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  • American Unions and Workers Confront Trump’s Savage Attack

    American Unions and Workers Confront Trump’s Savage Attack

    Tens of thousands marched in New York City on April 5 as part of the national “Hands Off” demonstration against President Donald Trump. Few unions turned out in New York City, but the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the union of workers of the City University of New York did.

    President Donald Trump has launched a vicious, multifaceted attack on American workers of all sorts and workers are beginning to respond, but both the working class and the unions are divided, making it difficult to organize and carry out a unified response.

    Millions of people in all 50 states, joined 1,600 demonstrations in large cities and small towns to protest against President Donald Trump and his henchman billionaire Elon Musk on April 5, with a number of small solidarity demonstrations in European cities. The “Hands Off” demonstrations, the largest anti-Trump protests yet, demanded that Trump keep his hands off democracy, human rights, reproductive rights, Social Security, Medicaid, public schools, immigrants, and LGBT people. In New York City, where I joined the protest in the drizzle, some 50,000 people took part in a spirited march with many creative home-made signs and banners. I saw signs reading: “Hands off Our Planet,” “Disappearing People for Speech = Fascism,” and “Hands Off Our Bodies, Our Democracy, Our Freedom, Our Constitution.” And scattered through the demonstration a few signs in support of Ukraine, though fewer addressed the Palestinian genocide.

    The demonstrations were called by a variety of organizations, including the Democratic Party groups like Indivisible, workers’ groups such as the Federal Unionists Network, and environmental, religious, human rights, and civil rights groups. Yet in New York City, the largest unions such as the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, with many Black members, failed to turn out their ranks. An exception was the union of workers of the City University of New York. Most unions failed to mobilize their members anywhere, though Federal workers, many recently fired, did join the protests.

    The NYC protest was overwhelmingly white, with only a small number of Black, participants in a city where Blacks make up 20%, Latinos 28%, and Asians 15% of the population. Some Latinos may have stayed home because of fear of being detained and deported, as Trump is now engaged in a massive deportation campaign. Some Black influencers on social media told their followers to stay home, that the march was not their affair. The low level of participation of Black people was an issue almost everywhere.

    These protests were a significant step forward, but the big unions are still not really in the fight and there is no common leadership and no consensus on whether the Democrats or mass protests represent the future. The left has only a small presence and plays little role so far.

    A protestor at April 5 “Hands Off” demonstration in New York City.

    Trump’s Attack on Labor

    Donald Trump has launched an unprecedented attack on the American working class, threatening dozens of unions and millions of workers. The assault on workers takes many forms. Trump is threatening to deport 20 million undocumented immigrants, though most experts say there are only 11 million in the country. To carry out these deportations he has increased the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement police and also the Border Patrol officers.

    Among others they have detained, these officers have been rounding up and deporting hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members, often identified on the basis of their tattoos. In doing so Trump has often denied immigrants due process and has violated U.S. law and court orders. Many undocumented immigrants now live in fear and often restrict their own movements to avoid the agents, Trump has also targeted foreign students who participated in rallies in solidarity with Palestine, having them arrested and planning to deport them, among them Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil whose case has become a cause célèbre. Yet according to recent polls, 48% of Americans approve of Trump’s immigration policy while 44% disapprove, meaning that many native-born American workers are in favor of deporting the undocumented immigrants.

    Trump has also gone after federal workers. His hatchet man Elon Musk is in the process of carrying out the firing of 13 percent of the country’s 2.4 million civilian workers, that is, 312,000 people. Some of these cuts will have a crippling effect on the agencies involved, such as the 24% of all Health and Human Services employees. Some of these workers have been summarily fired without notice and show up to find their electronic badges don’t work and their government email accounts have been shut down. Others receive emails late at night or early in the morning the day of their termination. Some workers accept buyouts, some combination of severance and pension. Millions of peoples’ lives, the workers, their families, and the people they served are being disrupted and, in some cases, economically ruined in the process. Still, according to recent polls, 40% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the federal government.

    At the same time, Trump has by fiat abolished the collective bargaining rights of as many as one million federal workers in ten federal departments, effectively destroying their labor unions. The unions will no longer be able to collect from these workers millions of dollars in dues used to pay union staff and run union programs. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents 800,00 federal workers, is challenging Trump’s outlawing of the unions in court. Just as when Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 striking Professional Air Traffic Controllers in 1981, so too Trump’s attack on federal unions and workers will encourage private corporations to follow suit, seeing if they can get rid of their unionized workers.

    In addition, Trump’s tariffs on dozens of countries, affecting billions of dollars in commerce in many commodities, which he claims will bring back industries and jobs to the United States, have resulted in a trade war that has already had a negative impact on American workers. For example, the car company Stellantis is temporarily laying off 900 workers at five U.S. plants and pausing production at one assembly plant in Mexico and another in Canada, With the disruption of commerce and the breaking of global supply chains other companies will also be forced to shut plants and lay off workers.

    Finally, Trump’s trade war frightened investors leading to a serious decline in the stock market, which was reflected in the value of many 401-k retirement or pension plans. That is, millions of workers in the last week or two saw their personal pension accounts declining. While Trump may not have intended to attack these workers in this way, it is another blow to their well-being. And the tariffs and trade war mean that basic commodities such as food, clothing, and housing will now be more expensive, inflation that has already shown up in economic reports.

    A protestor at the April 5 Hands Off protest in New York City

    U.S. Labor Basics

    What is the American working class today? The United States has a population of 340.1 million people, making it the third largest nation in the world in terms of population following India and China. Of those, about 144.5 earn wages or salaries. Some 78.7 million are hourly wage earners, the core of the working class. Of these about 12 million are manufacturing workers and another six million have blue collar jobs. Unionization rates are low. In 2024, 9.9 percent of wage and salary workers were in labor unions. In the public sector, union membership represented 32.2 percent, while in the private sector only 5.9 percent of workers were unionized. (Public sector unionization was devastated this year, as we will discuss below.) About 8% of the U.S. workforce is made up of undocumented workers. Workers who are Black, Latino, or young tend to generally earn lower wages.

    There were about 16 million workers in labor unions in the United States in January 2024. Some 15 million of these workers belong to 63 unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor – Congress of Industrial Organizations. Teachers’ unions are among the largest unions in the country: The National Education Association (NEA) has over 3 million members and the American Federation of Teachers has 1.7 million. The other two very large unions are the Service Employees International Union whick has 1.9 million and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters which has 1.4 million. Several other unions have over 500,000 members.

