughter in the care of relatives. According to court observers, Judge O’Conner acknowledged the court’s political agenda in handing down maximum sentences to “send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology.”

    Background 

    Sanchez Estrada, a 39-year-old artist, was found guilty on March 13, 2026, alongside eight codefendants who participated in an anti-ICE protest at the controversial Alvarado ICE detention facility. Under the auspices of “National Security Presidential Memorandum-7,” which was issued after the killing of Christian nationalist influencer Charlie Kirk, Sanchez Estrada was federally charged with “corruptly concealing a document or record” for moving a box of zines the day after the protest. Although he was not present at the protest, nor did he know about it, prosecutors argued that the content of the literature made it evidence of the defendants’ material support for terrorism, and shockingly alleged that the decision to move the box was a conspiracy between Sanchez Estrada and his wife.

    Following his arrest, Sanchez Estrada, a former DACA recipient and current green card holder, was singled out by ICE, doxxed by DHS, and threatened with deportation. He has received support from numerous advocacy organizations, including the National Lawyers Guild, Abolitionist Law Center, Immigration Legal Resource Center, Texas Civil Rights Project, Houston Leads, and Texas Jail Project.

    As stated by Seth Stern, director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, “Being guilty of possessing literature is a concept fundamentally incompatible with a free society. We don’t need a constitutional right to publish (or possess) only what the government likes, and the ‘anti-government’ literature in Sanchez’s box of zines is exactly what the First Amendment protects.”

    ***

    Members of the Free Des Support Committee are enraged and heartbroken by Sanchez Estrada’s sentence and continued imprisonment, and the ramifications of the Prairieland case for the First Amendment in particular and dissent in general. They urge people to continue to support him and the other Prairieland defendants, through letters, donations, and advocacy—until all are free.

    Donations to Sanchez Estrada’s defense and support fund can be made at https://freedes.net.

     

  • After Cuban Communism

    After Cuban Communism

    Samuel Farber originally published this article in Spanish on his Facebook page on June 19, 2026, just as Cuba announced a new economic policy. Farber had written the article before those changes were announced. – Editors

    Recently several articles have appeared on Facebook regarding the political program that should be adopted in a post-Communist Cuba. These articles focused primarily on the future of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), specifically on the question of whether the PCC should be banned once it has been removed from power.

    However, this question cannot be resolved without first considering the process whereby the PCC was ousted, and the position that we should adopt with respect to that event. Was this process mainly the product of a democratic revolution in the island? Or was it the product of a successful invasion organized by the U.S. government that concluded in a military occupation of the country, or of the establishment of a protectorate in the Venezuelan style? Like Venezuela, a U.S. protectorate of Cuba could be compatible with the creation of a new variety of state capitalism privatizing important sectors of the economy. Should the US succeed, in one way or another, to regain the control of Cuba after more than 65 years, we Cubans who advocate for democracy and national self-determination, must continue to oppose the CCP (no matter if it ends up in the political margins); but our focus must be the democratic struggle against foreign  domination. We cannot allow ourselves to become advisors of the empire on how to govern Cuba, including what to do with the survivors of the PCC.

    At the same time, we should prepare ourselves to the likely division that such a situation might generate among the Cuban people. The U.S. rulers would count with the active support of the Cuban American extreme right in Southern Florida and their equivalents inside the island, as well as of other significant sectors of Cubans. But the democratic forces inside the island that genuinely support national self-determination would oppose the foreign power as well as those who support it. Such political divisions are not new to Cuba. The fighters for Cuban independence in the late nineteenth century were not the only political option for Cubans. There were also Cubans who supported autonomy but not independence from Spain, as well as sympathizers of the Spanish “volunteers” and even with the so-called “guerrilleros” who very actively fought on behalf of Spanish colonialism.

    Let us suppose, however, that the Cuban government is overthrown from below by a genuinely democratic revolution in the island. That could politically create a much more complex situation vis a vis the status of the PCC. Thus, for example, a split could develop in the PCC if part of its base and even the party bureaucracy supported a democratic revolution. That was the case of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, when the Communist leader Imre Nagy became the Prime Minister at the head of the revolutionary forces. No wonder that Imre Nagy was executed by the USSR shortly after its invasion and counterrevolution that invaded the country. That was also the case of Czechoslovakia in 1968, where the Communist leader Alexander Dubcek played a role similar to Nagy, with a similar denouement, although less bloody than in Hungary.

