לאישה הזו קוראים האלא ערפאת, היא בת 35. מאז 2 בלילה היא ועוד 14 מבני משפחתה, רובם ילדים נמצאים מתחת להריסות ביתם שהופצץ ברחוב זארקה בשכונת תופאח בעזה. דיברתי עם גיסה, אנאס ערפאת ולדבריו כל מי שמנסה להתקרב כדי לסייע מותקף על ידי רחפנים. אם יש למישהו רעיון איך לעזור זה הזמן. pic.twitter.com/59vId4Ky20
The bombs fell in the Al-Tuffah neighborhood in Gaza City around 2 a.m. on July 14 local time. There was no “battle” or raid, just Israeli annihilation from the air. We have worked with a man named Anas Arafat for several years trying to help Palestinians in Gaza City provide more food for themselves. Anas’s mother and father were living in a 5-story building that had been partially destroyed. The bottom two floors were livable so they and two sons and daughters-in-law and 7 grandchildren were living there. Then the bombs fell. Everyone in the house was buried under the rubble, thirteen in all. People tried to help but without construction equipment to lift the heavy beams and debris they could do nothing. One person shot a few seconds of video of Anas’ sister-in-law who could be seen in a gap of the wreckage. She says, “My father, my kids”. She looks at the camera. She looks at us. Then IDF drones appeared, and local neighbors ran. Drones kept on scaring people away.
An article in the Israeli paper Haaretz said that members of the family told their reporter that the IDF kept rescuers away for eight hours. The last two sentences of the article were, “Haaretz reached out to the IDF to receive an urgent response, while at least some of the Arafat family was still alive. The army has yet to respond.” Read that again, “while at least some of the Arafat family was still alive.” But the IDF did not respond to Haaretz until much later. In another article, Gideon Levy says that the IDF spokesman didn’t get back to Haaretz for 12 hours. The IDF absolutely knew the need for immediate rescue but were content to let the family die.
Anas Arafat lost his mother and father, brothers, sisters-in-law, nieces, and nephews when Israel bombed their home and forbade rescues.
Rescuers from the Palestine Civil Defense eventually arrived but concluded that all 13 were dead. Anas Arafat said 15 other people in the area were also killed by the bombs.
Apparently, the explosion sent one of the granddaughters right out of the building. She had surgery and is alive. She will be told her family is gone
Added to the horror is the fact that the bodies can’t be retrieved. That is the Israeli military makes it impossible to do so. For one their jets are still dropping bombs. But more important one needs heavy construction equipment to pick up the steel and concrete of the destroyed buildings. It’s unclear whether the problem is lack of machinery or lack of fuel but either way it’s not available. So Anas’ mother, father, brothers, sister-in-law, and seven nieces and nephews will lie in the ruins indefinitely or until the Israelis bulldoze the area. Anas’ wife and children were not in the house that was bombed on the 14th.
Let me tell you about Anas Arafat. He trained to be a lawyer and graduated with a degree, but opportunities to practice law in Gaza are very, very slim. He’s been working on a mutual aid team called “Plant the Land”. It was an attempt to give Gaza more independence from food imports by growing food locally. It was vegan and had been co-founded by Jewish-American Laura Schleifer. It had considerable support from donors around the world. The team built a water well, provided medicine and sometimes blankets. He also set up an education center. Promoting Enduring Peace (PEP) started helping out three or four years ago. After some time we learned he had a serious medical problem. Anas is a young man but he developed diabetes, type 1. Insulin in Gaza City was expensive and since all of Gaza has been under various levels of Israeli siege, hard to get. He developed vision problems. Gaza doctors couldn’t help him, but he heard that an Egyptian doctor had a treatment involving eye injections and medicine that could lead to marked vision improvement. So fund raising from many sources including PEP got him the funds to get to Egypt. The treatment worked!
Then came the attack from Gaza on October 7 and the forever war from Israel on Gaza. Anas’ home was in the very north of Gaza City. He and his wife and children left right away, going from place to place in Gaza City . He learned in days that he had been correct in fleeing. His house was bombed. The education center he had set up that was serving as a shelter was bombed and six children were killed. Anas said that in that infamous October eleven of his extended family were killed including a sister-in-law.
His wife was pregnant with their third child. She was due in mid-December. There was no doctor or midwife available. So Anas delivered his son by himself only getting instructions from a doctor by phone. Luckily there were no complications.
After that October Anas had no more insulin. By 2025 vision in one eye was gone. But all that time he worked. He used donations to buy food, clothing, toys and water and gave them away in neighborhoods of Gaza. On occasion they had celebrations. All this bothered the IDF and he was warned twice, but he persisted.
Now he is in deep psychic shock. And his family is hungry. 25 pounds of Pillsbury flour costs around $25 in the U.S. Recently in Gaza City the asking price for that amount of flour was $235. Anas has said now the price has further skyrocketed. Laura Schleifer says Anas told him he hasn’t had food in four days.
In a third article in Haaretz Nir Hasson on July 21 wrote, “To this day, the IDF hasn’t said why it bombed the Arafat home, or why it barred rescue workers from coming.”
Written by the editorial board of Roud Media Collective, representing a group of Iranian political activists in exile, the present text is part of a detailed analytical statement published (in Persian) on June 20th, analyzing the background and consequences of Israel’s military invasion of Iran and its implications for reconsidering an alternative internationalist strategy.
General Challenges of Militarization in the Middle East for the Left
Regardless of the backgrounds and reasons behind Israel and the United States’ military aggression against Iran, it is clear that this invasion has imposed a new “state of war” on the Middle East. The fragile ceasefire established after the “12-day war” cannot conceal the gravity and severity of this imposed situation. Apart from the impacts this war conditions may have on restructuring the power system in Iran and, more broadly, on the balance of forces in the Middle East, one thing is certain from the perspective of oppressed peoples’ struggles: this war serves as the latest example of imperialist policies aimed at advancing the longstanding strategy of weakening/suppressing the political subjectivity of the oppressed in the Middle East and the Global South (the tragic case of Sudanese revolution is another prominent example). In an era where capitalism, in the true sense of the word, has conquered the entire world (both geographically and socially), and consequently, imperialist relations have become increasingly violent and widespread, events like the recent war cannot be analyzed outside the macro trends governing the world. From this perspective, if we consider the rise of the global neo-fascist wave and the expansion of the “global war regime” as responses by capitalism to the escalation of its chronic and multifaceted crises[1], then the Israeli war and genocide in Gaza along with the military invasion of Iran must also be understood within this broader historical framework.
Based on this viewpoint, we believe that strengthening an all-encompassing anti-capitalist internationalism in today’s turbulent era requires taking steps toward transnational (and organized) cooperation against the intertwined waves of neo-fascism, war, and militarization (or the global war regime). However, based at least on the experience of the failure of leftist and progressive forces to effectively confront the Gaza war’s atrocities, we have seen that establishing alternative structures for interconnected resistance or developing alternative internationalist strategies still faces significant obstacles. One major obstacle in this path is undoubtedly the notable growth of the campist approach (a state-centric understanding of imperialism) among a certain leftist spectrum over the past two decades—a tendency that has been reinforced and proliferated alongside the escalating tensions stemming from hegemonic rivalries among imperialist centers in the contemporary multipolar world (such as proxy wars in the Middle East and Africa).
The increasing proliferation of the campist approach, coupled with the global crisis, created divisions within the leftist combat-lines, and has practically weakened the possibilities for anti-imperialist struggles and internationalist solidarity—including those against war and militarization. The contradictory manifestations and consequences of this phenomenon are especially evident in regions where imperialist relations and interventions have been more severe or their catastrophic outcomes have been long-standing historically (such as many Middle Eastern societies).
Perhaps the most recent manifestation of this phenomenon appeared during the Gaza war within the sphere of the Palestine solidarity movement. Here, the dominant discourse focused exclusively on the inhumane policies of the Israeli government and opposition to Western powers supporting it, ultimately disconnecting the Palestinian people’s suffering from other ongoing tragedies in the Middle East. This discourse thus separated the shared and intertwined nature of Palestinian suffering from other mechanisms of domination and oppression inflicted upon the peoples of the Middle East. More concretely, while mainstream narratives propagate constructed polarities —such as Israel-Hamas, Israel-Iran, and USA-Iran— to demonize one side in favor of the other, the typical approach among leftists to resist these (dominant) narratives has been to defend the subordinate (demonized) side of each polarity. In doing so, this approach either ignores the inhumane nature and practices of the “subordinate side” (mainly from a pragmatic perspective) or justifies and rationalizes them through false anti-imperialism and/or decolonialist teachings. In both cases, it acknowledges—and departs from—the polarities constructed by mainstream narratives.
Currently, with the military invasion of Iran by Israel (and the United States) and its catastrophic consequences for the Middle East, this same logic is evident in many protest reactions by leftist groups, including the Iranian left[2]. This text aims, through a critical confrontation with such approaches, to demonstrate the necessity and potential of developing an alternative internationalist strategy based on “TheThird Way[3].”
Intellectual Challenges in Reconstructing Internationalism Related to the Middle East
Even if the flames of the current war, ignited by Israel’s military invasion, soon subside, its impact on the Middle East’s future remains profoundly dangerous (set aside its immediate consequences[4]).
First of all, this invasion normalized (further) the logic and possibility of war (at least) in the Middle East, while suspending some critical international norms (such as no military attacks on nuclear facilities). No need to mention that this combination has devastating consequences for civilians. When viewed alongside the ongoing war and genocide in Gaza, this imposed situation reveals an unprecedented level of systematic dehumanization, mirroring the global rise of neo-fascism. This trajectory inevitably sows the seeds for horrific future tensions, primarily by accelerating the region’s drift toward militarism and, consequently, authoritarianism.
Secondly, the direct impacts of this war, including the suppression of progressive forces, movements, and protests within Iran, create a political vacuum. This vacuum risks either the emergence and strengthening of reactionary alternatives, such as an imperialist top-down restructuring of political power, or the exacerbation of existing socio-political fractures due to intensified social crises and widespread insecurity. Such conditions could lead to confrontations among oppressed peoples, diverting them from collectively combating the foundations of the existing order, and potentially result in civil war and social collapse.
Thirdly, the war detrimentally impacts the future development of oppressed peoples’ agency in Iran and the Middle East. This occurs by:
Driving oppressed populations toward political passivity due to heightened economic and social insecurity, political repression, and security crackdowns.
Fueling nationalism and discourses of national grandeur, thereby promoting racism and xenophobia, by reinforcing widespread fear and feelings of inferiority and powerlessness.
Fostering Islamic fundamentalism, presenting it as Islam versus Judaism.
Amplifying antisemitism by exposing a severe aspect of contemporary global injustice regarding the unchecked power and practices of the Israeli state. This is because Israel advances its aggressive and inhumane policies under the guise of representing world Jewry, acting beyond norms and deterrents with unconditional support from global powers.
Ultimately, Israel’s invasion of Iran, despite its guise of regional and ideological conflicts, fundamentally weakens the formation processes of class consciousness and anti-capitalist awareness/agency of the oppressed.
Our aim is to highlight internal challenges within the Middle Eastern left that impede the perspective and development of an alternative internationalist strategy (rather, lead to further political divergence). We contend that this dominant leftist perspective has fragmented and weakened the left’s political forces in the region, thereby hindering progress. To provide clarity, we outline our own perspective, as an attempt to ground an alternative strategy we term “The Third Way”.
From our perspective, the recent conflicts and political polarization within the Iranian and broader Middle Eastern left[5] largely stem from several conceptual ambiguities and challenges:
The intertwined nature of autocratic national capitalism with global capitalist relations.
The nature and functions of imperialist relations within contemporary capitalism in the Middle East.
How to simultaneously combat authoritarian and exploitative relations while also confronting imperialist dominance.
How to effectively address the crimes and dangers of colonial-Zionist expansionism.
On a concrete and historical level, the widespread divergence and polarization among the Middle Eastern left reflect the structural contradictions of the global order. In the contemporary world, the reproduction of capital accumulation—the dominant system’s primary driver—necessitates both suppressing oppressed masses to curtail their agency and fueling militarized accumulation cycles. This process requires the reproduction of imperialist power structures and mechanisms at regional and national levels, primarily through the consolidation of autocratic powers reliant on militarism and despotism. Simultaneously, fluid yet inevitable conflicts of interest among core capitalist states (or imperialist centers) often manifest as regional tensions and proxy wars. However, since these regional tensions and proxy wars are shaped by specific historical and geopolitical factors[6] (including national, religious, and political divisions), the imperialist power mechanisms driving them often remain hidden.
In such a complex situation, conflicts among national actors or regional crises tend to seem independent and self-explanatory, rather than as systematic parts of the global order that shapes them to reproduce its foundations. In other words, surface phenomena conceal underlying root causes (not to mention the obscuring function of mainstream political narratives). This applies directly to the roles of both the Israeli and Iranian states and their ongoing conflicts in shaping the current Middle Eastern order. Therefore, our challenging political and intellectual task is to identify the shared imperialist core of their seemingly contradictory functions, where the apparent forms of these conflicts mask the essential kinship of the political systems that manage them[7].
[1] The shared core of these responses lies in the management (and projection) of the intensified structural crises of capitalism through the deliberate instigation of geopolitical crises, aligned with imperialist interests and interventions. This strategy employed by contemporary capitalism to face its exacerbated structural crises has consequently facilitated the emergence of what is termed “disaster capitalism.”
[2] Regarding debates among Iranian leftists (Persian-language media), a condensed version of this approach is exemplified by I. Ganji’s essay. “Six urgent points about the war against Iran” (Akhabar Rooz, 28 Khordad 1404).
[3] We acknowledge that the term The Third Way is ambiguous due to its varied thematic references and contradictory backgrounds within the left movement and related political literature. We hope this text illustrates the necessity and historical rationale for its use.
[4] The immediate consequences already include civilian casualties, destruction of infrastructure and the natural environment, intensified political repression, and the exacerbation of patriarchal repression.
[5] The existing ideological and political polarizations in Iran’s public sphere mainly revolve around these contentious issues: the nature of the Iranian and Israeli regimes and their relationship; the nature of Islamic despotism and its connection to the global order; and the direction and means of a liberating political project (the transition process from the IR).
[6] These concrete-historical characteristics have mainly stemmed from the legacy of national and regional histories of colonization and imperialism, as well as the formation of modern nation-states, which were forcibly integrated into the global capitalist system. Many countries in the Global South still bear socio-political fissures rooted in this history of domination.
[7] Historically, two overlapping narratives obscured the fundamental kinship and similarities between Iran’s and Israel’s ruling systems: The IR’s anti-Zionist and anti-Western ideology, coupled with its long history of repression and fanaticism, fueled narratives of its adversaries, portraying the IR-system as isolated and alienated from the global order. Conversely, ongoing imperialist interventions in the Middle East, and Israel’s aggressive expansionism supported by Western powers, bolstered Iran’s anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist claims.
In a recent video released for the 10th anniversary of Greece’s “No to Austerity” referendum, former finance minister and leader of MeRA25, Yanis Varoufakis, reflects on a political defeat. He recalls the moment in 2015 when the Greek people stood against the European Union’s economic dictates—and when the government, including himself, eventually gave in to pressure. On the surface, it’s still told as a song of resistance. But within the same video, when Varoufakis refers to the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom”—without mentioning Iran, the structure of repression, or the uprisings that made the slogan known worldwide—he steps into a space that clearly reveals the meaning of the crisis inside today’s European left.
This omission is not accidental. This erasure comes from a specific way of thinking: one that sees politics through states, diplomacy, and power balances—not through grassroots movements. The slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” wasn’t born in conference halls; it was shouted in the streets of Tehran, Sanandaj, and Izeh. It came not from leaders like Varoufakis, but from women who stood against religious tyranny and class oppression—under lashes, in solitary cells, and on the cold soil of cemeteries. When Varoufakis reduces this slogan only to “the Kurdish movement,” without any reference to the nationwide uprising of the Iranian people—those same people he once called friends and comrades—he’s not just erasing history. He’s detaching the struggle from the reality on the ground.
Back in December 2022, in an interview with London-based television station, Iran International, Yanis Varoufakis described the Islamic Republic as an “Islamo-fascist” regime and said it must be pushed back. He also expressed support for the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, insisting that one must not fall into false binaries: neither on the side of Israel and U.S. imperialism, nor on the side of a repressive regime—but rather with the people, from below. He even joined an international campaign in solidarity with Iranian political prisoners, launched by exiled Iranian activists.
But in his recent video and open letter to the Islamic Republic’s ambassador, none of those positions are mentioned. The letter only condemns Israel’s attack—a stance that can certainly be defended—but says nothing about the Islamic Republic, its machinery of repression, or the demands of the people. Not even a single line.
This shift is not just a personal retreat. It reflects a structural crisis in the European left: a left that has detached itself from class struggle, sought refuge in political diplomacy, and lost its ability to analyze contemporary forms of fascism. In the case of Palestine, many leftist currents in Europe stepped forward with loud, righteous slogans. But at the same moment—when they also needed to confront Hamas, Islamic fascism in Iran, Russian authoritarianism, and Chinese surveillance capitalism—they chose silence. They only seem able to recognize fascism when it comes from the Western right—Trump, Orbán, or French nationalism. That is why, in solidarity movements for Palestine across Europe, religious voices and Islamic symbols are heard more loudly and more clearly than secular or progressive ones.Western feminists and queer activists often show up quickly and loudly in defense of Palestine. But an Iranian, Palestinian, or Syrian queer person in those very same spaces is easily sidelined—because they do not fit into the pre-approved frame of the “oppressed Muslim subject.” Their local struggles are sometimes even interpreted as echoing Western far-right hostility toward migrants and Muslims. This distortion is not accidental. It is enabled by figures like Varoufakis, and a wider political environment where what once claimed to be a progressive, leftist force in the West has lost any real connection to political clarity or internationalism.
What we see now is a performance of resistance—a resistance that only defines itself against the Western far-right, not in relation to the lived struggles of millions under fascist, theocratic, or oligarchic regimes in Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. The result is absurd: an Eastern person resisting theocracy, fighting for free speech, bodily autonomy, and survival is mistaken for an enemy of Islam—resembling the language of white Christian nationalism. As if that person has no organic link to their society, no history, no context—just an alien body dropped into the conversation.