    There has been some increase in strikes over the last decade, peaking in 2023 and 2024. In 2024 some 271,500 workers were involved in major work stoppages. Yet recent strike levels don’t begin to compare with the national strike waves in the periods of 1933-40, 1946-48, or 1969-71 when millions of workers struck, paralyzing various industries. The labor upsurge of the late 1960s and early 1970s ended in the 1980s as conservative Republicans and Democrats inaugurated then the neoliberal period of the 1980s and 90s undermined unions and thwarted strikes so that labor activism declined for over the next 40 years.

    The Labor Bureaucracy

    The shrinkage of unions and their declining militancy can be attributed in large measure to the labor officialdom, that is the elected and appointed staff of the labor unions. The success of labor unions in organizing in the 1930s—both the AFL craft unions and the CIO industrial unions—combine with government regulation of many industries made it possible for unions to hire permanent full-time staff and to pay them decent salaries. When the U.S. entered into World War II, the labor officials collaborated with the corporations and the government to increase production, the result was the continued expansion of the labor movement and its increasing stability and legitimacy—but also a profound conservatizing of the union officials.

    Union officials became accustomed to negotiating with employers and working with government officials to increase the productivity in which workers often shared. Unions won not only wage increases but also acquired health benefits and pensions. But throughout the period from the 1950s to the 1980s, only about a third of all American workers had labor unions and enjoyed those benefits. In the unionized industries, officials tended to trade wages for working conditions, giving employers control of the shop floor. Meanwhile, the union officials congealed into a bureaucracy with high salaries, often ten or even twenty times those of workers in the industries they represented. They also had the perquisites of office including use of union cars, expense accounts, and personal pension plans, some so generous that they were called “golden parachutes.” Upon retirement, some union officials went to work for the companies they had negotiated with or as government arbitrators. Things were even worse in a few national unions—the East Coast International LongShore Association (ILA), the Hotel and Restaurant Workers (HERE), and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT)–Mafia dominated, violent, and corrupt unions where some officers received salaries of $500,000. The labor bureaucracy thus became a caste with interests quite separate from those of the working class as a whole.

    The bureaucratic caste of labor officials—the labor bureaucracy—developed its own ideology as an expression of its location as negotiator between rank-and-file workers and the employers. This was true whether one talked of the progressive unions like the United auto Workers (UAW) or the corrupt Teamsters union. Officials came to believe that because of their intimate knowledge of the workers, the employers, and government officials, they knew what was best for the working class. So the officials, not the workers, should make the decisions about whether or not to strike and what should go into the contract. These union officials, fearing to harm their own position, tended to seek labor peace rather than conflict and class struggle. Most union contracts contained clauses requiring union officials to prevent work stoppages or strikes during the life of the contract. At the same time, it is true that many local union officials were honest people who attempted to improve the lives of their members, but their national union officials often made that difficult.

    So when in the 1980s the U.S. government promoted neoliberalism, a more ruthless capitalism, the corporations carried out a reorganization of labor, with widespread plant closing, and companies moved some plants to the non-union U.S. South or abroad, and the corporations introduced the new so-called “Japanese management” of the production process, but the labor bureaucracy had no interest in fighting the corporations, no practice in doing so, and little trust and support from the ranks. From the 1980s to the 2000s, union membership fell from 35% to 10% and strikes virtually disappeared from the U.S. labor scene.

    Labor Politics in the U.S.

    The United States has never had a large Socialist, Communist, or Labor Party. Since the early twentieth century, The American Federation of Labor (AFL) and its affiliates tended to support the Democratic Party. During the labor upheaval of the 1930s, largely led by the Socialists and particularly the Communists, some unions experimented with local labor parties, but both the AFL craft unions and the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) industrial unions supported the Democrats. In the 1940s the AFL, the CIO, and the Socialist and Communist Parties backed Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt who was elected to four four-year terms as president.

    During the late 1940s and 1950s, Congress, over a presidential veto, passed the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 that limited labor unions power. At the same time, the media, the government, and employers carried out an anti-Communist crusade that drove many Communists out of their jobs and out of their unions. In 1955 the AFL and the CIO merged and the new AFL-CIO supported the Democratic Party from then on. The organizing and strikes of the 1930s and 40s brought about 34% of wage laborers into the union movement, but left two-thirds of workers with no union and little political influence. All of this led to the creation of what we call business unionism, that is unions that work to accommodate business and themselves behave like businesses, accumulating millions of dollars in property, bank accounts, and other assets.

    The 1960s and 1970s saw important new union organizing among teachers and other public employees as well as among farm workers in California. At the same time rank-and-file workers in many industries—telephone, auto, trucking, and the post office–rebelled against employers and often their unions too. Young radicals from the civil rights, student, and feminist movements became socialists of various sorts, mostly Maoists, and Trotskyists, got industrial jobs and became involved in the unions. They played a role in organizing the rank-and-file workers movements of that era.

    The International Socialists (IS), Third Camp socialists who opposed both capitalism and the bureaucratic Communism of the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Korea and Cuba helped to organize Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and to found Labor Notes, a publication and labor organizing center. Those last two organizations survived the collapse of the left in the 1980s. Labor Notes continues to play a central role in orienting worker activists, educating and helping to organize them, though it does not represent a significant political tendency in the unions as a whole.

    In June 1998, Tony Mazzocchi, vice-president of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW), other reform-minded officials, and some of those leftist labor activists came together to organize the Labor Party. Some 1,400 delegates from several large and important unions representing two million union members met in Cleveland to create the new party. But they could not agree on actually running candidates either at the founding convention or later, fearing that their party would take votes from the Democratic Party and lead to the election of a Republican. So the party atrophied and died.

    The Labor Bureaucracy Today

    The union officials today are quite heterogeneous. Most are business unionists who have tied their fortunes to union careers and the union structures and to the Democratic Party. Some are corrupt. And a very few are reformers. Two of the leading officials who have been playing a central role in labor activism and in politics provide a clear sense of the problems faced by workers and unions today.