    The support of members, and even the hierarchy of the PCC for a democratic revolution in Cuba could also affect that revolution in the sense of making it less bloody. It would create other problems with respect to how to deal with the support of PCC elements compromised with their record as an antidemocratic and repressive organization. Nevertheless, none of it would justify forbidding the continuing existence of the PCC after having lost its power, provided that:

    First, all the properties owned by the PCC, physical as well as financial, are confiscated and returned to the public purse at the expense of which they were originally obtained.

    Second, all members and especially high functionaries of the PCC that committed crimes, whether common or political, who utilized their membership or more probably their high position in the PCC to obtain impunity must be brought to court to stand trial for their offenses just like any other Cuban citizen.

    Third, a new Constituent Assembly is elected to revoke all the powers conferred to the PCC under the current constitution. Such an Assembly would of course have to discuss and decide on even more fundamental issues such as the status of the principal elements of the Cuban economy, and of the educational, health and social security systems, among others. Are they going to have a primarily public and democratic nature emerging from below instead of private and capitalist? Even if only a minority supported a socialist and democratic constitution, it is most important that these issues were discussed by the Assembly in public. Regarding the PCC specifically: once deprived by the Assembly of its powers and privileges, the PCC should have the same rights and obligations as any other political party. That means that it would only be able to gather support based on its ideas and practices, and not on its privileged powers. It should be clearly established that no group or party will be declared illegal based on its ideas, no matter how undemocratic they are, but may be so excluded based on their actions, especially those that attack the physical integrity and the democratic rights of the people.

     

  • Marjane Satrapi: A Voice of Freedom Through Art and Storytelling

    Marjane Satrapi: A Voice of Freedom Through Art and Storytelling

    Marjane Satrapi, the acclaimed French-Iranian author, artist, and filmmaker whose groundbreaking graphic memoir Persepolis transformed the world’s understanding of Iran and its people, has died at the age of 56.

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  • Hunger Strike & Protest at Delaney Hall Immigrant Detention Center

    Hunger Strike & Protest at Delaney Hall Immigrant Detention Center

    Protests in support of a hunger and labor strike by immigrant inmates at Delaney Hall, a detention center in Newark, New Jersey have been militant.  There have been conflicts between protestors and various police agencies. Dozens have been arrested. Activists held up large signs reading, “NO CONCENTRATION CAMPS.’

    The immigrants in detention are protesting maggot-infested food, overcrowding, lack of blankets, and inadequate medical services. The neo-Nazi Proud Boys have shown up to support ICE and to confront the immigrants’ allies. After issuing an order to disperse, state troopers on horseback and in riot gear have rushed protestors. ICE has roughed up protestors, fired tear gas and arrested many anti-ICE activists. New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, sent the state police to the site, she said, to keep order and reduce tensions as ICE withdrew. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka imposed a curfew and then lifted it.

    Members of Indivisible, the Democratic Party caucus that has organized the No Kings protests, have criticized Sherril for saying that protestors had become violent. They held up signs reading, “Gov Sherrill, stop lying about Delaney Hall” and “NJ Staties were the aggressors.”

    The protests continue with activists blocking vehicles trying to enter the facility.

    Below is the link to an open letter from the detained hunger strikers.

    https://www.lahuelga.com/elgrito

     

  • Rethinking the 1965 Revolution in the Dominican Republic 

    Rethinking the 1965 Revolution in the Dominican Republic 

    Members of a comando popular or people’s militia. Source: AGN

    The April 1965 revolution in the Dominican Republic was part of a broader trend of worldwide revolutions and anti-colonialist revolts that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, placing it alongside the epochal turning points embodied by the anti-colonialist struggle in Vietnam, the Cuban Revolution and the Algerian War of Independence. 

    The Dominican revolution, with its mix of spontaneity and politico-military planning, left an enduring legacy despite its tragic defeat by the US hegemon. One of the consequences of the defeat was the return of right-wing and anti-communist forces under Washington’s tutelage, paving the way for a twelve-year dictatorship under Joaquín Balaguer. Balaguer’s counter-revolutionary regime imprisoned, tortured and murdered thousands of revolutionaries, unionists and peasants; opened up the country to extractivist mining; and strengthened the Dominican state’s anti-democratic and pro-imperialist character to this day. 