This erasure of real political movements goes hand in hand with a Eurocentric blindness that shuts down any possibility for internationalist or transnational analysis. In this flattened moral world, political Islam is granted the banner of resistance. Meanwhile, Iranian feminists, queer activists, secular leftists, republicans, and pro-democracy forces are pushed aside—seen as inconvenient, too complex, or too Westernized to matter. This crisis is not just about Varoufakis. For instance, Naomi Klein, has rightly warned against digital fascism and the rise of tech billionaires aligned with far-right politics. But she, too, seems to forget that the very logic of oligarchy violent, extractive, surveillant has been the lived experience of people in Iran for decades, in even more brutal and organized forms. Yet many global left movements still hesitate to call what’s happening in Iran fascism. Their theory of fascism is not adequate. They cannot grasp the mix of religious authoritarianism, rentier class domination, and the destruction of everyday social life that defines contemporary regimes across the Global South.
The government of the Islamic Republic embodies many fascist characteristics: the obsession with national decline, the scapegoating of internal enemies, the ritualized violence, and the effort to construct a “pure” “moral” society through repression. However, it lacks the popular enthusiasm or broad elite consensus that sustained historical fascist regimes. In today’s Iran, repression substitutes for consent. Coercion replaces charisma. The regime remains in power not because of deep-rooted support, but because of its ability to suppress and fragment every alternative, especially those that emerge from below. As long as the Left’s theoretical failure and incorrect comprehension of reality continues, the real struggles of millions will remain invisible behind empty slogans and the selective solidarity of a false resistance. Much of the European left has tied its hopes to elections and parliamentary games. It’s this same mindset that led to the collapse of Varoufakis’s MeRA25 party, which failed to enter the Greek parliament. When leftist forces disconnect from the lived struggles of ordinary people, they eventually lose even their place in official institutions. Not because the people have turned right-wing, but because the left has forgotten how to speak in the language of class and from below.
A politics that still believes the world can be changed through statements, diplomatic balancing, and geopolitical calculations alone is deaf to the basic demands of “bread, work, freedom.” It cannot hear them. And more importantly, it cannot represent them. In Iran, politics from below has already been redefined. Despite brutal repression, people have voiced demands that challenge not only the system’s injustices, but its very foundations: from “No to execution” to calls for “council-based governance.” This is not a politics built on party platforms or legal institutions. It comes from truck drivers on strike, teachers protesting in schoolyards, and women confronting the regime in the streets. It’s a movement not waiting for validation from Western intellectuals.
This form of struggle refuses to be filtered through the institutional language of NGOs, foreign ministries, or social-democratic think tanks. It is born out of urgency, not ideology; out of necessity, not theoretical blueprints. And until the Western left learns to listen not with pity, but with solidarity rooted in shared struggle it will continue to lose relevance. A left that only stands against the Western far right, but makes excuses for repression in Tehran or Moscow, is neither radical nor progressive. It is simply a manager of the status quo. Today, across Europe, the left is being pushed out of parliaments, and losing its grip not because the values it claims to hold are outdated, but because its worldview is. In its place, a vacuum is growing filled with a kind of nihilism that dresses itself up as anarchism, but offers no path, no strategy, and no grounding in the material struggles of real people.
The Islamic Republic today doesn’t need mass rallies or aesthetic militarism to qualify as fascistic. Its power lies in its bureaucratic violence, religious-political fusion, and the continuous production of enemies: women, workers, students, migrants and queers. What we face is a bureaucratized, fragmented, post-charismatic form of fascism, one that survives through exhaustion and surveillance, not popular will or ideological passion. A living, relevant left must learn to listen to the voice of the oppressed wherever it speaks—not only when it matches familiar Western narratives. It needs to offer a true emancipatory vision and not just slogans. It needs to live up to its vision and not just be performative. Until then, it will keep mistaking comfort for clarity, and resistance for branding.
[This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of New Politics, due to subscribers in the next week.]
Donald Trump’s return to the presidency signals a deeper push to use executive power as a tool for repression and control. At the center of this effort isn’t the military or intelligence agencies. It’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). From the beginning, ICE has operated with broad authority, little oversight, and a structure that makes abuse easy and accountability rare. It was built to function outside traditional legal norms and was always ripe for abuse.
What makes ICE especially dangerous is its unique position within the executive branch. Of all federal agencies, immigration enforcement offers the president some of the most unilateral power to act without Congressional approval, without judicial review, and often without public scrutiny. Trump has seized on this fact. He is not targeting immigrants because they pose a threat to the country but because immigration enforcement provides the most incredible freedom for him to consolidate control.
Trump is leveraging ICE and the broader Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to test and expand the boundaries of executive authority. And he’s doing so in a way that invites outrage. His cruelty toward migrants is not incidental; it is strategic. It provokes his opponents, polarizes debate, and opens the door for expanded extrajudicial repression under the guise of national security. This dynamic is not new. What’s different now is how openly it’s being used not only to attack vulnerable communities but to silence political opposition. The more brutal his actions are toward migrants, the more they elicit protest. The more protests there are, the further dissenters fall under DHS and ICE purview. The more executive powers grow, the greater the opportunity to turn the machine against not only scapegoat immigrants but U.S.–born opponents as well.
ICE was not created in a vacuum. It emerged from the aftermath of 9/11, when fear eclipsed foresight and the U.S. security state expanded with bipartisan support. Agencies once separated by function were fused under the DHS. The result was an agency with broad discretion, minimal accountability, and a mandate shaped more by executive interpretation than legal constraint.
From its inception, ICE was built for control. Created through the Homeland Security Act of 2002, it was structured to operate primarily outside traditional checks and balances. ICE uses administrative warrants signed by its officers, not judges, unlike criminal agencies, and operates under executive authority.1 A few lawmakers—Ron Paul and some Democrats—warned against handing such unchecked power to the executive, but were ignored. The bill passed 295–132 in the House and 90–9 in the Senate, pushed through in a climate where questioning national security was equated with disloyalty.
Democrats helped build the system, Republicans expanded it, and Trump weaponized it. What began as an immigration agency now functions as a domestic repression tool poised in Trump’s second term to move beyond borders, punishing dissent and consolidating executive power through fear. Though more Democrats than Republicans opposed the Homeland Security Act, President Obama greatly expanded ICE. He increased its budget, rolled out Secure Communities (later revised as the Priority Enforcement Program), expanded E-Verify, and strengthened ties with local police.2 Simultaneously, he sought to humanize enforcement through DACA and deferred action, but these rested on executive discretion, not lasting reform. Obama governed as a technocrat, believing the system could be fine-tuned. However, he never limited ICE’s authority, and groups like the ACLU and United We Dream and progressive lawmakers warned of potential misuse.3
During his first term, Trump transformed ICE into a blunt enforcement tool. He reinstated Secure Communities, expanded workplace raids, and removed Obama-era enforcement priorities, directing DHS to target virtually all undocumented individuals. DHS agents separated families and detained them for extended periods, leading to children being unaccounted for, according to government representatives.4
Whistleblower reports and oversight organizations documented concerns about mistreatment and the absence of standardized reunification procedures.5 Although the Biden administration introduced policy changes, ICE’s underlying structure remained largely intact.6
In Trump’s second term, the DHS and ICE have metastasized into something more dangerous. Shortly after Trump’s return to power, Trump declared a “national emergency” at the southern border, prompting the Department of Defense to deploy an additional 1,500 troops.7 Framing immigration as a national security threat, the administration leaned heavily into post-9/11 “War on Terror” rhetoric, the same ideological foundation from which DHS and ICE were born.
The State Department officially designated several cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a move that dramatically expanded the scope of executive power.8 This designation, combined with the emergency declaration, opened the door for Trump’s team to attempt the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.9 Crafted initially to authorize the arrest and deportation of nationals from enemy states during wartime, the Act was now being weaponized against foreign nationals allegedly affiliated with gangs. Once the administration started describing gang violence in terms usually reserved for war, it didn’t take long before legal boundaries began to erode. What had separated domestic law enforcement from military authority started to disappear, along with the checks on presidential power.
While the groundwork was being laid for expanded executive powers, actions were being taken on an individual basis. Student activists critical of U.S. policy in Gaza were detained under immigration powers despite facing no criminal charges. Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian lawful permanent resident and recent Columbia graduate, was placed in deportation proceedings under a rarely used foreign policy provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act for his public speech at pro-Palestinian protests.10 Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian-born U.S. resident at Columbia University, was held under a provision targeting those deemed threats to foreign policy.11 Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts, was detained for alleged visa violations after co-authoring a critical op-ed on Palestine.12
All were targeted not for wrongdoing, but for dissent—their immigration status made them uniquely vulnerable to political retaliation.13 This weaponization of immigration status did not stop with non-citizens, but inevitably expanded to sweep in U.S. citizens as well.
ICE began wrongfully detaining U.S. citizens, including Juan Carlos Lopez Gomez in Florida and José Hermosillo in Arizona, even after evidence of citizenship was provided.14 In Gomez’s case, a judge explicitly ruled there were no legal grounds to hold him, but ICE continued his detention, demonstrating how the agency can disregard judicial authority. These were not isolated errors but early signs of a system increasingly untethered from legal constraints.
A Salvadoran national, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, with legal protection from deportation due to a prior immigration court ruling, was wrongfully deported in March 2025, an act the Trump administration later described as an “administrative error.”15 The case marked a shift: what had previously been framed as immigration enforcement began to take on the contours of a broader national security crackdown that increasingly affected U.S. citizens.
After the unlawful deportation of Garcia, Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka warned that those protesting the removal could be guilty of “aiding and abetting” terrorists. He implied that those criticizing the Trump administration for overreaching immigration policy could be classified as security threats.16 Under this pretense, ICE and DHS, once focused on non-citizens, could now be positioned as tools to suppress domestic dissent. The message was clear that if you stand with immigrants, you may be treated as an enemy.
This shift deepened when Trump suggested using the deportation system against so-called “homegrowns”—citizens—even telling the Salvadoran president to expand prison capacity in anticipation of more removals.17
Then came Stephen Miller, who proposed framing the southern border as an “invasion” to trigger special executive powers, including the suspension of habeas corpus, a constitutional protection.18 While Miller focused this justification on immigrants and asylum seekers, the legal precedent set would allow broad detention powers under the national security pretext.
Together, Miller’s legal strategy and Gorka’s inflammatory rhetoric revealed a troubling alignment: immigration law functioning as one of the executive branch’s most adaptable tools—used not only against migrants, but increasingly against U.S. citizens who voice dissent.
That framing gained further traction in a Senate hearing where Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem mischaracterized habeas corpus as “a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.”19 Maggie Hassan (D-NH) correctly explained that habeas corpus protects individuals, including U.S. citizens, by requiring the government to justify detention publicly.
This convergence of rhetoric and executive power sharpened in May 2025, when Trump posted that Democrats used immigration to destroy the country and that it was treason. The word “treason” can’t be assumed to be a metaphor.20 Paired with the administration’s words and acts, the post reads like an accusation that dissent is a punishable offense.
The last time habeas corpus was suspended was during the Civil War. By calling immigration an “invasion” and dissent “aiding and abetting,” constitutional protections are being eroded not only for immigrants, but for Americans who stand with them, being framed as an internal battle or cold civil war. As Gorka’s rhetoric makes apparent, protest, legal defense, and even speech can be reframed as threats to national security. ICE and Homeland Security are no longer just border tools—they’re instruments of political control in this battle.
That logic came to life in May 2025, when Newark mayor Ras Baraka was arrested by ICE while accompanying members of Congress on an oversight visit.21 Charges were dropped against Baraka, but the MAGA acting U.S. attorney has charged Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ10) with assault and suggested that more Democrats could face arrest. This was followed by an incident in Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler’s office in which DHS agents forced their way in, handcuffing one of his staffers in the process.22 Immigration enforcement had fully turned inward, targeting citizens, elected officials, and dissent.
After a series of high-profile immigration raids in blue states, a disturbing pattern has emerged: federal enforcement is becoming increasingly targeted, theatrical, and politically motivated. Notable operations in Massachusetts, San Diego, and, most recently, Los Angeles triggered protests and community pushback. Rather than de-escalate, the administration used the unrest to justify activating the National Guard, framing the demonstrations as an “insurrection” perpetrated by a “foreign enemy.” 23 The escalation continued when the Pentagon deployed 700 active-duty Marines to Los Angeles. 24 This trend of provocation and escalation will surely continue to ever higher stakes.
These actions show that DHS and ICE are being used to consolidate executive power and suppress political opposition. Under the guise of national security, the administration has recast immigration enforcement to justify expanded detention, surveillance, and even military deployment within U.S. borders, creating a framework that allows political opponents to be targeted as alleged collaborators with “foreign enemies.”
This moment demands more than policy reform. It requires recognizing that the very structure of immigration enforcement is inseparable from authoritarian drift. ICE cannot be “returned to its original purpose” because its original purpose was always expansive, unaccountable state power. It was built for this. If we fail to dismantle or fundamentally transform it, the machinery Trump is using will remain intact long after his term ends, ready for the next strongman to seize.
The danger is not only in what ICE does at the border but in how it is being used to redraw the boundaries of dissent, citizenship, and democracy itself. What begins with deportations ends with disappearances not just of people but of rights.
2. ICE, Secure Communities: Activated Jurisdictions, archived May 9, 2011.
3. Joanne Lin, “Speed Over Fairness: Deportation Under the Obama Administration,” ACLU, May 1, 2014; Zenén Jaimes Pérez, Carolina Canizales, and Raúl Alcaraz Ochoa, Immigration Raids: The Real Impact: Findings from the National Deportation Defense Hotline. Washington, D.C.: United We Dream, 2016; Seung Min Kim, “Democrats Lash Out at Obama over Immigration Raids,” Politico, Jan. 6, 2016.
4. Alex Nowrasteh, “Trump Executive Order Reestablishes ‘Secure Communities’,” Cato at Liberty (blog), Jan. 25, 2017; American Immigration Council, “The End of Immigration Enforcement Priorities Under the Trump Administration,” Mar. 7, 2018; Julia, Ainsley, “Trump Admin Asks for More Time to Reunite Kids, Parents Separated at Border,” NBC News, July 6, 2018.
5. Maryam Saleh, “Whistleblower ‘Helpless’ to Stop US Immigration Solitary Confinement Abuses,” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, May 21, 2019; Susan Ferriss, “Homeland Security Watchdog Attacks ICE for Dangers at Immigrant Detention Center,” Center for Public Integrity, Oct. 2, 2018.
6. David Pekoske, Review of and Interim Revision to Civil Immigration Enforcement and Removal Policies and Priorities, Memorandum, U.S. DHS, Jan. 20, 2021.
7. Dept. of Defense, “DoD Orders 1,500 Troops, Additional Assets to Southern Border,” April 30, 2025.
8. Dept. of State, “Designation of International Cartels,” Feb. 20, 2025.
9. Donald J. Trump, “Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua,” The White House, March 15, 2025.
10. Mahdawi v. Trump, American Civil Liberties Union, last updated April 30, 2025.
11. Mahdawi v. Trump, American Civil Liberties Union, last updated April 30, 2025.
12. Öztürk v. Trump, American Civil Liberties Union, accessed June 12, 2025.
13. Leila Fadel, Jan Johnson, and Kaity Kline, “Columbia Student Mohsen Mahdawi Arrested at Citizenship Appointment,” NPR, Apr. 29, 2025; AP, “Rümeysa Öztürk, Tufts Student Held by ICE, Vows to Continue Legal Action After Jail Release,” Guardian, May 11, 2025.
14. Gisela Salomon, “A US Citizen Was Held for Pickup by ICE Even After Proving He Was Born in the Country,” AP, Apr. 18, 2025; José Olivares, “US Citizen Wrongfully Arrested by Border Patrol in Arizona Held for Nearly 10 Days,” Guardian, Apr. 20, 2025.
16. Sebastian Gorka, “Trump’s Counterterrorism Czar Says Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s Advocates Could Be Prosecuted for ‘Aiding and Abetting’,” Yahoo News, Apr. 16, 2025.
17. Brian Mann, “Trump Hopes to Deport and Jail U.S. Citizens Abroad,” NPR, Apr. 16, 2025.
18. Julia Ainsley, “Top White House Adviser Stephen Miller Says ‘Actively Looking’ at Suspending Habeas Corpus to Speed Deportations,” NBC News, May 16, 2025.
19. Dareh Gregorian and Didi Martinez, “Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem Struggles to Define Habeas Corpus at Senate Hearing,” NBC News, May 20, 2025.
21. Oren Oppenheim, et al., “Newark Mayor Ras Baraka Arrested at ICE Facility While Joining Democrats to Conduct ‘Oversight,” CNBC, May 10, 2025.
22. “New Video Shows Tussle Between Rep. Nadler Staffer and Federal Officers,” Gothamist, June 5, 2025.
23. Chris Megerian and Michelle L. Price, “Trump Calls Los Angeles Protesters ‘Animals’ and ‘a Foreign Enemy’ in Speech Meant to Mark Army’s 250th Anniversary,” WTTW News, June 10, 2025.
24. Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali, “Pentagon to Deploy 700 Marines to Los Angeles, Official Says,” Reuters, June 9, 2025.
[New Politics is re-posting two views of the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York City Democratic primary. In addition to the article below by Eric Blanc, see here for another view by B.C. Hamilton.]
Zohran’s Historic Win: 16 Takeaways
The oligarchy is not invincible.
After decades of defeats for working people and the Left, it almost felt like a dream to witness Zohran Mamdani make history last night. Sometimes the good guys win. As David Hogg wrote last night, “BREAKING: Not everything has to suck.”
Absorbing the key lessons of this campaign is essential for the fights ahead, not just in New York City, but across the United States. Here’s an initial list of the biggest takeaways.
1) Zohran’s victory is a nationwide political earthquake. Huge numbers of voters are sick of the Democratic establishment, and there’s no good reason why his playbook can’t be widely repeated elsewhere. The party’s decrepit old guard is vulnerable, its unpopularity delivered us Trumpism, and it deserves to be displaced everywhere.
2) By stubbornly hammering on proposals to make the city affordable, Zohran was able to break beyond the Left’s college-educated base. He won all across the city, including in neighborhoods like Sunset Park and Woodhaven that swung rightwards towards Trump in 2024. Economic populism is our best weapon to win back working people and to overcome Trumpism. Blame the billionaires, not immigrants or transgender people.
3) We should always ignore the pundits and political hacks who try to convince us that transformative change is impossible — or that the best we can do is chase after a mythical political center, rather than winning the battle of ideas and ambitiously raising voters’ expectations.
4) Billionaires tried to buy this election and they lost badly. It turns out that the oligarchy is not invincible.
5) Pundits will try to spin this as purely the result of Cuomo’s unpopularity or Zohran’s charisma. That’s part of the story, but only part. In addition to the resonance of his policies and crystal-clear message on affordability, there’s no way he could have won without the tireless ground game of 50,000 volunteers and the New York City Democratic Socialists of America and other allied organizations. Knocking 1.5 million doors is an astounding feat.