    Teamsteer President Sean O’Brien

    Sean O’Brien was elected president of the Teamsters in 2022 with the support of the long-time union reform organization Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). In 2022 and 23, O’Brien attracted the support of TDU, Democratic Socialists of America, and other leftists with the implication that he planned to strike UPS. In the end he negotiated a contract with both strengths and weaknesses, criticized by some union members and sme on the left. Then in July of 2024 O’Brien broke ranks with the rest of organized labor and accepted an invitation from Donald Trump to speak at the Republican National Convention, for which he was roundly criticized by other union leaders and the left. Even though the Teamsters made no presidential endorsement, it was understood that O’Brien was backing Trump.

    After the election, O’Brien recommended and Trump nominated Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a Republican congresswoman from Oregon with nothing special to recommend her. Upon being chosen she made the preposterous promise, “I’ll work tirelessly to help President Trump put the American Worker First.” While O’Brien claimed her appointment as a victory for the Teamsters and American workers, in fact the Secretary of Labor has little power and she has and she will do nothing for the American working class.”

    Another important official in the unions today, Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW), led the union in a 45-day strike involving 50,000 workers against the Big Three U.S. auto companies—Ford, Stellantis, and General Motors—and in the contract negotiated in October 2023 won not only large wage increases and the elimination of tiers but also encroached on the corporations’ control over their plants and the industry. The United States has not seen a union leader of a strike of industrial workers like this for decades. Fain seemed to embody a new unionism that could change the direction of the American labor movement.

    Then in March of this year, Fain declared that the UAW supported Trump’s tariffs on foreign cars. He said, this “signals a return to policies that prioritize the workers who build this country — rather than the greed of ruthless corporations.” And that “ending the race to the bottom in the auto industry starts with fixing our broken trade deals, and the Trump administration has made history with today’s actions.”

    Yet Fain retained his critical faculties. On March 28 Fain issued a statement saying, “Yesterday, President Trump signed an order that tramples on the union rights of more than a million federal workers, stripping them of their ability to negotiate over their working conditions. The 1 million members of the UAW stand with federal workers and their union, AFGE, against the attacks from the Trump administration.”

    As the cases of O’Brien and Fain make evident, there is not yet a clear understanding in the labor unions and much less in the working class as a whole that Trump represents a new and different threat of authoritarianism tending toward fascism that must be resisted at all costs and whose defeat will require a united workers movement with a clear alternative vision of labor and politics. Leftist labor activists have a long way to go in organizing rank-and-file workers and in raising the idea of workers’ power and democratic socialism as the needed alternative. We will only arrive at that point after a long period of social and political battles with the capitalist class and the state.

    A protestor at the April 5, “Hands Off” demonstration in New York.

  • Ukraine: Not a Proxy War

    Ukraine: Not a Proxy War

    A discussion of the New York Times’ article, “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine.”

    The Ukrainian people are currently fighting against Russia’s brutal invasion and the occupation of about twenty percent of its territory. The war remains today what is has been from the beginning: A war of national self-defense and self-determination against Russian imperialism as Vladimir Putin attempts to reduce Ukraine to its former colonial status under both the Tsarist and Soviet empires. From the start of the war Ukraine, like any nation in such a position, has had the right to obtain arms wherever it can get them, despite the fact that the U.S. provision of arms and intelligence could influence and pressure Ukraine. And the right to self-defense remains despite the fact that the Ukrainian people are simultaneously challenging the neoliberal policies of the Zelensky government.

    Now, thanks to a New York Times analysis by Adam Entous, “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine,” published on March 29, we have new information about the extent of U.S. military assistance. The Russian press and pro-Putin media have been crowing about the article, claiming it somehow invalidates Ukraine’s war of self-defense.

    But while the article provides us with the story of the U.S.-Ukrainian military relationship in the Biden years in remarkable detail, significantly it provides no evidence of U.S. political control of the war, let alone that Washington pressed Ukraine to fight on when Kyiv preferred to throw in the towel. The article recounts the continual disagreements and tensions between U.S. and Ukrainian generals, as well as among Ukrainian political and military leaders. Most of those tensions arose from Ukraine’s legitimate and understandable desire to drive the Russian invader from its territory and, importantly, to free Ukrainians in the occupied territories from the oppression they have been enduring, on the one hand, and the U.S. concern about the dangers of a wider, even a nuclear, war, on the other.

    At the center of the article is a long discussion of the attempted Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2023 that ended in “stillborn failure.” Entous shows that Zelensky chose to follow the advice of his ground forces commander to deploy forces to the unsuccessful effort to defend Bakhmut, rather than concentrate forces for a push to the south as urged by both his own supreme commander and the Americans, effectively scuttling the counter-offensive.

    There followed more tensions and rifts among the Ukrainians. Never in the course of reading this article does one have the sense that the Americans were dictating to the Ukrainians. And that, of course, is the key issue.

    Early on in the article, Entous writes, “In some ways, Ukraine was, on a wider canvas, a rematch in a long history of U.S.-Russia proxy wars — Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later.” But his article does not substantiate that claim.

    What is a proxy war? One in which the parties doing the fighting are not the ones calling the shots. So the Soviet Union and China provided arms to North Vietnam – as they should have – but the decision to resist the American aggression was made in Hanoi and among the South Vietnamese, not Moscow or Beijing. Likewise, Ukrainians are fighting not because any foreign power compelled them to do so, but because they value their own national survival. In the Biden years, the United States supported Ukraine for its own motives—to weaken and prevent the expansion of Russia and to strengthen its relationship with its NATO allies and with the European Union and its economy. Washington and its generals proved incapable of forcing the Ukrainians to do what they thought was best strategically for American goals and never was able to take control of the war politically.

    Today, the situation is quite different. At the moment, Pres. Donald Trump is attempting precisely to take control, forcing a solution that essentially splits the spoils of Ukraine between the United States and Russia, with Washington getting mineral rights of the sort that great powers have often demanded of their colonies and Russia getting big chunks of Ukrainian territory, including its population and resources. Putin would also strip Ukraine of its autonomy, denying it the right to join NATO or the European Union. It is Trump’s support for Putin’s position that forms the basis for a broader U.S.-Russian partnership that would threaten other European nations. So Ukraine’s fight for its sovereignty is as important as ever.