    As far-right dominance continues to prevail in Dominican society there is an urgent need for international solidarity to confront President Luis Abinader (a Washington lackey) and his ultra-reactionary agenda. By looking back at the 1965 revolution, we can find valuable insights that offer guidance to navigate the current political moment. The points presented here aim to expand the discussion on the Dominican revolution and provide a re-evaluation of its radical legacy six decades later. 

    At first, the April revolution led by young, radicalized military officers, had a democratic character whose only political demand was the return of the constitutional order interrupted by the US-backed military coup that overthrew the democratically elected reformist government of President Juan Bosch in September of 1963. But the character of the democratic revolution soon changed into an anti-imperialist, popular revolution after the United States invaded the country on April 28, four days after the revolution broke out. The fast pace of events transformed the initial democratic slogan of “Return President Bosch and Restore the 1963 Constitution!” into a loud and resolute popular cry: “Yankee Go Home!”. 

    Washington’s aggression shifted the situation on the ground by turning the democratic revolution into a war of anti-imperialist resistance in defense of Dominican sovereignty, and in the process, it unified the popular sectors and some segments of the middle-class, reawakened political consciousness and ultimately, intensified anti-imperialist sentiment beyond Latin America and the Caribbean region. 

    The 1965 revolution was the culmination of a brief but tumultuous period marked by mass struggle that began in 1961 after the fall of the Trujillo dictatorship. From 1961 to 1964, waves of labor and student mobilizations emerged. In addition, the failed November 1963 guerilla uprising, spearheaded by the 14 of June Movement with the aim of overthrowing the coup regime, proved the validity of mass mobilization over guerrilla warfare and tactics detached from concrete reality (foquismo). 

    For the first time in three decades, the Dominican people entered the stage of history in full force. The revolution created democratic spaces for marginalized and oppressed sectors of society who quickly became full-fledged political actors in the making of history. Among some of the most combative layers of society who participated in the revolution were different sectors of the working-class: women, people of Afro-Dominican descent, LGBTQ people, students and chiriperos (informal workers). 

    The April Revolution cracked open the old Trujillo army created by US occupying troops during the first military occupation (1916-1924). The sudden irruption of popular power and subsequent military defeats led to an unprecedented political scenario which created deep internal divisions within the military and the police. One wing of the military, for example, sided with the revolutionary cause while the other openly sided with US imperialism. This new development dealt a heavy blow to the remnants of the Trujillo regime whose army was on the brink of collapse, raising alarms in Washington where President Lyndon B. Johnson, of the Democratic Party, ordered the US military invasion to prevent the emergence of “another Cuba”.

    One of the most significant weaknesses of the revolution was its inability to spread beyond the capital city of Santo Domingo. Although there were some attempts to extend the revolution to the Northern regions, for instance to San Francisco de Macorís where pro-coup forces quickly repelled the insurrectionary efforts, the revolutionaries failed to spread the revolution to the rest of the country, and in particular, to the countryside. One of the reasons why the revolution did not spread was the political backwardness of rural areas which lacked the political experience of urban dwellers. Further, in some rural areas like San Juan de la Maguana, the population feared reprisals as the memories of the 1962 Palma Sola massacre, carried out by the provisional Council of State government, were still fresh in people’s minds. 

    Unlike the Cuban Revolution, workers in key sectors of the economy such as the sugar industry played no role at all. The reason was twofold: a lack of unionization among workers, and the political weakness of the labor movement due to state repression during the proto-fascist regime (1930-1961) of Dictator Rafael Trujillo. Additionally, the system of racial and labor segregation installed by the sugar barons in the early twenty-century, in complicity with US occupying troops and the Trujillo regime, contributed to the isolation of sugar cane workers of Haitian origin which represented a large segment of the Dominican working class. 

    However, the formation of people’s militias (comandos populares) was key to sustaining the revolution. In fact, the comandos populares played a crucial role in providing military training to civilians, distributing weapons, feeding people, taking care of the wounded, disseminating revolutionary propaganda, maintaining local control, and encouraging democratic participation. People’s militias brought together civilians, soldiers, artists, students, intellectuals and workers. In fact, one of the most prominent people’s militias was that of POASI, or Sindicato de Trabajadores Portuarios de Arrimo (the Dock Workers Union). The comandos populares were organs of popular self-government, an expression of the dual revolutionary power created by the revolution.