6) Young people were the heart of this campaign. Last night, tens of thousands of them got to experience the ecstatic feeling of making history through collective organizing. Feeling that even once is enough to make you an organizer for life. This youthful social movement has the energy and ambition to make New York social democratic again.
7) Social media is extremely important for capturing the attention of wide layers of voters, and Zohran’s media team was amazing. But the secret sauce for good comms is not primarily technical — it’s political: you need an authentic messenger armed with a compelling platform. Hack Democrats can’t post themselves back into relevance.
8) It’s a very big deal — with nationwide and international implications — that Cuomo’s cynical smears about anti-Semitism fell flat. It turns out that opposing genocide and acknowledging the humanity of Palestinians is not necessarily an electoral dealbreaker. AIPAC should be very worried.
9) Despite what his opponents claim, Zohran is not a dogmatic extremist, but a radical pragmatist. He could not have gotten this far had he not focused on bread-and-butter economic issues, spoken in a commonsense language, ran as a Democrat, dropped his support for defunding the police, and endorsed Brad Lander. Zohran refused to drop his support for democratic socialism or his opposition to Zionist apartheid, but performative ultra-leftism was anathema to this campaign.
10) It took a liberal-Left alliance to defeat Cuomo. A huge amount of credit is due to Brad Lander for being a man of principle who refused to punch Left. At the same time, Zohran smartly rejected a widespread leftist tendency to treat liberals and liberalism only as ideological competitors to be fought. Look at how he adopted the best parts of the “abundance agenda,” how he cross-endorsed Lander, and how he framed his criticisms of Israel in the language of liberal equal rights. Leftists can’t defeat the old establishment — let alone overcome the Right — on their own. And mutuality cuts both ways: we can’t ally with liberals only when we’re in the lead.
11) Zohran’s inroads within organized labor were crucial steps towards legitimizing his campaign. The unions who took a risk and stood by working people by endorsing Zohran include AFSCME DC 37, UAW Region 9a, Doctors Council SEIU, CIR/SEIU, UNITE HERE Local 100, IATSE Local 161, PSC-CUNY, OPEIU Local 153, and Teamsters Local 804.
Every union that endorsed Cuomo should be embarrassed by their narrow-mindedness. The good news is now they have a chance to make things right by endorsing Zohran in the general election.
12) The fight has really just begun. Establishment Democrats, Trump, and their billionaire funders are going to do everything possible to prevent Zohran from taking office in November or, if that fails, from implementing his agenda. Expect an unprecedented, billionaire-funded scaremongering onslaught to convince New Yorkers that a Mamdani City Hall will bankrupt the city, unleash crime sprees, and persecute Jews.
13) Faced with claims that his project will lead to urban ruin and chaos, Zohran can lean on the progressive, technocratic competence of Lander’s crew and point to thriving social-democratic cities across Europe as well as strong historical precedents of success in the US. Before they named an airport after him, as Waleed Shahid notes, New York City’s wildly successful socialist mayor Fiorello La Guardia was also first denounced as an impractical radical.
14) The experience of La Guardia, like Milwaukee’s “sewer socialists,” shows that winning office is not enough. When you’re up against such powerful opponents, you need lots of organized grassroots power outside the state to actually implement your agenda. The most challenging obstacle on the road ahead is that Zohran’s electoral success has significantly outpaced the scale of working-class and socialist organization in New York City. Building widespread organization in workplaces and neighborhoods is hard, essential, and urgently needed. So join DSA. Unionize your workplace through EWOC. Reform your union. Salt a strategic company. Or build a tenant union in your building.
15) DSA’s membership is about to surge. And the organization is going to come under intense scrutiny from Fox News, Trump, and the Democratic establishment. It’s time to tighten our ship and to make a concerted nationwide turn away from self-marginalizing leftism. Members should study and emulate NYC DSA’s mass politics orientation. If this campaign didn’t fit all of your ideological priors, maybe those priors are wrong.
16) There are going to be all sorts of major setbacks in the months and years ahead. But after yesterday, it’s so much easier to see — and so much easier to feel — that a better world actually is possible if we fight like hell for it. The future is unwritten. Let’s write it together.
[New Politics is re-posting two views of the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York City Democratic primary. In addition to the article below by BC Hamilton, see here for another view by Eric Blanc.]
The Mamdani moment
New hopes and new hazards for the NYC Left
Without any doubt, Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic Party primary was a referendum on the key class and social struggles of the day—a referendum on late neoliberalism, a world on fire, and the Trump moment as lived by the multi-racial working class in New York City. This was a vote on the experience of the social crisis for the city’s working people: access to housing, affordable food and health care, public transportation and public education. Mamdani was up against the billionaires and a New York City ruling class that has profited from the one-sided class war in NYC over the last five decades and overwhelmingly backed his once and future opponents, including the current mayor, Eric Adams, and the former governor, Andrew Cuomo.
Perhaps most significantly, without the broad Palestine movement, the generational energy of the Mamdani campaign cannot be understood. In critical measure, the support for Mamdani is a reaction to a virulent campaign of scapegoating and gaslighting directed at migrants, trans and queer New Yorkers, and most importantly anybody (be they Arab, Muslim, Jew, etc.) who stood up against the genocide in Gaza and the Zionist whitewashing of mass murder. This has a particularly pernicious tone in NYC, one of the wellsprings of this well funded, bipartisan reactionary politics.
For socialists, this is the reality through which all the limitations, contradictions, and strategic challenges of Mamdani’s general election campaign, and likely mayoralty, must be understood. The embrace of his campaign by a broad NYC Left is inextricable from the substantive social, economic, and political struggles being waged within (and beyond) New York City and from the fact that there is an apparent enthusiasm for taking up these fights. It should go without saying that the revolutionary Left should be stalwart in our active support of these struggles.
The urgent task before us, then, is to continue to build the organized movement capable of taking on the forces of capital and political reaction in NYC, a process which requires a serious assessment of strategy and an understanding of historical precedents. Mamdani’s policy goals—most of which we should fight for unconditionally—will be challenging to win. His strategy of reforming the Democratic Party is mistaken, at best, and at worst, a contradictory project that inevitably undermines the fight for reform that is motivating the energy and excitement behind his campaign. Nonetheless, the political space created by Mamdani’s campaign represents an opportunity for coalition and movement building that can—and should—aim beyond the limits of a single election or candidate, at those broader, deeper goals of systemic social change—a coalition prepared to fight for needed reforms.
Backdrop to a landslide
The chain of events that led to the victory of the self-described democratic socialist begins with a crisis inherent in the person Mamdani is hoping to replace: Republican-turned-Democrat-turned-Trump-sycophant, New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Adams’s victory four years ago was born out of the right-wing social backlash following the COVID-19 pandemic. A nonstop disinformation campaign in the New York Post and on the nightly news relied on fabulists such as former New York Police Commissioner Dermot Shea to spread the false narrative of mayhem and disorder. New Yorkers were bombarded daily by claims that the city streets were running red with blood.
This text-book fear-mongering operation had its desired effect, with Adams, a former cop, eking out a win by just 7,200 votes (Mamdani, by comparison, secured a massive lead of nearly 117,000 votes over Cuomo, while also receiving about 140,000 more votes than Adams did in 2021 primary, born largely from his successful ability to expand the primary electorate.) Adams built a coalition of conservative, older home-owners, along with sections of the organized Black working class—especially in southern Queens, Brooklyn, and in the NYPD and Department of Corrections, where Adams had an established base. In office, Adams’ regressive, dictatorial policies appealed to the elite of the city. And working class New Yorkers were too often the object of Adams’ policies meant to unleash the police department on unhoused neighbors and Black and Brown youth, all while seeking to scapegoat huge swathes of the city’s immigrant population. (His current NYPD Commissioner is billionaire heiress, Jessica Tisch, an articulate defender of this police violence and murder.) Residents watched as Adams oversaw the continued increase in rents, attacks on core institutions like libraries and the school system, and the rise of a general affordability crisis in the city. This would fuel the future Mamdani campaign.
While the Democratic Party establishment could stomach Adams’ policies, it was a step too far when, in September 2024, he was indicted on federal corruption charges, in part revolving around his long standing ties to Turkey’s authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. When Adams then returned to his Republican roots by buddying up to Trump to secure a successful dismissal of the charges against him, his pariah status among the Democratic Party leadership and their financial backers was (seemingly) solidified.
The consensus post-mortem, by party leadership in the aftermath of their utter failure in the U.S. presidential election last year, also had an effect locally. People like U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries—both from New York City and both leading their respective minorities in Congress—echoed the narrative amplified by the mainstream press, that Democrats lost because of their embrace of “woke” issues, too far left for the general electorate, namely around bodily autonomy, police reform, immigration, and the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
When this assessment led the party leadership to “play dead” in response to Trump’s regime of terror, a fundamental tension came to the fore between it and much of the voting base of the Democratic Party. For many voters, what the party leadership advocated and adopted was not tolerable.
Mamdani and the Democratic Party
On July 1, after all the votes were tabulated in the city’s ranked-choice voting system, Mamdani came out ahead, decisively, besting Cuomo by 12 percentage points. While Cuomo is currently mullingwhether he will run in the general election on his independently financed ballot line, the primary results solidify Mamdani’s position as the odds-on favorite in November, in a city where Democrats hold an overwhelming registration advantage.
Despite the casting of Mamdani by the Right as a rabid communist, talk of revolution wasn’t part of his primary night election speech. He made clear his sights were much closer to home, framing his campaign as part of an ongoing effort by “progressives” to remake the Democratic Party in their image. He told those gathered that his win represented “a model for the Democratic Party”—economically populist, uncompromising on positions popular with the base such as opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza—and a rejection of the establishment status quo.
The immediate response of the Democratic Party leadership in New York has been illuminating. A series of non-endorsements, or endorsements of Cuomo in November, were common. Garnering the greatest attention was New York’s junior Senator Kristen Gillenbrand, who spouted Zionist talking points and attempted to paint Mamdani as an apologist for Hamas on a prominent radio talk show. This was picked up by other leading Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. The fact that Gillenbrand felt the need to apologize for having “misspoke[n]” is telling of the moment. In fact, in words and deeds, the Democratic leadership locally and nationally have made clear they have, at best, little interest in Mamdani. And in this, as has been too often the case in recent years, the Democratic Party leadership is preparing the political ground for an arguably more dangerous version of reactionary politics. Thus, Trump greeted the Mamdani election by proclaiming “I’m not going to let this Communist Lunatic destroy New York. . . I hold all the levers, and have all the cards. I’ll save New York City . . .”
It is within this divide between the Democratic Party leadership and much of its historic voting base that the Democratic primary election for mayor played out. With Adams turning into a Trump surrogate, Democratic leadership were left looking for someone who would toe the line on their possum doctrine. Enter Andrew Cuomo. Despite his status as a grandparent killer, the disgraced former governor could be trusted to take policy positions virtually indistinguishable from Adams—especially on crime—while ensuring a household name in New York Democratic politics would appear on the ballot. That ended up being essentially the extent of Cuomo’s campaign strategy, which didn’t seem to bother the host of Democratic Party officials, billionaires, and Trump backers who rallied around him as the safe, sane, non-socialist option, warts and all.
What those same elites had passed on was another weak field of Democratic candidates that, despite some having held citywide office now and in the past, hadn’t done much to distinguish themselves, besides largely not being Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani was the exception. As a vocal democratic socialist he actively pushed a campaign message directly at odds with the genocide-coddling Zionism and warmed-over neoliberalism that Cuomo represented.Mamdani’s policy goals—most of which we should fight for unconditionally—will be challenging to win. His strategy of reforming the Democratic Party is mistaken, at best, and at worst, a contradictory project that inevitably undermines the fight for reform that is motivating the energy and excitement behind his campaign.
In fact, Mamdani’s actual policy proposals are well within the parameters of a standard progressive program of reform. While improvements on the status quo—perhaps most importantly ensuring that the rent board does not increase rents on the approximately 1 million rent-stabilized units in the city—his other offerings are somewhat small bore (publicly owned grocery stores sound good, but won’t come close to addressing the food insecurity crisis in New York City), often require approval from other parts of government hostile to even mild socialist policies (new taxes and free buses need Albany’s approval), and frankly don’t go far enough (20,000 publicly-funded units of relatively affordable housing a year sounds like a lot until you remember 60,000 New Yorkers are in housing shelters each night).
Mamdani’s unapologetic message made few allies among the Democratic Party leadership, but it had a galvanizing effect on the electorate. Despite being at first ignored, and then later mocked, Mamdani had what no other campaign could manage: a massive fundraising operation with hundreds of individual donors, an army of volunteers that could spread out far beyond his base areas of support, and, most critically, a message that spoke directly to tens of thousands of working-class primary voters disgusted and fed-up with the way Democrats have continued to operate, especially under the daily assaults of the Trump regime.
A democratic socialist as NYC’s chief-executive?
In the immediate aftermath of the primary, there appears to be little to no movement towards a reconciliation with Mamdani by the party he’s dedicated to reforming. Meanwhile, the predictable right-wing Islamophobic, red-baiting onslaught has started its inevitable ramp-up. As the campaign now moves into the general election, Mamdani’s biggest challenge is not the independent campaign by the incumbent Adams and a perennial far-shot bid by Republican gadfly and wanna-be Brownshirt, Curtis Sliwa. It’s the war he’s facing as the soon-to-be mayor of the largest city in the United States who is opposed by the leadership of his own party and subject to their willingness to let the right wing do the dirty work of endlessly undermining him.
The leap that Mamdani is about to make is unparalleled in modern politics. The victories that other DSA-aligned candidates have secured have all come in relatively progressive districts for single seats within legislative bodies. In New York, that’s meant a handful of avowed democratic socialists winning as Democrats in the New York City council, state assembly where Mamdani has served since 2021, and even a few in the state senate. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had up to this point been the most high-profile DSA-backed candidate to win as a Democrat (a point worth returning to below), but even that was to the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives.
Mamdani is poised to not only be the mayor of a city of 8.5 million people, who, despite the party enrollment statistics, are as diverse in their political and social views as anywhere. He is also going to be the city’s chief executive in charge of the wildly labyrinthian, bureaucratic city government structure that includes the largest school district in the country and the nation’s largest police force—for whom he will now be their boss. In relation to city workers, he is now at the top of the management chart. As such, he is also the fiscal manager of the city, and it will be his responsibility to navigate and negotiate the impossible task of prioritizing popular policies amid a ruthless budgetary process. It’s one thing to talk about raising taxes on the wealthy, but doing so is a challenge as New York City itself has only limited power to unilaterally raise funds before it must go begging in Albany for the state’s support—a prospect as dim as Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul’s view of Mamdani himself.
To put it mildly, this is not a system built for the kind of socialist vision of city government Mamdani or those further to his left would ever hope. One recent observer saw New Deal-era mayor Fiorello La Guardia as the kind of mayor Mamdani should look to model himself after. Unfortunately, the far more likely analogy is 1970s “Drop Dead”-era mayor Abraham Beame, complete with a hostile Republican president and unsympathetic Albany leadership. Since the city’s fiscal crisis that Beame had the misfortune to oversee, the combined capitalist interests in New York City have kept a tight leash on the scope of the city’s ambitions for its working class residents, in a early example of the shock doctrine austerity politics that would come to define neoliberalism going forward. Unfortunately for Mamdani and city residents over the past five decades, those same interests have never ceased to hold sway over the city and have the ability to quickly turn any fiscal issue into a political nightmare for a mayor who runs afoul of their interests. Dennis Kucinich’s experience as mayor of Cleveland in the 1970s, similarly, presents a cautionary tale.
These and other factors (he will find no sanctuary from assaults in the press) combine into as uninviting and inhospitable an environment as one can imagine. This creates a real urgency for the Left to build an extra-electoral force capable of organizing and fighting to win both the promised minimal reforms of Mamdani and the much more substantive changes that are needed.
Reforming the Democrats, a strategic non-starter
Within these conditions, Mamdani, like so many before him, is set on pursuing the quest to reform the Democratic Party. This pursuit is destined to fail, as it has always been, but for two specific reasons, one of which actually speaks to the best, and only, way forward.
The first impediment, which is more than enough, is that the entire structure and purpose of the Democratic Party is to not be reformed. Single candidates can engender hope that change is possible. But the decades of attempts have proven, again and again, that those same Democratic Party candidates are typically co-opted by the leadership and party structure, which has been bought and paid for by the capitalist donors for whom the party singularly works. You cannot change the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party changes you.
To name one example close to New Yorkers, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has gone from being the insurgent DSA-backed reformist firebrand that bedeviled the right and enamored the Left to being just another Democrat, interested in giving political cover to her party leadership above any policy commitments, like an end to genocide. Simply put, the ability to make change from within the Democratic Party is always going to run up to the biggest, best-resourced, longest-running opponent to that: the Democratic Party itself.We are in a period of remarkable independent political activation. Mamdani was the beneficiary of this much bigger, broader working-class, bottom-up democratic surge. It’s time to take the next steps to building a future free from the inevitable failure of Democratic Party reform efforts and let loose the strength of a real movement to change the foundations of our society . . .
Given the absolute low the Democratic Party brand has sunk to it’s a wonder anyone is looking to tie themselves to the party. In New York, a “blue” state is seeing non-affiliated independent voters outpace all party enrollment in recent years. This speaks to the other reason the Democratic Party reform project is destined to fail—and why we should draw hope from it. An election is not a movement; the act of voting is not democracy. Yes, more than 500,000 New Yorkers turned out to give Mamdani support enough to win the Democratic primary, but the victory of the agenda he outlined, as modest as it is, was never going to survive the host of obstacles and derailers in positions of power that are lined up against it simply because he won a primary or gets elected to an office. It is what might be born out of the Mamdani campaign—building on the energy, the excitement, the will to act—that can deliver on the goals and visions that go beyond one candidate, one campaign, one election.
This same energy is today motivating the pushback to Trump’s ICE shock troops kidnapping our neighbors. It’s turning people out to demand a better union in our schools and equitable pay for our legal service providers, and giving them the strength to show up for trans kids under attack. It’s powering the growth of mutual aid groups, Palestinian solidarity networks, and anti-racist support efforts. We are in a period of remarkable independent political activation. Mamdani was the beneficiary of this much bigger, broader working-class, bottom-up democratic surge. It’s time to take the next steps to building a future free from the inevitable failure of Democratic Party reform efforts and let loose the strength of a real movement to change the foundations of our society, beginning here in New York City.
Given its material roots, Mamdani’s campaign and its victory is something socialists cannot but be excited about. On the further end of the spectrum some have disavowed Mamdani as a candidate for his position firmly within the Democratic Party. There’s merit to the argument, if not the conclusion. Mamdani is certainly fully committed to the kind of reformist agenda that has come to dominate the strategic thinking of groups like Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which he is a long-time, dedicated member. He is now the embodiment of that belief in practice: If only we elect enough of the right kinds of Democrats the system can be saved and good policies can get enacted.