    But as important as Ukraine’s struggle is for the long-term security of other European countries, the latter could not induce Kyiv to soldier on if Ukrainians themselves didn’t see the value of resisting Russian subjugation. Unfortunately, given the military imbalance between Russia and Ukraine, Ukraine cannot carry on their war of self-defense if other nations don’t contribute arms. We will have to organize to insist that the arms keep flowing until Ukraine can attain the just peace that the majority of the Ukrainian people so desperately desire.

  • Israel Resumes Genocidal Campaign in Gaza

    Israel Resumes Genocidal Campaign in Gaza

    After seven weeks of a ceasefire, Israel suddenly resumed its genocidal bombing campaign on March 18. In surprise air attacks in the middle of the night, it killed at least 400 Palestinians. In the ensuing days, the official Palestinian death toll since October 2023 reached 50,000, with the real figure surely much higher. Hostage releases by Hamas and reciprocal ones of Palestinian prisoners by Israel were thereupon halted, likely sealing the fate of the several dozen remaining living Israeli hostages, and dooming tens of thousands more in Gaza.

    All this is happening in the context of the fascist Donald Trump’s declaration that the people of Gaza should be ethnically cleansed and removed to other countries. Not only did Israel’s reactionary prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorse what he called Trump’s “bold vision,” but as recounted by the noted Israeli writer Dror Mishani, “the vast majority [of Israelis] think that the displacement from Gaza of the Palestinian population is a good idea,” this at a time when it has become “a society obsessed by vengeance” (Dror Mishani, “Le traumatisme de 7-Octobre a fait d’Israël une société obsédée par la vengeance,” interview by Raphäelle Rérolle, Le Monde 3/22/25).

    Trump’s plan is no mere verbal excess. The Israeli regime has begun to plan for it and Trump officials have recently approached Sudan, Somalia, and Somaliland as destinations for the people of Gaza, with Sudan at least rejecting it, as had Egypt and Jordan earlier (Jason Burke and Mark Townshend, “Sudan rejects US request to discuss taking in Palestinians under Trump’s Gaza plan,” Guardian 3/14/25).

    Amid all this, the escalating carnage on the West Bank should not be forgotten. Even during the ceasefire, Israel sharply increased its repression and ethnic cleansing there, not only killing over 800 people since October 7, 2023, but also driving tens of thousands off their land. Whole communities have been subjected to terror, not sparing even Hamdan Ballal, one of the winners of an Oscar for the documentary “No Other Land,” who was brutally beaten by Jewish settler fanatics and then briefly imprisoned by the Israeli occupation army.

    Despite the near collapse of Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance last fall, an “axis” that was always mostly about Iran’s subimperialist aims, and despite the Trumpist fascists’ assault on free speech and academic freedom in the United States, pro-Palestine demonstrations have continued. Beleaguered students and faculty have protested Israel’s renewal of its genocidal war and Trump’s illegal deportation actions against student activists, as well as the capitulation of their universities, if not their outright complicity, in the repression. Particularly in the United States, largely spurious charges of antisemitism have been weaponized for repression, a process escalated by the Trump administration against the universities but often with the passive support, if not worse, of the centrist liberals. Here, Columbia University stands out as a monument of shame, with its trustees having thrown to the Trumpist wolves both its students and the academic Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies.

    Around the world, actions in support of Palestine have been larger and stronger. In the UK, over 100,000 gathered in February to protest Trump’s call for the ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza. Smaller countries like Ireland and South Africa have not wavered in their support for the prosecution of Israel for genocide at the International Criminal Court, while Mexico has just welcomed a Palestinian ambassador for the first time.

    Above all, the ascendancy of Trumpist fascism in what remains the world’s largest military and economic power and its dirty deals with Russia for redivision of the world have put struggles for human liberation on the defensive everywhere. A new generation of radicals and revolutionaries around the world, born of the struggle against US-supported Israeli genocide, and shaped by other struggles like the Movement for Black Lives, the Second Arab Spring, and the labor upsurges in many countries, is being tested as never before.

  • Bilkis: A Ukrainian Feminist Organization

    Bilkis: A Ukrainian Feminist Organization

    Two members of the Ukrainian feminist organization Bilkis, Tania Vynska and Yana Dotsenko, were in New York for the 69th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW69), the world’s largest conference on women, that took place at UN Headquarters from March 10 to 21, 2025. The conference was focused on a review and appraisal of the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action adopted in 1995. You can find here an official statement on the situation of women in Ukraine posted on the CSW69 website.

    The Bilkis logo is the vagina dentata or toothed vagina associated with a Ukrainian mythic figure …

    Tania and Yana had also come to meet feminists from other countries and to network with other NGOs and donors. Dan La Botz of New Politics took advantage of their visit to learn about their organization.

    NP – Thanks for making the time to talk with me so that New Politics readers can learn about your organization and about the situation of women in Ukraine. Why did you originally found Bilkis?

    Yana –We founded Bilkis in Kharkiv in 2019 because we didn’t have any project or group like Bilkis at that time. There were some feminist groups, but we didn’t resonate with them, because they didn’t have any left point of view in their agenda. We really wanted to create a group that would change social ideas about gender.

    NP – What were those left ideas that you thought it important to have in a feminist group?

    Yana – We wanted to include the ideas of class, the issue of poverty of women. Women are one of the main groups suffering from poverty. Often in Ukraine NGOs work in an upper- or middle-class milieu. The existing groups at that time worked with businesswomen, but I think only after Russia’s full-scale of invasion of Ukraine did things change, because of the greater need in society. A lot of NGOs started to do humanitarian aid for people in need, but their discourse was still about women’s leadership, becoming a businesswoman, and they never criticized institutional economic problems.

    NP – What was your alternative to the other NGO’s ideas?

    Tania – The main issues of Bilkis are feminism and intersectionality, so we include different forms of combatting discrimination, for example, when thinking about helping people, we thought about groups such as young girls, women, and LGBTQ people. We acknowledge the fact that poor women could use more help than middle-class or upper-class women.

    We have three principal share values. They are social equity, decoloniality, and horizontality. Regarding decoloniality, we are opposed to all imperial states and also for freeing the colonized nations. There is also economic colonialism. And colonial consciousness.

    NP – So you are for “decolonization”…

    Yana – We would use the word “decoloniality.” Once countries were conquered and occupied, but today we still have economic colonialism and there are still colonial ideas. All of that means we have to think in terms of decoloniality. Take Russia, for example. The Russians behave in a very colonial way toward us. Also, in in the cultural sphere, the Russians are very dominant. For example, actors until recently were expected to know Russian if they want to get good roles, even though you live in Ukraine. That has changed some since the full-scale invasion, but it was that way for a long time.