    The revolution and this anti-imperialist resistance revealed the potential of solidarity between Haitians and Dominicans who to this day share an island that was divided two-hundred and fifty years ago by the European imperialist powers of Spain and France. For a moment, the revolution put a brake on the virulent nationalism and anti-Haitian racism espoused by the brutal Trujillo regime. 

     

    Revolutionary fighter in Santo Domingo. Photo by Milvio Pérez

     

    After the fall of the Trujillo dictatorship, a considerable number of Haitian exiles opposed to Dictator François Duvalier entered Dominican territory. At the onset of the 1965 revolution, these Haitian political exiles joined the revolutionary cause and formed a people’s militia. Hoping to spread the revolution to Haiti and topple the Duvalier regime, Haitian internationalist fighters became legendary for their military skills and bravery. 

    Although the revolutionary Left and working class played a significant role during the revolution, the main leaders of the revolution hailed from the middle class sectors of society. Such as Col. Francisco Alberto Caamaño Deñó, the military leader of the revolt, and democratic sectors of the populist Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) as well as radicalized elements from the social-Christian milieu. 

    Widespread international solidarity with the Dominican people was vital to lifting morale among revolutionary fighters and halting Washington’s imperialist campaign. In 1965, anti-imperialist protests reached every corner of the world: in Mexico City, New York, Buenos Aires, Caracas and Paris, millions of people mobilized to express their anger and opposition to the criminal imperialist violence unleashed on both Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. 

    Military tank captured by the people. Photo by Juan Pérez Terrero.

     

    The author is grateful to Simón Rodríguez for his comments and revisions. 











     

     

  • Consequential Elections in Colombia

    Consequential Elections in Colombia

    While the eyes of the world are fixed on the Strait of Hormuz, China, Russia’s war against Ukraine, and sometimes on the US created crisis in Cuba, Colombia is in the middle of a very close, tense and consequential election. The results will have repercussions throughout Latin America.

    The Pacto Historico (Historic Pact), the rising left wing party here, is poised to win a historic second presidential election. By doing so, it can stop the tide of losses by the left in important elections from Chile to Ecuador.

    Legislative elections on March 8 made the Pacto the biggest party in Colombia in every respect. The first round of the presidential elections is scheduled for May 31, but every poll indicates that a second round between the top two first round vote getters will take place on June 21st.

    The front runner is the Pacto’s Ivan Cepeda, but two right wing candidates, Senator Paloma Valencia of the Centro Democratico, and an attorney named Abelardo de la Espriella,  are engaged in a bitter fight for second place.

    The Centro Democratico is the extreme right wing party of former President Alvaro Uribe.

    Uribe has maintained tight control of Colombia’s right wing through his personal control of the Centro Democratico. A politician who had been on the USA’s list of drug dealers and who had been close to Pablo Escobar during his career in Medellin and Antioquia where he and his family are major landowners, Uribe was President of Colombia from 2002 to 2010. He was responsible for rolling back workers’ rights and for building up Colombian paramilitary organizations. He was also a close ally of US President Clinton and his Plan Colomba.

    A Multi-Party Presidential Race

    The president is elected in a two round system. Although the race began with several dozen candidates, there are now only twelve. Some of the others were eliminated in the primaries of parties, the primaries of coalitions of parties, or failure to gather enough signatures to appear on the ballot. Still other candidates left the race to support one or another candidate.

    More importantly, the race has resolved itself into two parts: the left versus the right, and the right versus the right.

    Most of the left has united in and around the Pacto Historico and its candidate Ivan Cepeda.

    From Petro to Cepeda

    Four years ago, Colombia elected its first ever leftist president, Gustavo Petro. Since then, Petro has struggled to implement his reform agenda despite the fact that the left did not have a legislative majority.

    Using a combination of mass demonstrations, presidential decrees, and a spellbinding array of deals with centrist parties and politicians, and even occasionally with members of right wing parties, Petro managed to accomplish significant land reform, a major increase in the minimum monthly salary, a historic extension of pension coverage, significant improvements in public education and university access, and a general rollback of the take aways of workers’ rights that were imposed during the presidency of Alvaro Uribe.

    Nevertheless, Petro failed to implement most of his ambitious environmental agenda and fought a bitter and inconclusive battle over health reform with the private health care industry.

    Petro is limited to one term in office by the Colombian constitution, so the Pacto Historico nominated Senator Ivan Cepeda as its presidential candidate in this year’s election. Cepeda’s nomination has put to rest most of the slanders that Petro was interested in becoming a president for life in the mold of Maduro in Venezuela or Ortega in Nicaragua.