Despite this, it would be a tragic, self-defeating error to brush off the legitimate upsurge of enthusiasm and excitement this campaign has generated, not just here in New York City, but across the country. The Mamdani moment is just the latest iteration (Bernie, the Squad, Brandon Johnson) of a strategic path now well known to the Left. A sober understanding of the limitations of Mamdani’s electoral strategy of inside-out reform must be married to a proactive campaign of solidaristic organizing to rebuild the forces capable of carrying forward the fights already being born out and by the remarkable outpouring of support that Mamdani has earned.
The election campaign and stunning victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s Democratic Party mayoral primary election on June 24 is having an enormous impact on American politics. Mamdani, a 33-year-old Muslim immigrant, state representative, and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), defeated Andrew Cuomo, a powerful 67-year-old politician who ran a multi-million-dollar election campaign. Cuomo had to resign from the office of governor after accusations by 13 women that he had sexually harassed them. Nevertheless, he had the backing of many major unions and financial and real estate interests. Mamdani, on the other hand, ran on a campaign platform that called for a rent freeze, for free buses, and free childcare, all to be paid for by taxing rich New Yorkers and corporations, and he criticized Israel’s genocide in Gaza. His message inspired young people and brought thousands of new voters to the polls. He could win the general election on November 4.
The New York mayoral election is important deciding the future of the largest city in the country with 8.26 million inhabitants, and a metropolitan area of 22 million. It is a port of entry for immigrants and one of the most diverse cities in the country. It is the home of the New York Stock Exchange and many of the most important banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, making it the country’s financial capital. It is the seat of the United Nations. And with its theaters, museum, galleries, and concert halls it is also the country’s cultural capital. The mayor of New York has a political profile and weight comparable to a governor.
Mamdani and the DSA organized an army of 50,000 volunteers who knocked on the doors of one million New Yorkers. Progressive Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez endorsed him. In New York, 68% of voters are Democrats and only 30% Republicans, so the winner of the Democratic primary usually wins the election. This time, the situation is more complicated.
Though Mamdani won the Democratic Party primary fair and square, the Democratic Party leaders, Senator Charles Schumer and Congressman Hakim Jefferies, both of whom are from New York, congratulated him but have declined to endorse him. They know the capitalist class in New York is horrified by Mamdani’s call for higher taxes on the rich and more services for the working class and poor, and their first loyalty is to the capitalist class.
Andrew Cuomo, despite his defeat in the primary, plans to run as an independent, and he will have the backing of finance and real estate again, though some of the unions have abandoned him for Mamdani.
The sitting mayor Eric Adams, will also be a candidate. He ran for office as a Democrat on a conservative, law-and-order program and filled city positions with friends and family. When Joe Biden was president, in September 2024, the U.S. Justice Department indicted Adams on charges of bribery, conspiracy, fraud, and two counts of soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations, and he was set to go to trial. But after the election of Donald Trump, the Justice Department dismissed the charges, allegedly because of Adams’ promise to let Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) free rein in the city. Adams’ deal with Trump turned many Democrats against him. Like Cuomo, however, he has the backing of many in the worlds of finance and real estate. Cuomo or Adams could build a coalition of conservative Democrats and Republican voters.
The Republican candidate for mayor, Curtis Silwa, head of the Guardian Angeles, a volunteer, unarmed police organization, has been asked by some in his party to drop out to help Adams. But he says he’s staying in the race.
Mamdani is a Muslim, so there’s the question of the Jewish vote. Jews make up only 2.4% of the U.S. population, but they are 18% of New York City’s. Mamdani is anti-Zionist, but Jewish organizations and leaders attack him as anti-Semitic. The Jewish vote was divided with many younger Jews voting for Mamdani. Republicans accuse him of being linked to 9/11, to Hamas, to terrorism. Republican Congressman Andy Ogles, called for Mamdani’s deportation.
Mamdani’s campaign, platform, and victory point a possible new direction for the Democrats and for the left. But it will be hard to beat the billionaires.
In 1975, George Caffentzis awakens in darkness one evening, rises from bed and scribbles a poem in one of his active notebooks. Born with the first name Constantine eighty years ago this past winter the noted class-warrior, philosopher of money and work/energy, is now a published poet.
Released by Common Notions on his birthday in February 2025, At the Edge of Everything: Collected Poems assembles George’s poetic output from 1961, when he published a short poem in the literary publication of the Brooklyn Technical High School, to the present. Actually, this is the only poem to be published previously and until recently they simply adorned the margins and corners of his notebooks, part of his individual and collective thinking over the past few decades.
The Crisis Coming On
“Who can sleep at night any more,” which also serves as the poem’s title, doesn’t refer to the New York City fiscal crisis, nuclear meltdown, repression of social movement forces, or firing of unionized academic faculty in the City University of New York. George was an active and vocal member of the Brooklyn College local, who fought against imposing tuition upon working-class students with the demand Wages for Schoolwork. “[A]nd only backs in bed” signifies a personal crisis, and a different kind of experience common to many of us.
For those who have encountered George’s work previously—collectively written communiqués from Midnight Notes or recent essay compendia In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of and No Blood for Oil!: Essays on Energy, Class Struggle, and War 1998-2016—one would correctly assume he is a poet.
“[A]ccording to our decoding, through the noise of the apocalypse, we must see in the oil caverns, in the wisps of natural gas curling in subterranean abysses, something more familiar: the class struggle.”ii Decoding, noise, wisps —this “finds,” George, “at the apex of his powers. Using multifarious language, he decodes the magic of the market and the energy crisis of the late 1970s. Amongst a wide range of concerns—the state of the antiwar movement, increased imposition of unwaged work on women, the shifting technological composition of capital, theory of machines—he offers two particular cogent insights, amongst many: first, capital transforms value from low sectors (unwaged, service, factory, and farm work) to high sectors (finance, energy); and second, not unrelated, capital seeks ‘low entropy workers,” I offered in a review following the 2012 publication of In Letters of Blood and Fire.iii
Initially appearing in November 1980, written under their collective moniker as a single essay for Midnight Notes titled “The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse.”iv For George and his comrades in Midnight Notes, the “manifold of work,” or what fellow Zerowork collective member Harry Cleaver in line with his Italian workerist and autonomist comrades refers to as the “imposition in work,” of the “planetary work machine” are metaphors used to describe the machinic nature of the global capitalist order. v
Through the Noise of the Apocalypse
At the Edge of Everything uses the chronology of George’s life as its organizing principle, breaking poems into decades-chapters and then the long-2000s as the final chapter.
George was constantly in motion—across the Northeast, teaching in Nigeria then Maine, traveling to his life partner and comrade-philosopher Silvia Federici’s ancestral home in Parma, Italy—and the poems reflect this as well.vi . Only a fragment addresses his numerous visits to Zapatista territories in Chiapas, Mexico, one of which was the result of an invitation from Subcomandante Marcos in 2014. The collection contains personal reflections on the “End of Zerowork,” fleeing to Nigeria as American social movement entered a dark period in the 1980s, discovering the importance of class struggle and commons in Africa, tales of memory and forgetting, the loss of his mother and a love poem for Silvia, who compiled Collected Poems along with George and Malav Kanuga, and “Springtime in Maine,” as one of the poems is titled. In the “End of Zerowork in 1978 he writes, “As we rise in / the nightmare / of dawn.”vii After the end of Zerowork came Midnight Notes.
The 1992 issue of Midnight Notes was titled The New Enclosures based on collective members’ observations on how Karl Marx’s conception of primitive accumulation continued throughout the history of capitalism into the present across the planet in Africa, the Middle East, South America, and appeared two years prior to the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, known colloquially as Zapatistas, emerging from the Lacandon Jungle. Prophetically, the back cover reprinted a “poem” from their first issue boldly declaring:
“No Time, No Work” illustrates the contradictory nature of work under capitalism, either workers have no time and endless work or no work and hence few ways to obtain wages needed to purchase the means of survival. “Surprise, Power” explores the endless possibilities of class struggle and forging a new common life for humanity.
Upon reading The New Enclosures in the contemporary moment, one is reminded that these are unfolding and unending processes of capitalist accumulation. Nevertheless, there are articles therein that suggest a particular moment. “The Struggle Against Enclosures in Jay, Maine: An Account of the 1987-1988 Strike Against International Paper” was contributed by filmmaker David Riker, who also directed The Many Faces of Paper documentary in 1988. It illustrates how the working-class fought against oblivion in the 1980s.
Workers and militants stood against oblivion during the dark years of union decline and class struggle with the working-class on the losing end. “A key objective of the [Midnight Notes Collective’s] founding group was to carry our political knowledge through a long period of counter-revolution, enabling us to cross over to a new phase of anti-capitalist struggle,” George would reflect during the thirtieth anniversary celebrations of the Collectives first issue.ix One wonders if that is what we are doing now, and all that we are required to do to stand against oblivion, again.
Between the 1930s and about the time New York City was told to “Drop Dead” in the mid-1970s, George’s father and family ran a Greek diner in Park Slope Brooklyn on 9th Street at 5th Avenue.
The Cube Steak, as the family diner was called, was essential for those who worked on the docks just west, along the Gowanus Bay at the Red Hook and South Brooklyn Marine Terminals. Silvia must have been in the neighborhood previously, as to scout locations and the surrounding community. On November 15, 1975, the New York Committee of the International Wages for Housework Campaign, celebrated with a street fair and declared with a banner flying above 5th Avenue, a major artery in Brooklyn: “We Demand: / Wages for Housework / From the Government.”xi
As part of their strategy to imbed themselves in the community, Silvia and the Campaign opened a storefront at 288 B 8th Street, just off 5th Avenue, between 5th and 6th Avenues. The Cube Steak was around the block, George and Silvia met in Brooklyn, first as roommates then as comrades, in 1973. Silvia shared in April 2025, “I did not know about the diner before I met George,”xii a testament to the layered and complexity of our lives and how we experience our communities.
A Philosopher’s Notes
During the 1979 and 1980 school years, George taught at Millersville State College and served as a faculty advisor for the schools Anti-Nuclear Alliance.xiii As a dedicated anti-nuke activist he was the appropriate choice, forming a similar group in Brooklyn and following the development of the northeast-based Clamshell Alliance. Then, at 4:00AM on Wednesday March 28, 1979, a series of cascading errors lead to the partial meltdown of the reactor core at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. As part of the state system Millersville was only forty minutes away by automobile from a particular isle in the Susquehanna River, at the time an emergency zone.
Strange Victories: The Anti-Nuclear Movement in the U.S. and Europe, the first issue of Midnight Notes appeared less than a month later on April 26, 1979. “It was published right after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania,” George reflected in a 2001 interview, “We were able to come out quickly after the accident because we had been working on the issue in the months before. Part of the idea of the issue was to begin to be more coherent about work and capitalist accumulation both theoretically and practically. The anti-nuclear power movement was the place where it naturally began at the time.”xiv
After a short stint in Pennsylvania, George taught at a private business college on the outskirts of Boston as five subsequent issues of Midnight Notes were published. Posthumous Notes appeared in May 1983 and began “There is a spectre haunting…” Notably this issue suggests that readers contact the Committee Against Repression in Italy, an effort the collectives’ members were supporting to aid Italian workerist and autonomist comrades who were facing brutal state repression. With the sorry state of U.S., Italian, and other working-class movements and fear of constant repression from the state, George left for Africa, where he lectured at University of Calabar from 1983 to 1987. Between 1984 and 1986 Silvia as well taught courses at the university of Port-Harcourt.
Later they would cofound the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa and edit its Bulletin. An immensely productive period for them both, it was in Africa that they would find the commons. Sometime after arriving, George penned the poem “Going to Nigeria (for John)” in 1984:
We may presume he was writing in December 1983 or January-February 1984, as Harmattan—the dry, dusty wind of the north African coast—begins in December, often dissipating by the end of February.
By the fall semester of 1987 George would find himself on other shores, “And finally by the sea in Maine” as he reflects some years later in “Osiris Among the Dragonflies,” another poem in the collection.xvi After a decade of being an itinerant academic, he became a winter resident of Maine during the school year. The Jay, Maine paperworkers’ strike was well underway, starting in the early hours of June 15, 1987. George, along with David Riker, would join the strikers on the picket line and at mass meetings.
It was told to me that the idea for The New Enclosures came to George while walking on the beaches in Peaks Island in Maine, and then I was told this wasn’t true. Living on Peaks Island required George to take a ferry, seventeen minutes each way, weaving though the Casco Bay, past Navy ships tendered off the Portland peninsula and terminals where oil tankers were moored. “Back to the sight of oil, guns and money, In Portland bay,” he reflected in “War Poem” he penned on “Peaks Island March 10, 1991.”xvii
Nonetheless walking on the shores on Peaks Island and Old Orchard, well after the tourists fled the encroaching winter, was a daily activity for George. Silvia would join him on her visits too. In July of 2024, Silvia remembered that these beach walks were “healing for George after losing his mother,” and she noted it was healing for her when she would return to the U.S. after caring for her mother in Parma. “I’d walk from one end of the beach to the other,” she shared.xviii Apparently, he had visited these beaches some years earlier writing in the poem “My Art” that “only the purest ice / piled in huge pieces / on a Maine beach” in 1979.xix
As I write this it is “Springtime in Maine,” to which George reflected in the poem: “The spring machine is here / And this poem / In protest must be penned.”xx As I fear that poems and protest are no longer enough.
At the Edge of Everything
What George decoded in the global capitalist order was the possibilities of life itself, of life in, against, and beyond capitalism. This is what makes At the Edge of Everything so insightful, the joy present in these poems, in the possibilities of class-struggle, of the “invading socialist society,” of the “last jubilee” are profound. George “show[s] an impellent need to find other forms of expression and other moments of ruptures of the daily routines,” Silvia wrote in the preface reflecting upon the collection.xxi
Escaping to its corners of the American and European “Empires,” as the poem is designated:
The past as haunting, “A Tale of Memory and Forgetting,” as this final poem is called, is woven through his collective efforts, through the edges of the collection, through the partnership between George and Silvia. He humbly asks, “Through all this can you see / this is a love poem for Silvia?”xxiii This collection is her love poem for him.
ii Most recently published as George Caffentzis, “The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse” in In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press and Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2013), 16.
iii Kevin Van Meter, “Refusing the Planetary Work Machine” in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, 27 (2014).
iv Midnight Notes, “The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse” in Midnight Notes Vol. 2, No. 1 (1980).
v Harry Cleaver, “Work is Still the Central Issue!” in Ana C. Dinerstein and Michael Neary (eds), The Labour Debate: An Investigation into the Theory and Reality of Capitalist Work (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2002), 135-148.
vi Interestingly only one poem even directly references his nearly yearly excursions to Greece
viii Midnight Notes Collective, The New Enclosures, Midnight Notes, 10(Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, Fall 1990), Back Cover.
ix George Caffentzis, “Two Themes of Midnight Notes: Work/Refusal of Work and Enclosure/Commons” in Craig Hughes (Ed.), Toward the Last Jubilee: Midnight Notes at Thirty Years (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia and Washington, DC: Perry Editions, March 2010), 27.
xi Silvia Federici and Arlen Austin (Eds.), The New York Wages for Housework Committee 1972-1977: History, Theory, and Documents (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. 2017), 87.
xii In conversation with the author, April 14, 2025.
Third Camp Socialism — A Phyllis and Julius Jacobson Reader, edited by Kent Worcester and Paul Heideman, is published by Brill as part of the Historical Materialism book series. The Brill edition is high-priced, for libraries, but an affordable edition will be published in 2026 by Haymarket Press.
Kent spoke to Workers’ Liberty about the project.
Julius and Phyllis Jacobson, 1940
Can you introduce Phyllis and Julius Jacobson, for readers who may not have heard of them previously? Why is their work important?
KW: The Jacobsons are perhaps best known for founding New Politics, which launched in 1961, and which is still being published today. They described themselves as third camp socialists and played a crucial yet under-appreciated role on the anti-Stalinist left as writers and editors.
Phyllis and Julius Jacobson led full lives. They fell in love as teenagers during the Depression. Phyllis Garden (1922-2010) was from Brooklyn. Julius (1922-2003) grew up in the Bronx. Their parents were Eastern European working-class Jewish immigrants. They came from neighborhoods where the language of rebellion and class conflict was ubiquitous. Phyllis’s parents were old school social democrats. Julius’s extended family were mainly Communist Party (CP) members, and fellow travelers.
Phyllis and Julius (Julie to his friends) were in their early teens when they defiantly gravitated toward the Trotskyist movement. The relevant meeting halls and gathering spaces were clustered around Union Square in lower Manhattan. This was convenient since their families were on opposite ends of the city. They admired speakers like James P. Cannon, Farrell Dobbs, and C.L.R. James. But they were closer to Max Shachtman and participated in the 1939-40 faction fight inside the Socialist Workers Party that resulted in the formation of the “Shachtmanite” Workers Party (1940-49).
Like most men of his generation, Julie served in World War II. He took part in the Battle of the Bulge and the liberation of Paris. After the war, he oversaw the Workers Party youth work and was the driving force behind its decision to sponsor a third camp student magazine, Anvil (1949-60). For many years, he worked in the group’s print shop and later ran a small machine shop. He also edited its theoretical journal, The New International, during its final half-decade.
Phyllis, a gifted and tenacious organizer, was the more naturally outgoing of the two. After high school, she led a thriving party branch at Brooklyn College. During the war she worked on an assembly line at General Electric. She eventually became a script reader for a major studio. Both she and Julie were leading members of the WP’s successor organization, the Independent Socialist League (1949-58), until its dissolution.
Their writings tackle weighty topics: organized labor, civil rights, intellectuals, revolution and counter-revolution. For a variety of reasons, Julie was more prolific than Phyllis. He happily conceded that Phyllis was the better editor. They shared a special joy in skewering apologists for “progressive” authoritarianism. And they were delightful company. They enjoyed nothing more than a convivial meal with friends. The Jacobsons were only “hard” on a handful of topics, most notably race, labor, the Democrats, and Stalinism.
Their journal can be viewed as both an extension of and a departure from the WP/ISL project.
On the one hand, the Jacobsons invoked Shachtmanite terminology – “bureaucratic collectivism,” “independent political action,” “socialism from below,” “neither Washington nor Moscow,” and the like – long after they stopped paying membership dues. In keeping with the third camp tradition, their magazine stressed the intrinsic connection between socialism and democracy. It championed civil rights, human rights, and artistic expression. It published authors like Hal Draper (in the sixties), Dan La Botz, Thomas Harrison, and Richard Smith who are steeped in this tradition. And it offered a platform for Soviet bloc leftists, most notably in the case of Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski’s widely discussed “Open Letter to the Party” (1965).