    Tania – We still have this issue that Russian music is most popular, the idea that Russian culture is superior continues to exist in our country’s consciousness.

    We also believe in horizontality, that is we are against hierarchical organization. We based decision-making on consensus, which has worked for us for six years.

    NP – And what sorts of projects or campaigns are you engaged in?

    Tania – We had for a time a project called “space of things,” a place where you can give away your clothes or other things, and you can take whatever you need. We continued this project for two years. Yana started space of things after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Women and children and poor people could go there and take what they needed.

    NP – What are your projects today?

    Tania – We do a lot of educational work and carry out social media campaigns about feminisms, gender, gender inequalities. I’m the creator of our YouTube video essay project, it’s called “Dear Diary.” It’s mostly a queer feminist lens on society, films, and culture.

    Yana – We also have a feminist film club in which we watch and discuss queer or feminist films. We meet twice a month at our office and watch and talk about films about social inequalities.

    We also had a campaign of sixteen days of activism against gender-based violence, from November 25 to December 10, and other organizations started from that campaign. We collected stories by women who had survived gender-based violence and posted them our Instagram pages.

    Tania – We also organized street actions during that period. We had a campaign against Drunk Cherry (Piana Vyshnya), an alcoholic beverage company, which had very sexist advertising, not only sexist images of women, but also suggesting in their text that men didn’t have to hear a woman’s “No.” Our campaign pressured them to change their advertising, though it did not completely fix the problem. Also, we do a lot of media campaigns about consent-culture and why it’s bad to have a rape culture and have gender-based violence against women.

    NP – You haven’t mentioned reproductive rights…

    Tania – In Ukraine the question of abortion isn’t really a central topic for political debate. Ukrainian women and girls have that right. Although, sometimes it may be difficult to exercise it due to impact of Christian beliefs, stigmatization of what women should do with their bodies, or fear of being judged in their communities, especially in rural communities.

    There are also a lot of sex education campaigns that mostly done by bloggers or civil society organizations. Some of them even do lectures in public schools. So, children from a young age would know, for example, about the idea of body autonomy, and they would learn where someone could find contraception and why menstruation isn’t something inherently bad.

    Tania – We should also mention that some of our members have joined the military Two members of Bilkis, Dasha and Ivanka, are fighting in the war right now.

    DL – What is the future for women and feminism in Ukraine?

    Yana – I honestly want to say that for me personally, I can’t think about an end to the war. What I see in the world is that there is more tension between different countries. I don’t have an optimistic outlook. Now we are in a war, and I don’t think it will end in a year or two. There may be some kind of ceasefire, but I don’t see that Russia will leave all of our land. And for me, talking about rebuilding doesn’t make sense before withdraws from Crimea, Luhansk, Donestsky and all of our cities. For myself, I spent a really big part of my life thinking that I should join the army. I don’t see any sense in civil life. Because if Russia occupies our territory, we’re done. I think only this fighting on the front line is very important.

    Tania – If Ukraine is defeated and Russia conquers Ukraine that would mean the end of civil society organizations, and especially of feminist LGBT groups. But if Ukraine is supported by the European Union with weapons and humanitarian aid, then that means that there is a future for women and for feminist organization, but there will be a lot of work to rebuild Ukraine and also return to normal life.

    NP – Thanks to both of you for sharing your perspective.

    Here is another discussion with Bilkis members.

    And another article here.

    And another here.

    You can find Bilkis on Facebook here.

  • Doesn’t Trump know that Israel and Saudi Arabia keep bodies of those they kill?

    Doesn’t Trump know that Israel and Saudi Arabia keep bodies of those they kill?

    One of the cemeteries where Israel buries Palestinians in numbered graves.

     

    In his latest ultimatum to Hamas President Trump wrote, “Only sick and twisted people keep bodies, and you are sick and twisted!”  Doesn’t he know that that his bosom allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, keep bodies as bargaining chips and for other reasons?  Isn’t this a case of the pot calling the kettle black?

    Israel

    A group I head, the Middle East Crisis Committee (MECC), got involved in this issue in 2021. It came to our attention that on July 27 of that year an Israeli soldier shot to death a Palestinian plumber named Shadi Shurafi while he was fixing a pipe to his village of Beita. The army made up some story that Shurafi was advancing on a military post across the road armed with a wrench. A week later his body was still in Israeli custody and there were protests.

    MECC started a petition calling for the Israelis to return the body to his family. We noted, “Since 2020 Israel has kept the bodies of any Palestinian it claims to have been involved in an attack against an Israeli. Military authorities don’t even have to prove that there was an attack. This practice is so widespread that sometime friends rush to bury a body before the Israeli military can grab it.” One article said the body was returned a week later, but another in November said the body still was in Israeli custody.

    Actually, the practice of keeping bodies started well before 2020. The Palestinian National Campaign to Retrieve Martyrs’ Bodies stated that Israel has kept the bodies of 665 people in numbered grave yards, that is grave yards where there are no markers of any kind except for a metal plate with a number on it (reported by the Palestinian Information Center on 2-25-25). According to the Campaign, “some of those bodies have been detained by Israel since the 1960s and 1970s.” The article said these were bodies retained after they were killed in the West Bank. It had no information about those bodies retained in Gaza since October 2023. Two weeks later the Information Center wrote that the Palestinian Center for the Missing and the Forcibly Disappeared reported that 1,500 Palestinian bodies were being held.

    National Public Radio (NPR) in 2016 said “human rights groups say Israel still holds nearly 300 bodies gathered over decades.” Not all are Palestinians. Some are Lebanese and some Jordanian. The report says one of these cemeteries is in a “military zone near the Jordanian border, marks graves with no names, just numbers, a few concrete blocks or sticks in the ground.” A picture of the cemetery illustrated the article.