    Senator Cepeda has literally been in the struggle against paramilitarism, oppression and imperialism for all of his life. His father, Manuel Cepeda was a leader of the Unión Patriótica and the Colombian Communist Party who was assassinated in 1994 while campaigning for a seat in the Colombian congress. He was one of more than 6,000 UP leaders, militants and supporters assassinated by the right wing government of the time and its paramilitary arm.

    Ivan Cepeda is known as the most fearless defender of human rights and the scourge of ex-President Uribe here in Colombia. As a member of the Chamber of Representatives and the Senate, he has led the struggle to uncover the links of Uribe and other members of the Colombian elite to the paramilitaries, dig up the links between the paramilitaries and the military, and investigate the thousands of murders, false positives, people tortured, and the tens of thousands displaced.

    When Uribe tried to use the court system against Cepeda, Cepeda turned the tables resulting in Uribe’s conviction for some of his many crimes (The conviction was reversed on appeal, but may still be reinstated.).

    Cepeda has also been a central figure in most of the Colombian government’s peace negotiations with various armed groups for more than a decade.

    His political style is a sharp contrast to that of Petro who is a brash, longwinded, and aggressive speaker. Cepeda is careful, thoughtful, and measured but is also a forceful speaker.

    The Right is Divided

    Colombia’s right wing is sharply divided by personal animosity, jealousy, hatred, and ambition. The divisions are so deep that there have been threats of violence by officials in the campaign of Abeleardo de la Espriella against prominent supports of Paloma Valencia. The assassination of Miguel Uribe (no family relation to Alvaro Uribe), an early leader in the race for the nomination of the Centro Democratico, remains unsolved.

    Abelardo de la Espriella, an attorney who has represented major drug dealers as well as the Venezuelan PSUV (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela) is Colombia’s wannabe version of El Salvador’s dictatorial ruler Nayib Bukele. De la Espriella is a close friend of Alvaro Uribe’s and seems to have unlimited campaign funds from unknown sources. His emulation of Bukele includes trying to dress like Bukele and wearing exactly the same style of facial hair as his idol.

    At the start of the campaign, it was not clear whether de la Espriella or Valencia had Uribe’s support, but he finally came down on the side of Valencia.

    Both of these candidates rely on amplifying the fears of the middle class of crime and violence. The persistence of the illicit drug trade and armed drug gangs, including remnants of the FARC and the ELN, plays into their hands. Occasionally, they have made plays to win over sectors of working class voters, as in Valencia’s recent proposal for the government to pay for the insurance of motorcyclists (A proposal she would finance by abolishing the Ministry of Equality.)

    Divided Government

    Cepeda has vowed to continue fighting for the program of the Pacto that Petro began to implement, but even if he wins, Cepeda will face a continuation of the divided Chamber of Representatives and Senate that has hampered Petro.

    In the legislative elections held on March 8, the Pacto won 36 seats in the 183 seat Chamber, and 25 in the 103 seat Senate. These results are a significant improvement over the Pacto’s 2022 results in which they won 32 seats in the Chamber and 20 seats in the Senate. The Pacto’s percentage of the vote increased from 15.5% in 2022 to 23.8% this year,

    Once upon a time, Colombia had a Tweedledee, Tweedledum two party system with a strong president much like the system in the United States, but it was abolished by the 1991 Constitution which introduced a complicated system based on proportional representation and other democratic measures.

    The result was destruction of the traditional two party system and the rise of a complex multiparty system.

    There are currently 28 parties represented in either the Senate or Chamber or both. Seven of those parties did not obtain the required vote percentages to win seats, but gained seats because they represent indigenous people or ethnic minorities. Six ballot qualified parties failed to gain any representatives.

    Besides the Pacto Historico, the largest and most important parties are the Centro Democratico, the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, Cambio Radical, the Partido de la U, and the Green Alliance.

    The Centro Democratico is the machine controlled by aging right wing strongman, ex-president Alvaro Uribe. The Liberal and Conservative Parties are the still powerful surviving machines of the old Tweedledee and Tweedledum parties (with the help of the Catholic Church in the case of the Conservatives). Cambio Radical and the Partido de la U are based on the machines of powerful political dynasties that were once part of the Liberal Party.