At the same time, under the Jacobsons’ editorial leadership New Politics accommodated disparate opinions to an extent that seems incompatible with any kind of sustained organizational ambitions. Greens, Mandelites [followers of Ernest Mandel, one of the most prominent leaders of post-Trotsky Trotskyism], social democrats, council communists, radical feminists, and left liberals all found a home in its pages. When it came to roundtables and so on, the final word usually went to the nearest “left-Shachmanite.” Yet it is significant that the Jacobsons insisted on publishing a ‘little magazine’ in which third camp perspectives were merely part of the equation.
Their willingness to co-mingle with social democrats, non-Marxists, and nonconformist cultural critics may explain why Martin Thomas concludes that “Shachtman, Jacobson and Harrington got ground down into approximating left social democracy.” This strikes me as unfair, not only to Phyllis but to the historical record. It minimizes the extent to which both Jacobsons remained stubbornly antagonistic vis-à-vis Democrats, the union bureaucracy, Cold War liberalism, and the like. The Jacobsons were not exactly optimists, but they retained an oppositional edge.
The Jacobsons I knew were preoccupied with producing the most engaging magazine possible on a shoestring budget. They “built low but on solid ground,” as Leo Strauss said in a different context. They concentrated on immediate tasks such as drumming up new subscribers, encouraging new writers, drafting their own pieces. Their guiding assumption was that the level of strategic debate and political discussion needed to be raised across the American left. They were not wrong in this assumption.
All I can tell you is that Julie’s childhood friend Irving Horenstein (Howe) would have been amused by the suggestion that Phyllis and Julie, his bitter print media rivals, were anything other than incorrigible reds.
What’s the background to this project? Who do you hope will read it?
There are two main audiences for Third Camp Socialism: A Phyllis and Julius Jacobson Reader. The first is those already “invested” in this tradition. The second includes anyone with a serious interest in the history of socialist thought. Both audiences might want to wait for the paperback edition, which will be out next summer. Librarians should order copies right away, however.
The background is as follows. I met Phyllis and Julie in the mid-1980s when they were tabling at a Socialist Scholars Conference. We immediately hit it off. After contributing a few pieces, they invited me to join the editorial board. When I tried shopping around a New Politics reader in the late 1990s, none of the publishers I approached expressed the slightest interest. The demand for books on socialist themes at that point may have been at an all-time low.
With the recent progressive revival, the time seemed ripe for a renewed push at raising the profile of the magazine and its founding editors. Someone pointed me toward the Historical Materialism/Haymarket series. When I learned that Paul Heideman was also putting together a proposal for a Jacobson reader, I reached out and we combined our efforts.
Paul is a generation or two younger than I am, but comes out of a broadly similar background. He has an interesting book out in November called Rogue Elephant: The Republican Party Since Reagan (Verso). We benefited from the advice we received from the book’s advisory board: Lynn Chancer, Barry Finger, Thomas Harrison, Scott McLemee, and Daniel Randall. Daniel proved especially adept at identifying deep cuts to include along with better-known pieces.
If people on the left know about the third camp tradition, it’s sometimes thought of simply as reflecting a doctrinal dispute over the class character of the USSR. But the material in the book shows third camp socialists developed nuanced perspectives over a whole range of issues, not just the analysis of Stalinism (although that was obviously central). Can you give some sense of that?
Even those who are familiar with the Jacobsons and their work will be impressed, I think, by the range and incisiveness of the material collected in this book. Rather than organizing the pieces in chronological order, we have arranged the book’s twenty-seven chapters into five thematic sections: Social Movements, Left Debates, the Russian Question, War and Peace, and Students and Teachers.
This allowed us to front-end some of their punchiest material, such as “Coalitionism: From Protest to Politicking” (1966), “Union Conservatism: A Barrier to Racial Equality” (1968), “In Defense of the Young” (1970), “Kate Millett and Her Critics” (1976), and “Black Outrage in Los Angeles” (1992). The first three are by Julie, the latter two by Phyllis. We also placed Julie’s “Isaac Deutscher: The Anatomy of an Apologist” (1964 & 1966) and “The Two Deaths of Max Shachtman” (1973) toward the front.
The middle section showcases Julie’s “Reflections on Fascism and Communism” (1983) and Phyllis’ “The Americanization of the Communist Party” (1986), as well as a series on Stalin and Stalinism that Julie penned after the fall of the Soviet Union. The closing sections recover pieces from Anvil, Labor Action, and The New International. I’m glad we were able to include Julie’s fiery polemics on student movements and McCarthyism, most notably “Do Communists Have a Right to Teach?” (1949) and “Civil Liberties and the Philosopher of the Cold War” (1953). The latter is about Sidney Hook and was cowritten with Gordon Haskell.
In your interviews with the Jacobsons in the 1990s, you discuss their break with Hal Draper over the launch of the Independent Socialist Clubs in the late 1960s. They felt it was wrong to launch a new organization at that time. But in her contribution to the Oral History of the American Left conference in 1983, Phyllis had partially attributed the collapse of the first iteration of New Politics to the lack of “an organization to sustain us during the bad times.” What’s your view on this question? Was there a point at which you think it would have been viable for New Politics to evolve from being a journal into being a political organization?
It’s possible Phyllis had something like the ISL in mind when she made that comment. I never asked her. But she might have been referring to what Dissent achieved in terms of paid staff, a regular office, a donor base, money in the bank, and so on. We might be conflating two meanings of “organization,” in other words.
For the record, I never heard Phyllis and Julie express any interest in joining or leading a membership organization. Nor did they pay much attention to far-left gossip. Their general attitude was reflected in Phyllis’ response to Hal Draper, when he pressed them to join the newly formed International Socialists. She said it “wasn’t the season for that particular vegetable.”
On the other hand, they bemoaned the state of the magazine’s finances and were conscious of the fact that Dissent received support from private foundations that would have regarded New Politics as beyond the pale.
While the Jacobsons did not evince much interest in “party building,” they certainly sought to extend the magazine’s influence. They sponsored panels at Socialist Scholars conferences and Left Forum events. They backed the Campaign for Peace and Democracy (1982-2017), a human rights nonprofit led by New Politics editors Joanne Landy and Thomas Harrison that had a third camp orientation. They distributed bundles to political groups such as Independent Socialist Club branches in the 1960s, and so on.
In addition, Julie edited two New Politics collections, The Negro and the American Labor Movement (1968) and Soviet Communism and the Socialist Vision (1973). Phyllis and Julie coedited the standalone volume Socialist Perspectives (1983). And they took satisfaction in the fact that several pieces that had appeared in the journal were widely reprinted, including Lewis Feuer’s “What is Alienation? The Career of a Concept” (1962) and Hal Draper’s “The Two Souls of Socialism” (1966).
Can you say something about the Jacobsons’, and New Politics‘, relationship to the New Left? In that period, some non- or anti-Stalinist currents grew quite dramatically, as well as Maoism, which was obviously Stalinist but in a more oppositional geopolitical relationship with the USSR from the 1960s. How did the Jacobsons see that ferment? What was their view, and what’s your view, of why specifically Third Camp forces didn’t grow more in that period?
The Jacobsons’ decision to launch a “journal of socialist debate” was inspired by the achievements of the civil rights movement. They were thrilled when Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement erupted and provided a platform for campus leaders such as Mario Savio and Mike Shute. They were turned off by the unsavory politics and apocalyptic rhetoric of groups in the late sixties like Progressive Labor and the Weather Underground. Julie’s coauthored piece on “Neo-Stalinism: The Achilles’ Heel of the Peace Movement and the American Left” (1976), reprinted in our volume, touches on this issue. The question of why the third camp tendency flourished during the first “new left” and floundered during the second is harder to answer.
Who were the Jacobsons’ main international correspondents and interlocutors? They published people from the “Cliffite” tendency in the UK (the International Socialists, later the SWP), including Tony Cliff himself, from a relatively early period. Who else did they see as potential international co-thinkers and allies? Did they have a view of what an international left regroupment might have looked like?
They did not have a position on “left regroupment” in the sense that you mean. Their horizons were lower than that. They had a decent track record of recruiting non-US writers. They published numerous articles, reviews, and symposia on Russian, European, and Latin American politics. Some of these contributors came from third camp or Cliffite backgrounds, but by no means all. Phyllis mostly handled the correspondence. Her focus was on maintaining a network of contributors rather than forging an international tendency.
Workers’ Liberty supporters will be interested to know whether the Jacobsons took any view of our tendency’s efforts to engage with and learn from the WP/ISL tradition. When we interviewed Herman Benson around the time we published the second volume of our Fate of the Russian Revolution anthologies, he was slightly bewildered as to why a small group in Britain would dedicate so much time and resources to republishing third camp material from the 1940s. Do you know if the Jacobsons had a view on this?
They were intrigued and a little bemused that a UK group was interested in this stuff. But they were preoccupied with other things. Phyllis had an incapacitating stroke in 2000, and Julie spent most of his waking hours at her bedside before he passed away in 2003. While they were happy to see the first Fate of the Russian Revolution volume, they were not here for the second.
There is still a wealth of valuable material from the archives that hasn’t seen the light of day for many years. If only someone would reprint all twenty issues of Anvil, for example. Contributors included Simone de Beauvoir, Dwight Macdonald, Jules Feiffer, Arthur Miller, Harold Rosenberg, and Eleanor Roosevelt! That would be something.
There was a big turnout in downtown Los Angeles for the “No Kings” protest on June 14th,2025. I felt a need to be there as if something historic was taking place and to let Trump know that there is power in masses of people. There were thousands of people gathering up at the LA City Hall where the speeches took place before the march. One of the first speakers was an African American woman who made clear what the objective of the protest was: “What would I have done during the Holocaust? What would I have done during slavery? The time is now to stop fascism!”
The overall spontaneous rallying cry for the crowd was “Free L.A.”… from under the boot of Trump’s rule. L.A. is a forerunner to the ongoing fight against authoritarianism nationwide reflected in the ongoing fight against the recent invasion by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
After the speeches I was swept up in a sea of people. We marched through downtown where I saw one Latina, a Marine in uniform who had broken ranks with her fellow Marines. She was standing on the sidewalk with a protest sign that said “This Isn’t The ‘Freedom’ I Fought for, Remember Your Oath.” Oath is a reference to defending the U.S.Constitution which states that due-process applies to non-citizens as well as citizens. This one Marine got recognition and applause from the passing protesters. Due process has been negated by the deportation of immigrants without their day in court.. There are those within American society who still have a sense of their own humanity to fight for the weak and vulnerable. I think the estimated number of participants in the march in L.A. was between 20,000and 30,000. The National Guard, LAPD and the Marines were at the march on stand-by but unwilling to tackle a massive peaceful protest. They waited wait until the crowd had thinned out before they struck with tear gas and rubber bullets to arrest 38 stragglers. What got my attention was that there was a large number of whites, young and old standing with Black and immigrant labor at this event. One speaker put it this way to remind us of what Hitler was able to do in Nazi Germany: “If they come for you in the morning, they will come for me in the night.” Never forget how fascism can divide, to enslave the many and to empower the few.
Hopefully this protest was only the beginning of massive protests to help uproot Trump’s authoritarian rule. . “They want our labor, but they don’t respect our humanity” stated one Latino laborer about the immigration raids on private homes,hospitals and places where day laborers stand. Immigrant workers represent 5% of California’s economic output. Trump’s ICE agents’ gestapo tactics to arrest, detain and deport Latinx workers was met with the “No Kings” day of protest nationwide which reached into the millions and overshadowed Trump’s 250th Army Anniversary parade which coincided with his birthday. The military parade was a waste of time and $45 billion in taxpayer money while several hundred thousand federal workers’ jobs are being cut by the “Department of Government Efficiency” DOGE to decrease the deficit.
What the corporate giants like Trump have forgotten is that workers created all the wealth that the bourgeoisie enjoys. Trump’s attempt to replace workers with Artificial Intelligence can explain why many attacked the Waymo, driverless (A.I.) cars that were burned during the protest against ICE.The alienation of the immigrant worker can be seen in their attempt to succeed with broken English and a look that reflects being white. But as one Mexican worker told me,, “regardless of how white I might look, I have the look of the cactus in my face.” This reflects the cultural shock of his journey to reach American soil and not be fully accepted but always be seen as a outsider regardless of financial success. The hope of assimilation has led many in the Latinx community to vote for Trump but it is never a given regardless of job status or education. The ICE raids have brought many back to the reality of American injustice which doesn’t ask whites for their green cards. It is a one sided justice for people of color regardless of how much you attempt to separate yourself from your being.
We must embrace”self” as a movement. That is why I think American citizens who are of Mexican descent, wave the flag of Mexico in defiance. Identity brings power to change American culture of acceptance. That image of “success” for many immigrant workers is to work two or three jobs so that your children can get a college degree for a better life. In many cases, this is a pipe dream. Those children are the ones out fighting in the streets today for their parents to be freed from federal detention and free to work under humane conditions without fear of arrest.
The American dream has become a nightmare for the Latinx worker. Labor once again is being used to pay into a system where weapons of war are put above human needs such as Medicaid assistance for the poor who will be asked to work to receive benefits in the future. These medicaid cuts are projected to lead to the death of 16000 per year who won’t be able to afford necessary tests and medication. As American workers, we get the boot and become the scapegoat: .cut labor, deport labor, lockup labor.
Immigrant labor is a big part of the “melting pot” of American labor and can be seen as part of any successful organized labor movement within America today,We are one movement.
Sponsored by: Northeast Los Angeles Alliance for Democracy
A panel of Iranian feminists will speak about how U.S. activists can take a principled stand against the violations of human rights by all the powers involved and defend progressive, life-affirming forces inside Iran, the Middle East region and the United States.
Speakers:
Elahe Amani, Chair of Women’s Intercultural Network; board member, National Association for Community Mediation, Emerita, California State University; and editor of the women’s section of the monthly journal, Peace Mark, a publication of Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRA).
Frieda Afary, Iranian American librarian, translator, author of Socialist Feminism: A New Approach (Pluto Press, 2022) and producer of Iranian Progressives in Translation.
This statement is an invitation to think about responsibility and agency in the current momentous situation. The signatories call on all to open an alternative pathway to counter both the Iranian regime’s warmongering and those who have set their hopes on foreign invasion and encourage it.
The war has started. Every war has a background and various causes. Highlighting this or that cause should not lead us to ignore the immediate cause. If so, all wars become inevitable. The immediate cause that has made this war inevitable is Israel’s attack on Iran. This attack was launched with the knowledge of the U.S., and has relied on U.S. intelligence sharing and what Trump called “great American equipment” which makes the U.S. a partner. It has been praised by the president of the U.S.
Israel’s pretext for this attack was to counter a nuclear threat from Iran. Let us not forget that Israel itself is a country that has been pursuing a secret military nuclear program and has not joined the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons. It is currently promoting the biggest mass slaughter of the century and has become infamous for its brazen and rogue behavior in international relations. Therefore, it should be the last country entitled to opine on the nuclear programs of other countries, much less use this as a pretext to engage in military action against them.
Iran’s rule by Islamic Jurisprudence shows off its power by repressing women, workers, retirees, university students, intellectuals and others who seek freedom, justice and an end to discrimination. Although it cannot match the wave of Israeli assaults which might soon expand through direct U.S. collaboration, it continues its warmongering.
The regime of Islamic Jurisprudence resorted to uranium to survive. What started as a strategy for survival, gradually expanded. A large security, technological and economic establishment was built around it. The ruling class benefited from it. When sanctions were imposed on Iran, it viewed them as an opportunity to make money by smuggling goods in and out, raising prices in the production and distribution network, and increasing the intensity of exploitation. The cult of uranium and its enrichment organization was placed at the center of the military-ideological-economic multiplex of the rule of Islamic Jurisprudence. This regime gambled the entire wealth of the country on uranium enrichment. The obvious result of uranium enrichment became the impoverishment of the county and the further impoverishment of the dispossessed. The economic and security benefits of the ruling establishment created a stagnation force which led to the regime’s rulers not recognizing the gravity of the latest situation. And now the regime is doing irreparable damage to the country with its warmongering.
However, we also need to view the problem from the vantage point of the responsibility and agency of civil society and political forces that demand freedom, justice and peace. It is regrettable that Iran’s nuclear program did not become a major issue in the public sphere. This is due to the lack of sensitivity to the topics of nuclear militarism, environmental pollution, and war in general. We can also attribute this to nationalist thought that considers nuclear capacity “an absolute right” and to the paucity of theoretical and analytical discussion concerning the role of the cult of uranium in the repressive establishment and political economy of the regime.
We should have turned Iran’s nuclear program into a topic of discussion and enlightenment at the public level. We should have consistently highlighted the connection between uranium enrichment and the impoverishment of the county. We should have tied every protest against poverty and deprivation to this issue. At opportune moments, we should have demanded referenda on the nuclear program, as the program on which the regime is gambling the entire wealth of the country. Now we need to make up for this negligence.
War darkens and polarizes the political atmosphere. The regime will continue its usual style of polarizing the environment and will present itself as the side which can defend the country and win the war. We should not side with the regime. Instead, we should consistently remind people about its warmongering, the failure of its authoritarian plans in the region and its baseness and bullying.
However, there is another effort at polarization which presents itself as the alternative to the Iranian regime’s war of “right against wrong.” In this alternative, Netanyahu and Trump present themselves as “right.” Simply saying that people’s desperation makes them set their hopes on foreign invasion does not take away from the stupidity of this “alternative.” From the time of the Constitutional Revolution [1906-1911] to the present, the people of Iran have struggled for freedom and equality. It is beneath them to set their hopes on killers, authoritarians, racists and enemies of democracy and human equality.
Confusion in taking positions has a long history, and all of us have contributed to it by not doing enough critical thinking. This confusion has become very dangerous. We must play a decisive role in clarifying and distinguishing positions, and shed illumination on the reasons which have brought about the current situation. We call on all to comment on this by focusing on the current war. The main question is how to achieve peace and freedom.
Our specific demands:
End the war: Put pressure on the Iranian regime and international pressure on Israel and the U.S. and their allies who promote war.
End the insane nuclear program. We need to demand a referendum inside Iran.
Strengthen ties among forces who demand an end to the rule of Islamic Jurisprudence but also rely on the people and foundational norms of freedom, equality and an end to discrimination.
In the alternative politics that we seek to strengthen, the principle of coming together is the means and ends. We believe that war and setting hopes on foreign military powers is definitely not compatible with the goal of freedom, justice and independence.