    Israeli courts find this practice legal. Back in 1948 the new Israeli state copied a British Mandate regulation which stated “it shall be lawful for a Military Commander to order that the dead body of any person shall be buried in such place as the Military Commander may direct.” The practice was challenged several times in court, but each time the Israeli court found the practice legal. Usually the retention of bodies is justified as being need for negotiations with forces holding Israeli soldiers or Israeli corpses, but that’s not always the reason. Another reason is to keep control of funeral ceremonies. In 2017 the Israeli Knesset passed a legislative amendment to its counter-terrorism law that explicitly authorized the police to place conditions on Palestinian funerals and to withhold Palestinian corpses until they could exact security assurances. In other words, only small groups of people and low-key mourning are allowed for Palestinians. Just this January (2025) the Israeli High Court ruled that authorities can keep bodies of “terrorists” to use as bargaining chips…even if they are Israeli citizens.

    Saudi Arabia

    Saudi Arabia too retains bodies. Take the case of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist, who was murdered by Saudi government agents in 2018 in a Saudi embassy in Turkey. Hideously, his body was cut up and taken somewhere. Though a Saudi court convicted the men most immediately guilty for the murders, his remains were neither returned to his family nor the location of his remains ever reported.

    Less heard of in the West, but far more well known in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries, was the execution and imprisonment of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a leader of Shia in the kingdom and an advocate of a democratic society. He was convicted of “seeking ‘foreign meddling” and “disobeying” its ruler and other fanciful crimes. He was beheaded in 2016 and his body was kept by the monarchy.

    It is much larger that these two cases. Saudi dissident Ali Al Ahmed told me,

    “Over the years, thousands have been executed for various reasons including criminal offenses. All those executed are never returned to their families and secretly buried. There is nothing in written Saudi law or in the death sentences that requires such action. In another word, stealing bodies is not legal under Saudi laws. The bodies belong to the family and they cannot be changed or taken.”

    In a 2024 case the Saudis refused to repatriate the body of a Filipino in Saudi Arabia whom they had executed. The Filipino news source GMA News wrote, the “Philippine Embassy in Riyadh said that this was the standard for executed individuals in the country.”

    Presumably the bodies are kept to deter future crime or for reasons of vengeance.

    International law requires parties at war to be “honourably buried, if possible according to the rites of the [victim’s] religion.” The Red Cross has noted that the

    International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance “imposes certain obligations on States Parties: to locate, respect and return the remains of the deceased.” In 2016 a UN committee called on Israel “to return the bodies of the Palestinians that have not yet been returned to their relatives as soon as possible so they can be buried in accordance with their traditions and religious customs, and to avoid that similar situations are repeated in the future.”

    The use of bodies as bargaining chips or for deterrence or vengeance is repulsive. It should be considered a remnant from another backward age. But it is what it is.  So Mr. Trump get off your high horse about who is “sick and twisted”.

  • How I Organized a Tesla Takedown in Troy, Michigan

    How I Organized a Tesla Takedown in Troy, Michigan

    Photo credit: Peter Werbe

    It was a lot easier than I thought. The website teslatakedown.com has a link at the top to ActionNetwork to create your own event at a Tesla dealership or showroom. Once there, I clicked the button that said “Host an Event for this Campaign” and picked my target. Activists had been protesting the showrooms in Ann Arbor and West Bloomfield, but one hadn’t got much attention. In Somerset Mall in Troy, there is a Tesla showroom on the first floor. The mall lies on a major thoroughfare, Big Beaver Road, meaning any protest would reach many people. I selected Sunday, March 9th as the date, 1PM for the time.

    From then on the protest basically organized itself. I pressed friends and family to attend and they spread it to other people. Many saw the event on the #TeslaTakedown website and social media sites Reddit and Facebook. I heard from some participants that the protest was talked about it in church that morning. Fitting, since on the Lord’s day we were doing the Lord’s work: trying to drive the money changers out of the temple.

    On a bright Sunday afternoon, Metro-Detroiters showed up to unequivocally say “No!” to Elon Musk and Tesla fascism. Although the crowd started small, it kept growing until around one-hundred were present at the height. Signs said “Stop the DOGE Coup,” “Detroit vs. Musk,” and “Stop Funding a Fascist: Dump Tesla.” More humorous signs read “If it Honks Like a Goose and it Steps Like a Goose” and “Destroy the Turd Reich.” Trying to give the rally some socialist content, my own sign quoted “Big Bill” Haywood: “The capitalist has no heart, but harpoon him in the pocketbook and you will draw blood.”

    Passing motorists were overwhelmingly friendly, with many laying on their horns to show solidarity. Black drivers were particularly supportive. Nonetheless, there were others who gave the crowd the one-finger salute or a bellowed “Fuck you!” but this was a small minority. The poor rent-a-cops milled around with nothing to do. It was as if they’d never seen a protest before.

    Elon Musk is an eminently hateable figure. He is anti-union. He promotes anti-Semitism. He spews hatred against transgender people. He throws out “Sieg Heils” like they were candy. He is the personification of a decaying system. He is the perfect target for anyone looking to pick a fight with modern capitalism.

    Socialists should take a leading role in organizing these protests. Who else could? Democratic politicians? Congresswoman Haley Stevens was too busy hosting a fundraiser at exclusive Heathers Country Club. After praising Ronald Reagan in her State of the Union response, Senator Elissa Slotkin has been running ads on social asking for money for reelection even though she was just sworn in this January and won’t face reelection until 2030. Governor Gretchen Whitmer was just appointed by Donald Trump to the Council of Governors. Clearly, no condescending savior is coming.

    Opposing Musk gives socialists the opportunity to highlight the century-plus long link between fascism and big business. Standard Oil and Dow Chemical “had significant dealings” with the Nazi conglomerates I.G. Farben and Krupp right up until World War II. Torkild Reiber of Texaco illegally sent oil to Franco during the Spanish Civil War. He then threw a party celebrating the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940. In attendance were executives from ITT, General Motors, and Ford. Henry Ford, who Musk most resembles, received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Nazi officials in 1938. Ford worked with Christian Nationalist—and future Holocaust denier—Gerald L.K. Smith to prevent his workers from unionizing.

    Socialists have the opportunity to explain how to effectively counter the unmasked power of big business. Boycotts and corporate campaigns are fine, but what would really damage Tesla’s bottom lines would be to unionize their workplaces. Every dollar in wages and benefits those workers get, is a dollar less Musk has to loot the Treasury for him and his robber baron accomplices.