    In this system, there is still a strong president and no prime minister, but the two houses of the legislative branch can overrule presidential initiatives, and a plethora of unelected government bodies including the several supreme courts and various independent prosecutorial, administrative and oversight agencies all have the power to block laws passed by the legislative branch and presidential initiatives and policies in many ways and at many levels.

    In any case, passing legislation depends on cobbling together coalitions of parties, individuals and factions.

    Polling and Trolling

    According to the polls, Valencia and de la Espriella are running neck and neck for second place in the first round of voting. Depending on which poll you look at, Cepeda has around 40% of the votes, and Valencia and de la Espriella each has about 20% of the votes.

    The traditional polls, notoriously imprecise and skewed to the right, show Cepeda winning the first round, and running neck and neck with either Valancia or de la Espriella in the second round. La Silla Vacía (The Empty Seat), an online and media investigative news source,  ranks the performance of the main polling companies here on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being a perfect score, and 1 being catastrophically bad. The top poll, GAD3, has a score of 6.2, and the bottom poll, Guaramo, has a score of 5.1.

    Nevertheless, the difference between polling and trolling here is sometimes difficult to discern. Polymarket, the online betting platform is now being used as a stand-in for election polls by the right wing media in Colombia. It now shows de la Espriella leading Ivan Cepeda in the betting race by 43% to 41%.

    In other words, flipping a coin is almost as good a predictor as are Colombian polls.

    The Pacto, the working class, and the left

    The social base of the Pacto Historico is the urban working class, especially the organized labor movement. Together the membership of the three union federations, the CUT, CGT and CTC, amounts to only about 850,000 workers out of a working age population of about 35,000,000. Nevertheless, the unions have a huge following beyond their membership because the unions negotiate with the government every year to determine the next year’s annual minimum salary.

    In brief, Cepeda and the Pacto’s campaign could be summarized as defend and extend the gains made during Petro’s presidency. However, Cepeda is proposing to do this by creating a National Accord to bring together all sectors of Colombian society, from big businesses to the poorest farmers, around the progressive reform program of the Pacto.

    Officially, most of the unions support the Pacto, but this year the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT) and the Unión Sindical Obrera de la Industria Petróleo (USO) are officially supporting Roy Barreras in the first round of voting. Barreras has become the vehicle for the CUT and USO to make public their differences with Petro and Cepeda on energy policy, and especially their displeasure with the current ban on fracking and drilling for oil and natural gas.

    Almost all of the organized left in Colombia including the various communist and socialist organizations, the feminists, the indigenous movements, Afro-Colombianos, the LGBTQ+ movement and the environmentalist movement are either inside of the Pacto Historico or are supporting the candidacy of Cepeda. While the anarchist movement is anti-electoralist, most if its sympathizers are also likely to vote for Cepeda.

    The key question mark on the left had been the Alianza Verde which has significant support among voters and has a large block of votes in the Senate and the Chamber. It portrays itself as center-left.

    While it had not nominated its own candidate for president, it also had not endorsed any other candidate. Two of its most important leaders, Claudia Lopez (former Mayor of Bogotá) and her wife, Angelica Lozano (former Senator) recently split from the Greens to mount an independent presidential campaign with Lopez as the candidate. She is languishing in fourth or fifth place in the polls with less than 5% of the voters supporting her.

    At the end of April, the Green Alliance ended the suspense when its leaders voted 34 to 3 (with one abstention) to support the Pacto Historico’s candidate in the first round of the presidential election.

    Throughout the race there have also been three minor candidates who had been in Petro’s government: Roy Barreras, Luis Gilberto Murillo, and Mauricio Lizcano

    Murillo, who is one of the most prominent leaders of the Afro-Colombian community and had been Governor of Choco and Petro’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, has withdrawn his candidacy and thrown his support to Cepeda.

    Barreras, a medical doctor, has been a key but controversial supporter of Gustavo Petro. He began his political career in the Liberal Party, moved to Cambio Radical, was elected Senator as a candidate of the Partido de la U, and then switched to Petro and the Pacto in 2022. He has been an outspoken supporter of Paz Total, Petro’s attempt to negotiate peace with all armed groups in Colombia including criminal gangs.

    Lizcano, was an important figure in the Partido de la U but became Petro’s Minister of Information and Communications Technology.

    According to the polls, both of these candidates have less than 1% of the voters behind them.