At least five million people participated in 2,000 “No Kings Day” protests in big cities and small towns in all 50 states, the largest yet in a series of national demonstrations. In a festive but defiant spirit, with bands and drummers, the marchers chanted, sang songs, and waved their signs with slogans like “No Kings since 1776” or signs opposing President Donald Trump’s attacks on health care, food programs for children and the elderly, or his attacks on education and science. Some banners read “Fight Oligarchy.” More signs than in earlier protests said, “Fight Fascism!” In all of the protests there were more American flags and chants that expressed a desire for national redemption. Where I protested in New York City people chanted, “Whose country? Our country!” In Philadelphia, the flagship of the demonstrations, historian Timothy Snyder, repeatedly said, “No Kings” as the crowd responded “Freedom!”
These were almost all peaceful demonstrations with virtually no incidents. In Riverside, California a counter-protestor pursued by police was found to have a gun in his car. And in Virginia a man drove a large car into the marchers, injuring one person. Only in Los Angeles where conflict had gone on for days did a few protestors throw things at police and police responded by beating and arresting some, and that was only a small incident in a massive march there.
No Kings Day coincided with the military parade organized by Trump to celebrated the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, but which also coincided with his 79th birthday. Trump spent $45 million dollars for the demonstration of military might that included 6,700 soldiers, tanks from several wars and other military vehicles, while flying overhead were helicopter gunships, and descending from the sky the Golden Knights Parachute Team who presented the president with a flag. Fences had been erected to protect the parade and Trump had warned that any protests would face “very heavy force.” To avoid conflict, the No Kings organizers did not plan any protest in D.C.
The No Kings Day marches culminated a week of protests in Los Angeles and in 40 other cities in 23 states against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, arrests, and deportations as well as Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and the Marines to L.A. ICE is attempting to arrest and deport 3,000 people per day, picking up undocumented immigrants at workplaces in neighborhoods, and even arresting children at schools. In these earlier protests authorities in some cities fired tear gas, flash-bang grenades, and rubber bullets and arrested hundreds of protestors. The raids and immigration local protests continue.
Organizers cancelled the No Kings protests in Saint Paul, Minnesota because of the political assassination in the area of two Democratic Party legislators and the wounding of two other people. There was fear because an active shooter who had been disguised as a police officer was still at large. Police are searching for Vance Boelter, a 57-year-old white man, who is a strong opponent of abortion and also criticized LGBT people. He voted in the last election for Trump, owned several guns, was the head of a private security company and he also had led a Christian non-profit. As I write he is still a fugitive. President Trump, who himself was the target to two assassination attempts, condemned the killings in Minnesota and offered federal resources to the state.
The anti-ICE protests and No Kings Day represented another step forward for the resistance to Trump. Once again, the demonstrations in some places, as in NYC lacked proportional Black and Latino participation. And a movement like this needs more power, needs strikes and mass civil disobedience. The next national march against Trump is planned for Juneteenth, that is June 19 there is a national celebration of the end of the enslavement of Black people.
[The article below by Mariano Rosa is followed by the manifesto issued by the International Socialist League.]
We are going through a stage marked by Trumpist aggression against Latin America, and Mesoamerica in particular, in a sort of 21st century Monroe Doctrine. Undoubtedly, this element is an important factor to take into account when analyzing everything politically and constructing an orientation for intervention in the region. However, we cannot look the other way in the face of the reality experienced by the peoples of three countries where alleged political formations govern, with supposedly leftist, anti-imperialist, even socialist projects, which in reality have been transformed into real odious gendarmes and adjusters of their peoples. For this reason, organizations from the three countries in question, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba, as well as from Costa Rica, Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico and other parts of the world, have agreed to promote an International Campaign for the Freedom of political prisoners and against the repression in these countries. This initiative arose as a campaign voted unanimously in Colombia, in November of last year, in a Mesoamerican and Caribbean regional meeting of the International Socialist League, with the purpose of being the starting point for a very broad call. From there we advanced towards the Forum that we held last week, where we carried out an exchange and defined the approval of a manifesto and an international call. This important and representative Forum was attended by organizations such as Socialistas en Lucha from Cuba, Marea Socialista from Venezuela, Alternativa Anticapitalista from Nicaragua, members of the articulation of social movements, human rights activists, intellectuals, critics from the countries of the region, who assumed the commitment to be promoters of this proposal. That is why the start of the campaign fills us with expectations that it will be transformed over the weeks and months into a highly convening confluence of collectives, organizations and personalities from all over the world.
Two precedents: campaigning for the freedom of political prisoners in Nicaragua and against the persecution of Jean Mendoza in Venezuela.
This initiative has two very important and successful immediate antecedents, which are an accumulation of experience to be taken into account, promoted by the International Socialist League and the collectives and referents with which we carry them forward in common. On the one hand, the International Commission, with left-wing parliamentarians, social leaders, politicians and collectives of Latin America, with whom in 2022 we promoted the so-called International Commission for the freedom and health of political prisoners in Nicaragua, and the Caravan for Life that mobilized to the border by land from San Jose, Costa Rica to Peñas Blancas, on the border with Nicaragua in July of that year. This initiative, whose first merit was to unify the majority of Nicaraguan exiles in Costa Rica, had the support of groups such as the articulation of social movements, the Nicaragua Never Again collective, the Mothers of April and various organizations of relatives of people murdered, assisted or imprisoned by the dictatorial regime of Ortega and Murillo. In addition to a high regional repercussion that ended up leading to the decision to release a few months later more than 200 prisoners, and later several dozen more. A relative of a political prisoner summarized the experience with the international commission by saying textually “that the International Commission and the LIS had done more for the freedom of his imprisoned relatives in one week than the so-called organizations of the international community had done in four years.”
The other positive experience that we have to take into account was the campaign, first for freedom and then against the persecution and criminalization of the labor leader Jean Mendoza of the Guayana region of Venezuela. Jean Mendoza is secretary general of the Union of Woodworkers and a worker of the MASISA factory, a multinational company of Chilean capitals that, invoking the so-called “Law of Hate” of the Maduro government and the protection of its justice system, has been criminalizing the union protest led by Mendoza for wages and working conditions for the workers in the wood industry. He was first imprisoned for a time and since then he has been persecuted and criminalized by the bosses who act in this way under the complicit silence of a regime that claims to be socialist, Bolivarian and anti-imperialist. The international campaign promoted by the LIS together with union, student, political and social leaders, intellectual, cultural and human rights collectives from different parts of the world, was decisive in the first place, to roll back the imprisonment and achieve the freedom of Jean Mendoza. And since then, at the same time that a trial is taking place against him, the campaign has been maintained to achieve his definitive acquittal and to defeat by putting a stop to the persecution of the workers’ leader. Still today, according to Jean Mendoza himself, the campaign that won his freedom is remembered by the workers of the factory and the union, who made a concrete experience of internationalist solidarity with the LIS, recognizing the merit of that orientation. In short, that is what it is all about. To make practical internationalism, militant, not declarative, to achieve beyond borders, to take in our hands just causes, independently of any imperial interference or capitalist power, and at the same time deploying a broad unity of action in the field of mobilization to carry them forward.
We cannot be indifferent
Faced with the situation of a real open-air prison that the peoples and activism in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba are living, we have decided, as we said at the beginning of this article, to promote a campaign for the freedom of political prisoners and against the repression of these three regimes. There are points of contact between the reality that these three peoples are living and in particular the repression exercised by the governments currently in power. They also have to endure the terrible economic and social situation of tremendous precariousness and poverty, as well as the concentrated privileges of rulers who profit under the protection of power. For all these reasons, beyond the nuances or differences that these countries may have in their recent or past histories, it is clear that anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists, true socialists, democrats and defenders of human rights around the world, we cannot look the other way in the face of the reality that they are living. That is why this campaign has a concrete purpose, which is to achieve the freedom of all political prisoners, and to exert international pressure to collaborate in the difficult, laborious resistance, in total clandestinity, in semi-clandestinity, or in conditions of enormous persecution, that the courageous activism that still exists in the three countries is carrying out. And also to put on the agenda and unmask the complete falsehood and swindle of the leftist narrative with which these regimes cover up, trying to confuse, regimes that have absolutely nothing left-wing and are rather their negation. You cannot be a leftist and profit under the protection of power, be a leftist and persecute your own people, be a leftist and do business with local bourgeoisie and imperialists of different stripes. All this has nothing to do with socialism or with anti-imperialism or with the anti-capitalist identity that we do claim. So, although our starting point is to denounce and confront the global and regional ultra-right and the aggressive Trumpism that threatens the region, it is no less important to unmask this false left that does nothing else, in short, than giving arguments to the right wing all over the world to amalgamate the banners of socialism, anti-imperialism and the left to the worst expressions of privileged regimes, privileged bourgeoisies or bureaucracies reconverted into privileged bourgeoisies that repress their peoples, persecute and kill. That is why we rebel against the complicit silence of those who invoke the logic of the lesser evil and the repeated argument of not playing into the hands of imperialism. Thus, by action or omission, they are accomplices to the brutality that the peoples of these three countries are suffering. We do not remain silent, we do not look the other way, we are not indifferent.
Manifesto and international call
We are launching this campaign, expressed in the Manifesto which we reproduce below and which we call for adherence, dissemination and activation throughout the world. In trade unions, the student movement, intellectual and cultural collectives, human rights organizations, social movements and political forces. This is the first task that we propose as a stage of installation of the initiative, for several weeks we want to collect hundreds of adhesions that allow us to add critical mass, and then move to a second stage where with all these regional adhesions in Mesoamerica, the Caribbean and around the world, activate protests, actions and visits with representations of human rights referents, parliamentarians and political, social and civil leaders, to embassies and consulates of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua. To request again to those governments the authorization to enter their countries and to be able to verify with a commission of personalities with international recognition and unsuspected of relations with any imperialism, to have access to visit political prisoners and to be able to meet with those who denounce systematic violations of human rights.
In addition, finally, we also propose to form an international independent investigative commission to which we invite independent jurists, personalities from the field of culture and human rights to be part of, to collect testimonies and information directly and to advance in substantiating or taking steps to substantiate what we consider essential: to set up an international tribunal of the peoples to judge in an independent and truly impartial manner, from below, what we are denouncing in relation to the persecution, imprisonment and systematic violation of the most elementary freedoms in Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela. We want, in short, to set up a true international movement, from a unitary, plural and broad position at the same time, that acts with total independence from the State Department and from any foreign power intervention. The freedom of prisoners and the cessation of repression in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba, will ultimately be a task to which we can contribute with this type of initiatives across borders, and which the peoples of these countries will finally have to take in their hands, to self-determine and emancipate themselves completely, opening the way to a transition to a social model that reorganizes on new bases the economy, social relations and the political system, to truly realize social equality and democracy for the majorities for which we are fighting. This is our highest aspiration and the strategy that mobilizes us.
Freedom for Political Prisoners, Down with Repression in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela
We have always carried Nicaragua, Venezuela, and of course, Cuba in our minds and hearts. The rebellions of their peoples against sinister dictatorships in the past, against the subjugation of imperialism and the injustices committed by the privileged classes, were points of reference for entire generations around the world, where solidarity among peoples was the driving force behind victories small and great. Cuba in the 1960s, Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Bolivarian people rising up in the 2000s against the nefarious neoliberal decade of the 1990s. But today these peoples live under and suffer dramatic realities. And we cannot look the other way; on the contrary, we must activate the solidarity that has done so much good and continues to be vital to the peoples.
Governments and regimes that usurp a false leftist identity are, in reality, executioners of their people. They censor, persecute, repress, imprison, condemn to exile, or kill off every voice of opposition, regardless of ideological affiliation. In all three countries, activists who reclaim their rebellious and revolutionary past have faced and continue to face repression, imprisonment, and death. That past has been co-opted by the current leaders.
The governments of Ortega-Murillo, Maduro, and Díaz-Canel, beyond any differences or nuances that may exist between them, are not leftist, nor rebellious, nor anti-imperialist: they are executioners of their people. They represent economic privileges built under the protection of the power they maintain with repression.
The context is aggravated by Trump’s aggressive interventionism, his threats to take over the Panama Canal and his brutal anti-immigration policy. Precisely, in the face of the threat posed by this global neo-fascist movement, whose apex is the current US president, regimes like the ones we denounce do nothing but fuel the repudiation and confusion they generate with their false leftist narrative.
Therefore, we reject all imperialist interference, which also includes all sanctions or blockades that always end up harming the people, not the dictatorships.
We call on human rights activists in Latin America, the Caribbean, and around the world, especially the youth, intellectuals, critical voices in the cultural field, and socio-environmental, territorial, labor, and political groups, to establish a broad international movement against repression and in favor of the freedom of all political prisoners in Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba, as well as against all imperialist interference.
As part of the actions that express solidarity with the peoples of Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela, this International Movement raises the banner of truth, memory, and justice and promotes the construction of an Independent Investigative Commission to decisively judge these regimes for all the abuses and crimes reported in these countries through a People’s Tribunal and human rights organizations.
This is the justice we believe in: the justice of the people, from below.
We call on you to join us, from wherever you are in the world, in saying with one voice: we accuse the governments of Ortega-Murillo, Maduro, and Díaz-Canel of censoring, repressing, imprisoning, forcing exile, and killing their own people. Solidarity is our banner, because we cannot remain indifferent in the face of injustice.
Man builds a barricade in Paramount, California during anti-ICE protest.
In response to peaceful protests against ICE raids in California, President Trump sent in the troops, saying, “We’re going to have troops everywhere.”California state Senator Scott Wiener, a Democrat,said, “This is what fascism looks like.”
In the last three days thousands of protestors against ICE raids in Los Angeles have blocked streets and freeways and set cars on fire. Their actions have been a response to ICE raids, the mobilization of the National Guard, and the violent response protestors have faced.
Protestors have been facing severe repression from Los Angeles police, sheriff’s deputies, ICE, FBI and from the National Guard who have fired various sorts of crowd control weapons from tear gas and flash-bang grenades to rubber bullets..Governor Gavin Newsome , criticizing Trump’s sending the National Guard to California against the state government’s wishes showed that he was a “dictator.” The story below was written on May 8. – DL
As widespread, militant protests against immigration raids have mounted in southern California, home to large immigrant communities, President Donald Trump has ordered the mobilization of 2,000 California National Guard troops, part of the U.S. Army, to suppress the demonstrations. Trump posted on social media, “These Radical Left protests, by instigators and often paid troublemakers, will NOT BE TOLERATED.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that if the violence continues. U.S. Marines at Camp Pendleton, 82 miles south of Los Angeles, would be deployed, though the Posse Comitatus Act forbids the use of the military as a domestic police force.
Trump’s act is a legal but extraordinary act, since the Guard is usually mobilized only at the request of the state governor and no president has done so on his own initiative since 1965 when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators.
California Governor Gavin Newsome, a Democrat, said of the president’s action, “That move is purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tension. This is the wrong mission and will erode public trust.” He said the Trump administration was deranged.
The protests in San Diego, Los Angeles, and New York are a result of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on workplaces and immigrant communities by masked agents wearing military gear, carrying rifles, and accompanied by armored trucks. ICE’s goal now is to arrest 3,000 undocumented immigrants a day and one million this year. Police attempted to suppress the protests and dozens were arrested, put into unmarked vans and taken away.
“Our community is under attack and we are being terrorized. These are workers, these are fathers, these are mothers. And this has to stop,” said Angelica Salas, the executive director of CHIRLA, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in L.A.
Caleb Soto, of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said that the 70 to 80 arrested at one raid in L.A. had been “kidnapped” by masked men who had shown no arrest warrants.
“As Mayor of a proud city of immigrants, who contribute to our city in so many ways, I am deeply angered by what has taken place,” said Democratic Party Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles, referring to the recent raids. “My Office is in close coordination with immigrant rights community organizations. We will not stand for this.” Over a third of the population of Los Angeles, 1.5 million people, are immigrants and the city council voted to make L.A. a sanctuary city in 2024 but have refused to cooperate with immigration authorities since 1979.
“While the LAPD will continue to have a visible presence in all our communities to ensure public safety, we will not assist or participate in any sort of mass deportations,” Police Chief McDonnell said. And he added, the department would not attempt to determine anyone’s immigration status.
Protests took place at the sites of the raid, at federal immigrant detention centers, and federal administration buildings. Union activists came out to support the immigrants. David Huerta, California president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), was arrested by the police at one such protest for allegedly blocking an ICE vehicle. His union says he was “peacefully observing” the raid. SEIU, which represents healthcare workers, janitors, social workers, and city and state employees, has 750,000 members in California.
Dozens of people have been arrested, some on serious federal charges.
In the Los Angeles suburb of Paramount, protestors barricaded streets as they confronted Border Patrol agents in military gear. The air was filled with teargas and pepper spray, protestors stoned ICE and police vehicles. Protestor Ron Gochez, an award winning public school teacher said that the protests were necessary. He called it, “A beautiful day of resistance.’
Suddenly, the resistance is real, in the streets, and fighting.
I first met Jorge Mújica about forty years ago when my wife and I were living in Mexico. I was working with and writing about Mexican workers and their unions and my wife Sherry Baron was studying workers’ health and safety. Jorge was then organizing workers just as he is today. I remember he gave the two of us a wonderful educational talk about mapping health and safety hazards in the workplace.
Since 1987 he has lived in the United States and for more than a dozen years, he has worked for Arise in Chicago as a strategic campaign organizer with immigrant workers. It is estimated that Chicago has 820,000 Latino immigrants and that the metropolitan area has over two million. Three quarters identify as Mexican. Most are workers, many of them employed in service industries, manufacturing, warehouses, construction, landscaping, and cleaning. Employers often take advantage of immigrant workers and today the U.S. government is threatening to deport undocumented immigrants. Jorge and his colleagues teach them their rights and help them find union representation.
I interviewed him for a Swiss organization interested in knowing more about and supporting the immigrant movement in the United States. – Dan La Botz
In my view, his piece attempts to dampen or minimise criticisms of the increasingly authoritarian and regressive course taken by the Venezuelan political system under Nicolás Maduro. His defence of the Maduro government also reflects a broader problem among some sectors of the left: a tendency to remain tied to decaying regimes, while lacking any ideas and imagination to chart out alternative paths that are both critical and rooted in popular struggles. Such political clarity is urgently needed in a world where far-right movements and authoritarianism are gaining ground.