    Many participants thanked me for organizing the protest, even though I repeatedly stressed it wasn’t difficult. After canvassing the crowd, I announced we will be coming back next week. The people I met are looking for ways to fight back against the present plutocracy. One said they had never been to a protest before. Socialists should take a leading role in taking down Musk and Tesla fascism.

  • The Trump-Putin Axis and Its Impact on Global Politics

    The Trump-Putin Axis and Its Impact on Global Politics

    Donald Trump’s forging of a political alliance with Russia’s Vladimir Putin at the expense of Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination may not be totally unexpected, but its speed and extent represent a dramatic transformation of world politics.

    Nothing more sharply—and crudely—signals this transformation than Trump and J.D. Vance’s public browbeating of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on February 28 at what was supposed to be a brief session to take questions from the press prior to a private meeting to discuss conditions for ending the war. In a breathtaking display of imperial arrogance, Trump and Vance turned the session into a shouting match as they insulted and threatened Zelensky for stating the obvious—that Putin cannot be trusted, and that any peace deal requires security guarantees for Ukraine. Trump then cancelled further talks with Zelensky and ordered him to immediately leave the country. This brazen take-down and humiliation of a democratically elected head of state for not totally submitting to U.S. dictates is unprecedented. It is as ominous as Trump’s inauguration five weeks earlier.  Ukraine will be left to feel the full wrath of Putin’s murderous war machine just as Palestine is being left to face Netanyahu’s fascistic effort to annihilate its very existence.

    This is hardly the first time a major imperialist power has suddenly forged an alliance with a longstanding adversary. One can recall war criminal Richard Nixon’s sudden opening to China in the early 1970s, which led to a rapprochement that ended up extending the Vietnam War by several years (Mao reduced aid to North Vietnam to curry favor with the U.S. and Nixon used his entente with him to demand greater concessions from Hanoi). But an even more striking antecedent is the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. This may sound like an exaggeration—after all, the alliance between fascist Germany and Stalinist Russia gave the green light to World War II, and no one is suggesting a third world war is imminent-—although the risks of it are ever-present. Nonetheless, the 1939 Pact is worth recalling since it produced a shift in world politics that had crucial ideological ramifications, as many leftists supported it in the name of opposing Western imperialism while others denounced it as a betrayal of the principles of socialism. Today’s U.S.-Putin alliance likewise has profound ideological ramifications, as seen in how leftists opposed to Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination now find their position being shared by MAGA Republicans, while others on the Left are searching for revolutionary new beginnings opposed to all forms of occupation and colonialism, from Gaza to Ukraine.

    The Betrayal of Ukraine

    The Trump-Putin alliance was forged with the convening of direct talks on February 18 between representatives of U.S. and Russian imperialism in Saudi Arabia, a meeting that excluded both the Ukrainians and the U.S.’s European allies, some of whom were not even informed of it beforehand. These were not negotiations: Trump simply adopted virtually all of the Kremlin’s talking points without so much as suggesting a single concession from Putin. The Russian delegates could hardly conceal their shock and glee at what Trump gave away at zero cost to themselves.

    On February 24, following the talks in Saudi Arabia, the Trump administration voted against a Resolution of the UN General Assembly condemning Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine—the first time it did so, joining Russia, China, Belarus, North Korea, and Israel, as well as 12 other Moscow-friendly countries (93 other countries voted yes, 65 abstained). Brandishing the lie that Ukraine, not Russia, started the war, Trump clearly allied the U.S. with Putin.

    Not a peep of opposition to this was heard from a single Republican member of Congress—even though many of them spent years bashing Russia and voting aid to Ukraine. Many Democrats expressed outrage but seem lost as to what to do next. So much for the claim that the U.S. ruling class has a vested interest in helping Ukraine!

    Trump insists that Ukraine cannot recover twenty percent of the country that Russia occupied since 2014 and 2022, and that no U.S. troops will be used to patrol a ceasefire which is to be imposed largely on Russian terms. Nor can it join NATO, until now the inter-imperialist alliance of the U.S. and Western Europe.

    Most revealing, Trump demanded that the Ukrainian government repay $500 billion to the U.S. (at least four times as much as the value of all the military and economic aid it received under Biden) by surrendering 50% of the proceeds from its sale of national resources, such as minerals, oil and gas, and port fees. Ukraine was moreover expected to repay the U.S. twice the value of any future U.S. aid (it does not indicate whether this would include any military assistance). This amounts to paying $100 percent interest on top of the total principle of a “loan.” Taken as a whole, this would entail that a higher percentage of Ukraine’s GDP become turned over to the U.S. than the allies demanded in the form of reparations from defeated Germany after World War I.

    That would clearly amount to turning what is left of Ukraine (Putin is demanding annexation of parts of it he does not now control) into an outright economic colony of U.S. imperialism. If this mis-named “peace plan” were to go forward, the U.S. would reap profits at Ukraine’s expense and Russia could secure the conquest of parts of its territory while building up its diminished military apparatus (Russian forces are nearing exhaustion due to heavy losses, especially in soldiers and heavy weapons like tanks and artillery) in order to ready itself to launch a renewed assault in a few years.

    Not surprisingly, Zelensky initially balked at Trump’s demands, insisting that any concessions to the U.S. contain security guarantees that could prevent the overthrow of the government or a renewal of the war. It remains to be seen if the Europeans will provide them. They too were taken aback by the recent turn of events and are unsure how to respond: most of the leaders of the European states have lived so long under the protective umbrella of the U.S. that they cannot imagine how to exist otherwise.

    Zelensky has been under tremendous pressure to capitulate to U.S. demands. On February 26 a tentative agreement between Trump and Zelensky was announced that placed slightly less onerous conditions on the amount the U.S. would get from the sale of Ukraine’s natural resources. Zelensky reluctantly agreed, even though the proposal provided no security guarantees for Ukraine. Trump ruled out sending any U.S. peacekeeping forces and says the burden for providing them would fall to the Europeans—which Russia insists it will never accept. On February 26, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov referred to any deployment of such peacekeepers as “empty talk.”

    Trump claimed that the presence of U.S. companies on the ground in Ukraine to extract its mineral resources would “provide automatic security” (Ukraine does not currently have the ability to extract more than a small amount of its mineral wealth). But as many in Ukraine have pointed out, the presence of U.S. companies in eastern Ukraine did nothing to stop Putin from invading and occupying those areas. Moreover, over half of Ukraine’s mineral resources are located in the eastern part of the country which is currently occupied by Russia. Trump is surely eyeing those resources as well—which Putin would be glad to provide him with so long as Ukraine is severely weakened and demilitarized.