    Project Jupiter, Hondurasgate and Fake News

    Most of the media in Colombia is controlled by five very wealthy family groups: Organización Ardila Lülle, Grupo Santo Domingo, Grupo Gilinski, Organización Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo and Grupo Prisa. The same groups control the country’s most important industries, banks, commerce, and health care and are enormously influential in all of the main political parties except the Pacto, which they all work overtime to defeat.

    In this election, Project Jupiter has emerged as the Uribista hothouse for disinformation and fake news directed against Cepeda and the Pacto. The project is led by Uribe’s former Foreign Minister, Jaime Bermudez. Bermudez is currently president of the Colombian branch of the multinational bank, Lazard.

    The template for the Jupiter campaign appears to be the “Hondurasgate” operation which used an international network composed of the United States, Israeli and Argentine governments to produce and disseminate slanderous fake news against the left in Honduras.

    Most recently, a fake audio linking Cepeda to an armed FARC dissident faction has been released. The audio has been featured in all of the right wing national media and  reposted in the social media of Alvaro Uribe, Paloma Valencia, Abelardo de la Espriella, Claudia Lopez and many other right and center political leaders.

    Soon after becoming the headline story of the right, the national police tracked the audio to its origins in a prison in Ibagué rather than to anyone related to the FARC dissidents.

    Constituent Assembly

    Parallel to the election campaign, Petro and part of the Pacto Historico are campaigning for the convocation of a constituent assembly to radically amend the Constitution of 1991. Ivan Cepeda has distanced himself from the campaign but not repudiated it.

    A major constitutional change is the greatest fear of the right and the center which use the many checks on democracy embedded in the current constitution to thwart progressive reforms. El Tiempo, the country’s most important newspaper, even featured a front page headline screaming, “Today, a constituent assembly would be a political civil war.”

    This issue was alsoat the heart of the split in the Green Alliance when Lopez, Lozano and their supporters left.

    Petro used the threat of convocation of an assembly plus mass demonstrations to help pass his labor law reform last year. Now, some commentators speculate that the campaign for a constitutional change is his Plan B in case Cepeda is not elected.

    The campaign needs more than 2 million signatures to put a referendum on the ballot. The organizing committee is shooting for 5,000,000 signatures to guarantee that the Registrar places the measure on the ballot. So far, it has collected more than 900,000.

    On the left, the timing of the campaign is an issue of concern especially due to the failure of the Chilean left’s efforts to radically change that country’s constitution.

    The International Situation

    Colombia is surrounded on three sides by countries that are controlled by, or very close to, the Trump administration: Venezuela, Panama, and Ecuador.  Despite withdrawing most of the military forces it used to kidnap Nicolas Maduro, the President of Venezuela, the United States continues to attack boats alleged to be carrying drugs in the Caribbean and Pacific, a continuous threat against Colombian’s fishing and tourist industries and a warning to the Colombian government.

    Ecuador’s government, now controlled by Trump ally President Daniel Noboa, is engaged in a US instigated trade war against Colombia. Noboa imposed tariffs of up to 100% on Colombian goods. Colombia reciprocated and then cut off its electricity exports to Ecuador. Noboa’s family banana company has been implicated in cocaine exports but he portrays his trade war as a crusade against Colombian cocaine exports.

    Meanwhile, Cuba is facing an existential crisis created deliberately by the Trump administration of the USA. It is preparing its defense in case of a US invasion, most likely on hold due to the failure of the United States to anticipate Iran’s resistance to its attacks on that country.

    Seemingly, the pendulum in South America has swung to the right in recent elections in Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, and Uruguay. A victory by the Pacto Historico here in Colombia could end that appearance and bolster the left throughout the region.

    Prognoses

    With Cepeda likely to win the first round of voting by a wide margin, a great deal of attention is now focused on who will come in second, Valencia or de la Espriella. According to the pundits and the polls, Valencia will be a stronger challenger in the second round of voting.

    No matter who wins the second round, the next four years are likely to witness a significant increase in class conflict, social strife, and the political crisis here. A US invasion of Cuba would upset the entire region.

    Global warming is also an unpredictable factor. Later this year, the weather phenomenon of El Niño is supposed to begin again. It will bring with it drought conditions and possible electric energy shortages in this hydroelectric dependent country.

    A Cepeda victory will strengthen the hand of the working class, the social movements, and the oppressed whereas a victory of the right will place all of the repressive apparatus of the state firmly in the hands of the forces of reaction.