Ellner’s central argument is that criticism of Maduro should be more contextualised and nuanced, and that greater rigour is needed. However, his article simply amounts to a series of so-called “nuances” to Hetland’s arguments that, in effect, justify Maduro’s repression of workers, destruction of wages and implementation of a highly aggressive neoliberal regime. Paradoxically, Ellner’s own arguments lack nuance. He makes glaring omissions on issues that are essential to any analysis seeking to avoid simplistic binaries, especially one grounded in solidarity with popular struggles. In the end, Ellner falls into the very trap he criticises. As for rigour, it is worth noting Ellner often fails to provide any of the data he demands of Hetland. In some cases, his sources are no more than statements from Venezuelan government officials. For this reason, it remains necessary to carry out the work of critical nuance that Ellner claims to value — but unfortunately does not practice.
Sanctions as a tool to silence criticism and dissent
Ellner raises several key issues. For example, he argues international sanctions should be central to any analysis of the situation in Venezuela. I want to make my position clear from the outset: these sanctions are entirely condemnable, especially coming from a government such as the United States, with its long-standing tradition of interventionism and neo-colonialism. I would also add that this is an almost universally shared position on the Venezuelan left — diverse as it is — which has consistently rejected sanctions. In fact, these measures are broadly unpopular across Venezuelan society. Even some liberal scholars, intellectuals and opposition figures have spoken out against them, though others have not. The problem, however, is that Maduro’s government has turned the issue of sanctions into a tool to suppress criticism and debate, and the perfect excuse to justify an ongoing series of economic and political abuses.
If we are going to talk about nuance and rigour in relation to sanctions, then it is only fair to ask whether these measures actually triggered the worst crisis in Venezuela’s history, and to what extent they have shaped its course. Ellner refers to the sanctions imposed by the Obama administration in 2015, but those were limited to freezing assets and bank accounts in the US, as well as revoking visas and restricting entry for Venezuelan government officials and key figures. What he does not mention is that by 2017 — when the first sanctions targeting Venezuela’s economy were introduced — the country’s GDP had already plummeted by 31.9% from 2013, imports had collapsed by 81.76% compared to 2012, inflation was the highest in the world at 438.1%, and external debt had soared to a staggering $148.3 billion.1 In fact, the slow decline of oil production, along with the deterioration of numerous state-run industries and key agricultural sectors such as sugarcane and corn, began during the Hugo Chávez years. Something was already deeply wrong then, stemming from the deepening of Venezuela’s oil rentier model during Chávez’s government together with a disastrous administrative and economic management. This all unfolded at a time when Chávez enjoyed nearly 70% popularity and benefited from record-high oil prices, years of unprecedented revenues, control over state institutions, and significant regional influence and alliances.
Ellner fails to mention this context, as well as the rather significant detail of the huge corruption scandals that drained public coffers and harmed the population. These include: foreign exchange fraud through Cadivi; multiple large-scale corruption cases within the state oil company PDVSA, the state food supply network PDVAL and the China-Venezuela Fund; various infrastructure project scams; and a long, ongoing list of other such examples. Ultimately, the widely-promoted narrative of an “economic war” was, in reality, the work of a network of actors that included government officials (sometimes at the highest levels), working in conjunction with international and business-sector elites. This process has continued under Maduro’s government — something even authorities have acknowledged, with the arrests of several high-ranking officials (including multiple presidents of PDVSA) and the revelation of more recent scandals involving the oil company and the state’s cryptocurrency regulator, Sunacrip, that entailed more than $21 billion in uncollected revenue. Given the scale and continuity of this plunder, it is hard to see this as just anomalies or the work of a few unscrupulous individuals. A truly critical thinker must recognise it as a systematic and large-scale mechanism for the illicit appropriation of wealth.
Some may wonder how the Chávez government, which enjoyed huge popularity during the first decade of this century, sank to a disapproval rating hovering between 70-80% under Maduro. The immeasurable suffering of Venezuelans — soaring poverty, collapsed hospitals and basic services, etc — stands in stark contrast to the luxurious, excessive lifestyles of the ruling elites. These elites have luxury apartments in Dubai or Europe, ride around in high-end SUVs, dine in gourmet restaurants, and throw extravagant parties. This reality is deeply rooted in the consciousness of the Venezuelan people and embedded in the national imagination. It explains the widespread loathing of Maduro’s government, the hollowing out of popular support, and the huge voter turnout for the July 28, 2024 presidential elections by a population desperate to end what they perceive as a nightmare. It also helps explain the protests that erupted on July 29-30 against electoral fraud — mobilisations that were primarily driven by working-class neighbourhoods such as Petare, La Vega, El Valle and Catia.
I watched in astonishment as these protests were criminalised by sectors of the international left who, with chilling ease, labelled them as demonstrations by “people from the far right,” thereby legitimising the brutal repression that unfolded in the days and weeks that followed. We have seen a similar criminalisation of popular protest under right-wing presidents such as Iván Duque in Colombia and Sebastián Piñera in Chile during the huge 2019 protests. If we are to talk about nuance, then there should be deep reflection on the reasons behind the huge public discontent in Venezuela. Followers and supporters of Maduro’s government seem to always prefer to look for external scapegoats and criminalise dissenters rather than take a hard look at how and why they lost the support and connection with the population.
Sanctions have had a subsequent negative impact on the course of the crisis and indeed made recovery from Venezuela’s economic free fall more difficult. But they do not explain the root causes of the societal collapse we have lived through. Nor the fact that this entire process has unfolded within a framework that both triggers and enables wealth appropriation, and that emerged from the heart of the Bolivarian government itself. The official sanctions narrative functions as a powerful mechanism for neutralising debate and criticism — and has unfortunately been adopted by a section of the international left to avoid confronting our reality.
Clinging to narratives of the past to justify the disaster of the present
There is a persistent tendency to cling to arguments from the Chávez government era — when oil revenue was widely distributed throughout society, the nominal monthly wage was US$400, and popular participation in politics was encouraged — and transpose them onto a present reality that has dramatically changed. Several examples can be mentioned. Ellner refers to the communes, even though he himself acknowledges that under Maduro they were marginalised for years. He refers to a “renewed push” to support communes, but does not mention that this marginalisation was part of a broader process of demobilisation and hollowing out of popular organisation, which had very harmful effects, such as stripping the communal idea of its original meaning, with the concept reduced by Maduro to the CLAP food distribution system. Today, the commune proposal has been reinterpreted as an instrument to facilitate the state/government’s territorial control within a political system that has evolved into a kind of neopatrimonial model.
When people talk about the “Bolivarian process,” we are no longer referring to a system based on a national-popular alliance with an emphasis on the most disadvantaged classes. That formula has been drastically reconfigured: the alliance with the military has multiplied the presence of security forces throughout the state, while priority is given to coordinating with the main national business federation (Fedecámaras), working with evangelical church elites, strengthening partnerships with US oil corporation Chevron and Chinese capital in the Orinoco Oil Belt, and supporting bankers and new elites born from within the so-called “revolution”. Importantly, practically all capitalists operating in Venezuela are profiting from the country’s wealth under shamefully preferential conditions, with generous advantages and without any restrictions or mechanisms of accountability. Laws such as the Anti-Blockade Law, the Law on Special Economic Zones, and the Law for the Protection of Foreign Investment, along with tax exemption decrees for companies, backdoor privatisations, Chevron’s License LG41, and the agreements with the China National Petroleum Corporation, among many other examples, demonstrate this reality. What is striking is not that most leftist forces in the country — especially the most combative — have strongly opposed this surrender of national assets, but that the only left still supporting, and even applauding, all this is the pro-Maduro left.
Another example of the disconnect between an outdated narrative and the current regime is Ellner’s insistence that we must not forget the role of the (traditional) Venezuelan opposition when understanding the “scope of the war against Venezuela.” Undoubtedly, this opposition has played a part in the country’s political decay — through certain insurrectionary cycles driven by its more radical wing having further degraded political life, and with its minimal grassroots organising and very few efforts to build real alternatives. What the author fails to explain is how the government ended up crushing not only the right-wing opposition — which lies in ruins, helping explain the rise of María Corina Machado — but also any political or social force that dared oppose it. This included intervening into and splitting traditional parties, such as Acción Democrática and Copei, to impose new leaderships handpicked by the government. The end result is the kind of “opposition” we now see presented to the public. It also included the persecution and imprisonment of union members, community leaders, social organisations and NGOs. Ellner should have highlighted the arrest of grassroots Chavistas and communal organisers, the use of torture in Venezuelan prisons, the crackdown on the Communist Party of Venezuela and the chilling effect of the “Law Against Hate.” But on such sensitive issues, there are no “nuances” in his text — and that is a serious omission.
Ultimately, Ellner does not acknowledge that Venezuela today is not the Venezuela of 2017 or 2019. We face a different scenario today — one shaped by a system of power without any real checks and balances. Any analysis must evolve, just as history does.
Nuancing the destruction of a country? On the limits of the unacceptable
One of Ellner’s conclusions — in my view quite striking — is that Maduro’s mistakes were forced by Washington. This kind of argument reflects a Manichaean outlook, in which a dark, malevolent force (the US) pushes Maduro into wrongdoing. Seen this way, the other side is not truly “bad,” it is merely forced to act that way. It is the kind of reasoning you would expect from someone who follows a leader out of sheer faith. It is difficult to respond with reason to someone who portrays the Maduro government as a victim while failing to mention in the same article the victims within Venezuelan society — those produced by the regime’s decay and predatory turn. Ellner — and here I agree with Hetland — ends up constructing a narrative of justification. For example, Ellner justifies the new alliances with Fedecámaras and their policies, but says nothing about the deliberate destruction of wages or the persecution and imprisonment of workers.
Perhaps at the heart of all this is the question of the limits of the unacceptable. That there are things that quite simply no longer allow for nuance. That there are things that have come to embody the very worst of the horrors the left once spent decades denouncing. That today’s geopolitical dynamics — as abominable as they may be — are not enough to “nuance” the barbarity and devastation of a country carried out by its own government, and in the name of nothing.
Those who advocate for a supposed “critical support for Maduro” are not far removed in their logic from those who might claim critical support for El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, Argentina’s Javier Milei, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega or Russia’s Vladimir Putin. In the end, anything can be nuanced, anyone can be made a victim. Donald Trump, for instance, can be the victim of the US “Deep State”, Benjamin Netanyahu a victim of Hamas. The argument can be stretched to cover anything — but it always only serves to justify abuse. In the end, such a path can only lead us astray — into a world where we relativise barbarism and plunder, turning them into the new global “normal”. Once there, the left will have lost its way forever.
Epilogue
One of the many questions that can be raised about Venezuela is this: if that section of the international left that supports the Maduro government is fully aware of the regime’s abuses and corruption but considers it a matter of “honour” to not support traditional opposition leaders or parties, why not instead dedicate their energy, resources, support and advocacy to strengthening a left-wing opposition that might someday challenge for political power? If it is truly about preserving a leftist identity with integrity, why not build bridges with sections of the left opposition inside Venezuela? Why not help develop an alternative that is not neoliberal, but rooted in popular demands — a political project with national reach, capable of uniting diverse organisations and defending wages, workers, popular sovereignty, public education, and other historic demands?
These questions seem crucial to me and open the door to other much-needed debates.
International Children’s Day is June 1 in Ukraine, Russia, and 47 other countries. This Children’s Day, the Ukraine Solidarity Network (US) calls for the freedom and return of the tens of thousands of Ukrainian children whom Russia has kidnapped and for ending the mass starvation of millions of children in Palestine, Sudan, and other sites of widespread child hunger such as Haiti, South Sudan, and Mali.
Kremlin documents dated a week before the full scale invasion on February 18, 2022 detail plans to abduct Ukrainian children and bring them to Russia under the guise of “humanitarian evacuations.”
Ukraine has verified Russia’s deportation of 19,456 children to date, but Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab places the number of deported children closer to 35,000 as of March 19, 2025.
Putin and his Children’s Rights Commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, are under indictment by the International Criminal Court for abducting children.
Russia says it “accepted” 700,000 Ukrainian children between February 2022 and July 2023.
Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab has documented 43 Russian children’s camps housing deported children: at least 32 are explicitly for “re-education.” Ukrainian children are indoctrinated, punished for Ukrainian language and culture and forced to participate in “military-patriotic” training courses.
Abducted teenage Ukrainian boys forced to accept Russian citizenship face conscription into the Russian army to fight against their fellow Ukrainians. https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/fact-sheet-russias-kidnapping-and-re-education-of-ukraines-children/
Trump has cut funding for a program that tracks abducted Ukrainian children, and DOGE may have permanently deleted a database with crucial information.
A negotiated outcome to the war on terms other than Ukraine’s will result in an irreversible loss of Ukraine’s children and its future and irreversible harm to the children.
Russia’s war against the children of Ukraine joins the war against Palestinian children being conducted by the Zionist regime of Israel, with the full support of the Trump regime in the USA, as a ghastly crime against children and humanity.
As of this writing, every child in Gaza is severely undernourished and facing imminent death by starvation due to Israel’s having prohibited entry of food, water, and other necessities into Gaza.
According to the UN, at least 100 children have been killed or injured every day in Gaza since Israeli strikes resumed on March 18, even as the United States underscores continued support for Israel.
From October 2023 to Palestine Children’s Day on April 5, the Palestinian Ministry of Education on Saturday said more than 17,000 children had been killed in Gaza, about 1,100 children had been detained by the Israeli army, and about 39,000 others had lost one or both parents.
Israel detained 1,200 Palestinian children from the occupied West Bank in the same period.
More than 9,500 Palestinians including women and over 350 children are currently held in Israeli prisons under harsh conditions.
Since October 2023, around 1.9 million people – including thousands of children – have gone through repeated forced displacement amid bombardment, fear, and loss according to UNRWA.
Israel has killed more than 61,700 Palestinians and wounded 118,366 in Gaza since October 2023, most of them women and children. Thousands of others missing under the rubble are presumed dead.
The atrocities that Palestinian children have undergone since October 2023 are but a continuation of decades of deprivation and attacks by Israel.
Sadly, the horrific civil war in Sudan may have even deadlier results than either Russia’s war against Ukraine or Israel’s war against Palestine.
Sudan is becoming the world’s largest hunger crisis in recent history as the ongoing protracted famine puts hundreds of thousands at imminent risk of death.
24.6 million people are acutely food insecure and 638,000 face catastrophic levels of hunger.
Over 1 in 3 children face acute malnutrition.
12.5 million people have been forced from their homes.
The World Food Program (WFP) is supporting over 3 million Sudanese people each month, but the Trump administration’s cuts to foreign aid will cause radical cuts in this aid. WFP spent $9.8 billion on aid last year, and nearly half of the funds were contributed by the U.S. This year, it’s facing a projected 40% reduction in funding.
Israel must immediately end its blockade and its war on Palestine!
All US medical and food aid for children and others in Sudan and everywhere else must be immediately restored!
The Ukraine Solidarity Network (US) calls on the US government and the international community to insist that Russia adhere to international law and return Ukrainian children to Ukraine and to sanction Israel diplomatically, economically, and militarily until its food blockade of Gaza is lifted. We also call on the US government to restore its funding to the World Food Program to feed hungry children in Sudan and other famine areas.
We call on the United States and European nations to cease providing weapons and other help to Israel’s war on Palestinian children and adults and send military aid to Ukraine for its self-defense.
In the face of the ongoing genocide unfolding before our eyes in Gaza, with Human Rights Watch warning “Latest Israeli Plan Inches Closer to Extermination,” it is not surprising that people with decent instincts would feel desperate to do something to stop the carnage. But the path chosen by Elias Rodriguez, who shot and killed two staff members of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, was not the solution. On the contrary, it was a tragedy and wrong on multiple levels.
Most people are not absolute pacifists, but believe that there are times where violence is morally justified. But the moral bar for using violence is a high one, and violence must be focused on those who bear particular responsibility for harm. That’s why international humanitarian law makes a crucial distinction between combatants and noncombatants—a distinction that has been violated by Israel on a vast scale. Low-level embassy employees are not combatants nor are they policymakers. Killing them was morally wrong. That they worked for the foreign ministry of a state engaged in mass crimes was condemnable, but not a capital offense.
Moreover, to be just, violence must offer the best chance of stopping the harm. Yet there is no chance at all that the deaths of the staffers will cause Israel or its American enablers to reverse course. On the contrary, the incident is already being used to justify further repression of the pro-Palestine movement.
From the reports of the shooting, one wonders whether Rodriguez even knew for certain that his victims worked for the embassy. The crowd leaving the event at the Capital Jewish Museum included diplomats, young Jewish professionals, and keynote speakers from two aid organizations, one of which suffered the loss of three volunteers in Gaza, killed, in the organization’s words, “when their residence was attacked by Israeli forces without any warning.”
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the “terrorist who cruelly gunned [the pair] down did so for one reason and one reason alone—he wanted to kill Jews.” This is preposterous. Nothing in Rodriguez’s “Explication“ or his social media history that has been extensively pored through shows that he held any animus toward Jews qua Jews rather than towards the Israeli state and its terrible crimes. It’s hard to imagine that he would have acted as he did in the absence of Israeli atrocities that have reached the level of genocide. He shouted his support of Palestinians, not antisemitic slogans. On his window in Chicago he had a sign reading “Tikkun Olam means FREE PALESTINE.”
But still, by targeting a mostly Jewish meeting organized by the American Jewish Committee held in a Jewish space without an explicitly pro-Israel agenda, Rodriguez has blurred what should be a bright line between anti-Jewish and anti-Israel actions. Israel apologists have long been working to deny the distinction; unfortunately Rodriguez has muddied it further. Whatever his intentions, his victims will not just be the two staffers, but the people of Palestine. As a result of his actions, attention will be diverted from the ongoing mass slaughter in Gaza to the deaths of the young couple.
The pro-Palestinian movement had been making important strides in recent weeks. The latest Gallup poll showed that fewer than half of Americans support Israel, and that among those who identify as Democrats, Palestinians were supported over Israel by an incredible 59% to 21%. According to an Economist-YouGov poll, a plurality of voters want to decrease military aid to Israel, particularly among Democrats. And though Congress lags far behind the public, opposition has been slowly growing there to the U.S. blank check to Israel and to the enforced starvation.
Now, however, the killing of the staffers will be used to try to discredit the Palestinian cause. There will be all sorts of further clamping down against activists: more weaponized charges of antisemitism, more surveillance, more arrests, more deportations. This repression will not be new. But it will have more public support than before. Already the print New York Times has run a story on its front page:
“Attack Tangles Pro-Palestinian Movement’s Path”
“The slaying of two Israeli Embassy workers cast[s] a harsh spotlight on pro-Palestinian groups in the United States. Activists, who were already being scrutinized, could face further pushback.”
And on the op-ed page, they offered up a piece by the media director at the Consulate General of Israel in New York with the print title “This Is the Tragic Consequence of Conflating Jews and Israel”—ignoring the strong presence of Jews and Jewish organizations in the movement for Palestinian liberation.
To be sure, terrorism has sometimes “worked,” particularly when carried out by powerful states (think of Guernica or Hiroshima). But the historical record of terror by Palestinians has been to strengthen the Israeli right. Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians in the mid-1990s or during the Second Intifada, or rockets fired at Sderot, led not to justice but to more repression, the disappearance of the Israeli left, and greater racist intolerance among the Israeli public. Likewise, October 7 did not advance the Palestinian cause, but set it back horribly. And the assassinations of low-level Israeli officials in the United States will certainly not help in furthering Palestinian interests.
The survival of the Palestinian people will alas depend on political change in the United States. That will require the growth of the U.S. pro-Palestine movement, building support as widely as possible. Such a movement needs to maintain its moral clarity—both for its own sake and to have any chance of success.
This spoof image found on Facebook, based on Trump’s “Liberation Day” presentation of new U.S. tariffs, only spplying them to other-worldly places, captures the sense of astonishment in the public as he announced them, and then post-poned them, them, and then restored them, and then….
Trump’s April 2025 tariff blitz ignited market chaos and deepened rifts within his own coalition. Beneath the turmoil lies a battle between technocrats, ultranationalists, and anti-imperial populists, all vying to reshape—or destroy—American global power.
On April 2, 2025, Donald Trump declared a “Day of Liberation” and slapped massive tariffs on most countries—excluding Russia but including a 50% tariff on Lesotho. The standard Left argument is that Trump’s tariffs represent capital’s warfare against the working class in response to the crisis of global capitalism. Of course, there’s some validity to that view, but it tends to operate at an excessively high level of abstraction.
More immediately, it doesn’t explain the ferocious backlash to tariffs from multiple fractions of capital, both within and beyond the Trump coalition. After the tariff tsunami, Elon Musk called Trump’s economic advisor Peter Navarro “a moron and dumber than a sack of bricks.” Meanwhile, liberal mainstream media outlets screamed bloody murder, portraying Trump not only as dumb but deranged. The frenzy only intensified when the stock market meltdown carried over into the bond market, which, as financial orthodoxy tells us, isn’t supposed to happen.
Trump responded by postponing most of the tariffs for 90 days, even as he ramped up the trade war with China. In just over a week, Wall Street went ballistic, the dollar rapidly devalued, Trump’s approval ratings tanked, and much of the Republican Party—and key fractions of capital—went into panic mode, even as they remained terrified of crossing him. These dynamics remain ongoing.
Trump’s tariffs are not merely erratic protectionist gestures. Rather, they form part of a blunt and confused arsenal aimed at dismantling post-Second World War US imperialism and replacing it with a brutal new form of nationalist global domination—one stripped of the trappings of “soft power” such as USAID. This multi-sided project emerges from factions within the New MAGA Coalition, and takes different—and often contradictory—forms.
Understanding these contradictions in their specificity is essential, not just for critique but for posing questions about new possibilities for organizing and alliance-building—not only in South Africa, but working towards a concrete internationalism, a topic to which we’ll return later.
It also encompasses elements of the petty bourgeoisie and working class that go beyond Trump’s earlier mostly white cross-class base, as the late Mike Davis described in Catalyst in 2017. Most notably, sizable Latino communities in some US regions have come to identify with MAGA—vividly documented by Paola Ramos in her recent book on the Latino far right. Another notable addition in 2024: disaffected, mainly young Black men who joined the MAGA coalition.
What knits this awkward coalition together is a powerful anti-woke sentiment and a ferocious opposition to liberal DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) initiatives that proliferated after the nationwide Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020. David Walsh describes “woke” as a “catch-all specter that could variously connote the ravages of state planning, the anarchism of street protests, or the godlessness of modern secular society—not an empty vessel, exactly, but a foil and common enemy against which a political coalition of often diametrically opposed interests could congeal,” as he writes in Boston Review.
Also traveling under the anti-woke banner is unfiltered racism, patriarchy, and vicious heteronormativity—especially targeting trans people—all of which underscore the limits of elitist liberalism, as discussed on The Dig. These brutalities are now wrapped in a (mostly white) Christian Nationalist package that stretches back to Trump 1.0, but is being significantly re-elaborated in Trump 2.0.
What also distinguishes Trump 2.0 is its rooting in a far more coordinated and organized project of dismantling and privatizing the state, one that’s been in formation for several years. Its blueprint is a 920-page document titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation. It has come to be known as Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project.
During the campaign, Trump denied having read it (probably true), but the steaming pile of executive orders he gleefully signed post-inauguration came straight out of it and continues to do so. Unlike Trump 1.0, Trump 2.0 has determined and coherent operatives behind it. They’re driving the juggernaut of destruction—most notably Russell Vought, head of the powerful Office of Management and Budget—despite the clown-car nature of most of Trump’s cabinet. Even if Musk were to depart for Mars brandishing his chainsaw, the scaffolding of Project 2025 appears firmly in place, at least on the surface.
But look a little closer and you’ll find that this scaffolding had a fatal weakness from the start. Scroll down to Chapter 26 on trade, and two sharply opposed visions emerge.
In the section on “fair trade,” Navarro—Trump’s key pro-tariff advisor in both administrations—concludes that “America gets fleeced every day in the global marketplace, both by a predatory Communist China and by an institutionally unfair and nonreciprocal WTO.” Focusing on the large trade deficit by which the US imports significantly more than it exports, he asks: “Might America even lose a broader hot war because it sent its defense industrial base abroad on the wings of a persistent trade deficit?” The answer, for Navarro, is clear: tariffs are imperative to “restore American greatness, both economically and militarily,” by bringing manufacturing back home.
In the opposing section, “The Case for Free Trade,” Kent Lassman presents the classic conservative argument against protectionism. Declaring that “American manufacturing is currently at an all-time high,” he slams tariffs as a lose-lose-lose scenario: the tariff raiser loses access to affordable goods, the target country loses export markets, and retaliatory tariffs punish the instigator yet again. He also warns of the hidden costs of tariff dodging. For Lassman, recent departures from free trade have damaged the US economy and “weakened alliances that are necessary to contain threats from Russia and China.” He calls for reaffirming “openness, dynamism, and free trade” as the pillars of continued US dominance into the next century.
These splits and contradictions have carried over into the tariff wars erupting within the MAGA coalition itself. There are now two distinct pro-tariff projects, both aimed at reconfiguring US imperialism. One is the so-called Mar-a-Lago Accord, led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The other is a far more radical vision pursued by Steve Bannon and the wide array of popular forces he continues to mobilize.
Before unpacking these competing projects and their wider implications, it’s important to sketch briefly the key contours of US imperialism. The main pillars of American global power are a specific configuration of finance capital—with the US dollar as global reserve currency—backed by overwhelming military force.
Because key commodities such as oil and gold are priced in US dollars, all countries must hold dollars. Small open economies like South Africa operate at a distinct disadvantage. Meanwhile, the US can accumulate massive debt by issuing Treasury Bonds—a privilege no other country enjoys. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has spent over $30 trillion more than it has taken in.
China has played a key role in underwriting this system, using export earnings to purchase US debt, thereby lowering the cost of borrowing. At the same time, shrinking employment, stagnant wages, and rising inequality since the 1980s pushed much of the US population into a frenzy of consumption and spiraling personal debt. This dynamic relies on large trade deficits—precisely what significant factions of the MAGA coalition see as the greatest threat to American power.
Back in 2019, historian Adam Tooze asked, “Is this the end of the American Century?” His answer: not quite. Financial and military power remained intact. But what had collapsed was any claim that American democracy could serve as a political model. What we were facing, he wrote, was “a radical disjunction between the continuity of basic structures of power and their political legitimation.” When Joe Biden took office in 2021, he sought to resuscitate the liberal international order—an order whose cruel hypocrisies are now starkly exposed in US support for Israel’s war on Gaza, as Adam Hanieh has brilliantly analyzed. Trump 2.0, through its tariffs and trade wars, is in effect attacking the financial pillar of US global power with a sledgehammer—even if this is not quite what some of his pro-tariff advisors intended.
Tariffing the end of empire?
Unlike Navarro and others who see the trade deficit as the central existential threat to the US, the authors of the so-called Mar-a-Lago Accord are primarily concerned with what they regard as the gross overvaluation of the dollar. Their aim, per a New York Times report, is to use:
tariffs and other strong-arm tactics to force the world to take a radical step: weakening the dollar via currency agreements. This devaluation, the theory goes, would make US exports more competitive, put pressure on China, and increase manufacturing in the United States.
In addition to Treasury Secretary Bessent, a key figure is Stephen Miran, who Trump appointed as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors in March 2025. Just after the 2024 election, Miran published “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System.” In dense, economistic language that Trump has almost certainly never read, the 41-page document lays out the justifications and strategies for devaluing the dollar using threats of tariffs and defense pact withdrawals—country by country.
In short, Bessent and Miran envisage tariffs as part of a coercive negotiation strategy: to pressure countries into raising their currency values relative to the dollar, and to relocate key industries to the US. These include sectors deemed vital to national security, such as semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and military equipment. While the “User’s Guide” insists the dollar must remain the dominant currency, it also acknowledges growing efforts to find alternatives, such as the Chinese renminbi or a potential BRICS currency. Though such efforts are deemed doomed to fail, Miran asserts, “alternative reserve assets like gold or cryptocurrencies will likely benefit.”
The Mar-a-Lago Accord, when read alongside the “User’s Guide,” affirms the substantial advantages of the US’s reserve currency status—cheap borrowing and global power projection among them. But it argues that the costs are now outweighing the benefits. “As the economic burdens on America grow with global GDP outpacing American GDP,” Miran writes, “America finds it more difficult to underwrite global security, because the current account deficit grows and our ability to produce equipment becomes hollowed out.” Hence, the push for policies that “recapture some of the benefit our reserve provision conveys to trading partners and connect this economic burden sharing with defense burden sharing.”
Even so, the “User’s Guide” issues a sharp warning against disruption and volatility: “There is a path by which the Trump Administration can reconfigure the global trading and financial systems to America’s benefit, but it is narrow, and will require careful planning, precise execution, and attention to steps to minimize adverse consequences.”
Naturally, the preposterous tariffs that Trump unveiled on April 2 (reputedly dreamed up by Navarro) run directly counter to these cautious recommendations—leaving Bessent and Miran to bluster about the President’s “extraordinary negotiating skills.” As the markets melted down and Trump threatened to sack the chair of the Federal Reserve while ramping up attacks on China, Bessent increasingly found himself in the awkward position of having to leash the rampaging orange bulldog.
In the ensuing economic, political, and military chaos, the technocratic pipe dream of an orderly reconfiguration of US imperial power has imploded, leaving the remains of the Mar-a-Lago Accord scattered across the manicured grounds of the White House. What persists, however, is a hard core of MAGA support for a far more radical popular project: one aimed at dismantling US imperialism as we’ve known it.
Nationalist-populist opposition to US Empire
In a striking profile from October 2024, James Pogue shows how Stephen Bannon “has turned his immensely influential War Room show … into a cross between a daily troop muster and a policy training school, which he uses to tutor millions of “peasants,” as he likes to phrase his target demographic, on how this global power structure actually functions.”
He quotes Bannon insisting, “To be serious, you’ve got to be anti-imperial.” People are waking up, he claims: “Once you talk about how the system is financed, they are fucking furious. A working-class audience can understand that something’s not right with the system, but they can’t put their finger on it.” Calling his listeners “the army of the awakened,” Bannon has made it his mission to lay it all bare, Pogue reports.
Before unpacking the substance of this anti-imperialism, some context matters. Bannon is not best understood as a singular “great man” but as a figurehead within a global network of right-wing Christian nationalist forces, rooted in the US and deeply embedded in the MAGA bloc. He’s also closely allied with Peter Navarro—both were jailed in 2024 for contempt after refusing to testify in the January 6 congressional inquiry. While Navarro maintains Trump’s ear despite mockery from parts of MAGA, Bannon is far more articulate and intellectually potent, and actively shapes the movement’s populist base.
In an article from 2020, I outlined how Bannon was instrumental in constructing the popular forces that helped propel Trump’s 2016 victory. First, he hijacked the anti-Obama Tea Party from the Koch brothers and delivered it to Trump. Second, he played a major role in stoking backlash to bipartisan immigration reform efforts in 2013—linking xenophobia to anti-trade sentiment and mobilizing it before these issues had fully entered the political mainstream. In a 2017 interview, Bannon recalled saying:
I said, look, trade is number 100 on the list of issues, nobody ever talks about it, and immigration is like two or three, but if we ran a campaign that really focused on the economic issues in this country and really got people to understand how trade is so important, and immigration are inextricably linked … we could really set this thing on fire.
Trump, he claims, became the mouthpiece for these ideas by “[deploying] a very plain-spoken vernacular.”
Third, Bannon seized control of key media outlets—including Breitbart News, massively funded by the Mercer family—which he used to destroy enemies both inside and outside the GOP, while pushing his conservative, anti-globalist, traditionalist nationalism. By the 2016 election, Breitbart had far outstripped Fox News, dominating the right-wing media ecosystem. Today, Bannon reportedly believes he wields more power through War Room than he ever did as Trump’s campaign architect or White House strategist.
The “anti-imperial common sense” Bannon communicates to his “peasant” audience includes—but far exceeds—Navarro’s tariffs, which he supports. It also goes well beyond the Mar-a-Lago Accord. Rather than merely twisting global systems of finance and military power in America’s favor, Bannon and his fellow hyper-nationalists seek to obliterate altogether the post-1980s form of US imperialism.
What exactly does this anti-imperialism consist of? It has a solid—and glittering—material base. Bannon’s worldview is reportedly detailed in a multi-volume report titled The End of the Dollar Empire, available only via the Birch Gold Group, a firm that offers not just a gold-backed ETF but actual physical gold. Downloading the report requires entanglement with Birch Gold, so I passed. But listening to War Room podcasts, one can’t miss the constant exhortations to secure your IRA with Birch Gold in anticipation of a dollar collapse.
Bannon isn’t focused on trade deficits or dollar valuation alone. He’s obsessed with the entire dollar-based global order. As Pogue notes, it creates a perverse military incentive: “It lets us finance huge expenditures on hypercomplex weapons and allows us to toss off hundreds of billions of dollars to support Ukraine’s and Israel’s wars”—even as it hollows out America’s ability to manufacture basic war matériel. Biden’s attempt to weaponize the dollar during the Ukraine war failed to crush the ruble, and raised a new alarm: that others might now see it’s possible to abandon the dollar entirely.
Pogue also interviews Samuel Finlay of the IM-1776 project, whose views align with Bannon’s. Finlay emphasizes “rootedness” and “tradition,” which he connects to a hatred of global capital and resistance to the military-industrial complex—a position that directly contradicts decades of Republican orthodoxy. People like Finlay, Pogue writes, have come to the same “awakening” Bannon is fomenting: that the system has betrayed those who believed in and served it—leaving them with NAFTA, fentanyl, and an elite that views their values as backward and dangerous.
War Room weaves these insights into a broader narrative. Disaffected veterans and others are fed a critique of “the lords of Wall Street” and “the apartheid state of Silicon Valley.” The message: elites own everything and have sold out to the Chinese Communist Party—thus funding the very forces attacking America. According to Bannon, we are now in a “Time of War,” one that dwarfs debates over trade, inflation, or price hikes.
So, how do the wild gyrations of post–Liberation Day fit into the Bannon-Navarro worldview? From their perspective, the unraveling of the “Dollar Empire” since April 2 looks like progress. As Pogue notes, Bannon and fellow populists across the West have come to embrace a multipolar world modeled on Russia’s strategic vision—one that displaces the American-led order Bannon believes has ravaged the US. On an April 25 episode of War Room Battleground, Bannon claimed that we are “moving toward a new geopolitics of blocs.”
Yet the very Americans Bannon sees as crushed by the Dollar Empire are also most exposed to its chaotic dismantling. First, prices for the cheap imports that sustain the US economy—and low-income Americans in particular—are spiking. Second, as the dollar declines as reserve currency, government spending will be slashed. And who bears that burden? Early signs include proposals to gut Medicaid to help fund tax breaks for the rich. Third, rising automation will sharply undermine promises that reindustrialization will yield secure, high-wage jobs and revive devastated regions.
In short, the idea that a protectionist, isolationist, national capitalism—mashing up xenophobia, anti-globalism, Christian nationalism, and anti-elite rage—can deliver liberation is just as much of a pipedream as the Mar-a-Lago Accord.
Which brings me back to the central claim: understanding Trump’s tariffs as blunt weapons aimed at either reconfiguring or shattering US empire matters deeply for the Left, both in the US and globally. What we need is not nostalgia for the collapsing liberal order, nor Kamala-style “politics of joy” in the face of atrocities in Gaza. Instead, we need what Stefan Kipfer calls “concrete internationalism.” He develops the analysis with reference to current conditions in Canada, but with much broader transnational relevance. Distinguishing between nationalism and national-popular democratic projects, he insists that “left national-popular projects can offer alternatives to nationalism only if they are components within larger internationalist strategies” that reject the tendency of all nationalisms “to demote emancipatory social questions of class, gender, and race.” In South Africa, we are, of course, sharply aware of these dangers.
Trump’s tariff debacle and the ensuing meltdown have exposed the fragilities of the liberal international order, the absurdities and devastations of global capitalist dynamics, and the dangers of resurgent nationalisms and forms of fascism. Grappling with the limits and contradictions of a Bannonite “anti-imperial common sense” can help, I hope, to make space not only for protest and resistance, but also for envisaging and building toward a very different project of concrete socialist internationalism.
Please Donate or Subscribe to New Politics!
The New Politics Summer 2026 issue will soon be in the hands of subscribers, featuring articles on Democracy versus Degeneration in the United States (with contributions by Dan La Botz, Ellen Schrecker on McCarthyism Then and Now interviewed by Elizabeth Rapaport, Ben Silverman on the fascism debate, Samuel Farber on free speech, Samuel Barney on rural prisons, and Raoul Cansino and Bill Kelly on nativism), Imperialism Around the World (with articles by Lisbeth Moya González on Cuba, Husam Mahjoub on Sudan, Siyavash Shahabi and imperialism and the working class, and Matt Benson on the Mapuche in Chile), interviews on labor struggles and Russian political prisoners, a history of the International Socialists, review essays by Frieda Afary on AI, Javier Sethness on Western Marxism, and Peter Drucker on Molly Crabapple, as well as reviews on Ukraine, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, white rage, South Asia, and Afghanistan, plus a letter on women under the Taliban.
You can help us by making your tax-deductible donation here. Or by subscribing (see options here). Or by doing both. If you’ve already done so, you can close this annoying box with the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve helped us to persist in defending and exploring “socialism from below.”