    Meanwhile, discussions among European members of NATO about increasing military aid to Ukraine are hardly reassuring. It could take years for them to make up for Ukraine’s loss of U.S. military assistance. For example, the entire British army currently has fewer artillery pieces than one brigade possessed in the 1990s. Russia could rest and rebuild for a few years (or less) and then renew its longstanding aim to take over all of Ukraine.

    Setting the Record Straight

    The ideological fallout from the Trump-Putin alliance is already evident from the way Putin’s false claims about Ukraine are being normalized—and not alone by Trump.

    Foremost among these is the claim that Ukraine started the war by provoking Russia through its repression of Russian-language speakers in eastern Ukraine and its desire to join NATO. This overlooks the fact that the war actually began in 2014, when Russia invaded eastern Ukraine and Crimea in response to a mass democratic movement on the streets of Kiev which ousted its pro-Moscow leader, Viktor Yanukovych. As he had done earlier in South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and elsewhere, Putin sent in troops (often in the guise of residents) to stoke separatist sentiment. The response of the U.S. and NATO at the time was meek: it slapped limited sanctions on Russia but did little else. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, the U.S. initially told Zelensky to flee the country on the grounds that there was no chance of holding off the Russian military. The Ukrainians then succeeded in doing so to the shock and surprise of both the U.S. and Putin. Only then did the pipeline of military and economic aid begin to flow from the U.S./NATO to Ukraine.

    As I stated at the time of Russia’s 2022 invasion, the claim that the U.S./NATO were itching for a fight with Russia and jumped at the chance when Putin invaded gets it all wrong. Intra-imperialist conflicts are often driven by economic factors, such as the drive to accumulate capital on an ever-expanding scale at the expense of rivals. But this does not apply to the conflict between the U.S. and Russia, since the latter’s economy is too weak to pose a threat to U.S. economic dominance. As Russian sociologist Ilya Matveev puts it, “Post-Soviet Russia’s economic clout has always been far too limited to threaten the centers of capital accumulation in the Global North… In fact, the Kremlin’s decisions in 2014 and 2022 were the product of a specific ideological vision that overemphasizes Russia’s vulnerabilities and calls for preventive military action under the slogan of ‘offense is the best defense.’ Russia’s conflict with the West, unlike the U.S.-China rivalry, is rooted less in structural, particularly economic, causes and more in ideological (mis)perceptions.”

    This explains why the U.S. and NATO provided enough support for Ukraine to hold off Russia but not enough to enable it to inflict a major victory. I wrote in July 2024, “That the U.S.’s conflict with Russia is not structurally rooted in the dynamics of global capital accumulation does not make it less dangerous. But it does suggest that a change of government in the U.S. in the coming months can easily lead to a rapprochement between Western imperialism and Putin’s Russia.” That has now occurred, capped off by Trump’s claim that Ukraine is responsible for starting the war.

    Putin also claimed that Zelensky is an illegitimate leader of a regime stocked with “Nazis.” In fact, he was voted in through a democratic election with over 70% of the votes while the neo-fascist far-Right (which surely exists in Ukraine, as it does in virtually every European country as well as the U.S.) got 2%. Trump responded to Zelensky’s objection to being excluded from the discussions over the future of Ukraine by denouncing him as a “dictator” who has the support of only 4% of the populace. In fact, as of the end of 2024 his support was 52%, but following Trump’s reversal of U.S. policy in favor of Russia, it shot up to 63%. Many of his most prominent critics, such as Valery Zaluzhny, former Commander-in-Chief of the Army who was dismissed by Zelensky one year ago, now say they intend to vote for him once the war is over (Ukraine’s Constitution prohibits an election from being held during wartime).

    Meanwhile, Putin’s effort to break apart the Western alliance, which has long been his goal, is being codified by Trump as he treats his NATO allies as an after-thought—except when it comes to prodding them to ramp up military spending so as to free the U.S. from being responsible for Europe’s security. The U.S.’s European allies are completely flummoxed by Trump’s threat to cut off military aid to Ukraine and lift sanctions on Russia: they have been thrown into a new world that their neoliberal mindset never prepared them for.

    Redrawing the Political Map

    What we are witnessing today is a redrawing of the political map, as the U.S. is now transitioning from its decades-long pursuit of single world dominance under the illusory claim of supporting democracy to forging a united front of reactionary and neo-fascist powers intent on pursuing national and regional interests.

    This is not isolationism—neither Trump, Putin, nor Xi Jinping fit into that category. It is rather an effort to respond to the U.S.’s failure to secure single world domination (as seen from its defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan) by reverting to a twenty-first-century form of annexationist territorial imperialism. This was initiated by Putin’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, and it is now embraced by Trump as he threatens to annex Greenland, Panama, Canada, and even Gaza as he promotes Israel’s effort to expel its entire Palestinian populace. This is why Trump finds so much in common with Putin—they share a similar view of the world, in which even the pretense of international law and norms must be cast aside. This should not be written off as a mere quirk of his personality or reduced solely to his business interests (though they both play a big part): they are a reflection of a world gradually being divided up into regional power blocs based on naked national self-interest. As Peter McLaren put it, “Trump and Putin do not seek peace—they seek a pact. A deal that cements Russia’s aggression as legitimate and Ukraine’s sovereignty as expendable. A deal that undermines not only Ukraine but the very idea that nations have the right to exist beyond the will of imperial masters.”

    Of course, it is not alone foreign affairs that binds Trump to Putin—at least for now (one thing about neo-fascists is that they rarely have an easy time getting along with their co-conspirators). What most of all connects them is their disdain for the advances made by women, workers, national minorities, and LGBTQ people over the past decades. The far Right sees in Putin the exemplar of the white-racist attack on democracy that they adore. As Putin stated a few years ago, “The U.S. continues to receive more and more immigrants, and, as far as I understand, the white, Christian population is already outnumbered…. We have to preserve [white Christians] to remain a significant center in the world.”

    This is why those who concede even the slightest ground to Trump’s narrative on Ukraine make a big mistake when they presume it can be somehow separated from his attacks on immigrants, women, workers, and people of color in the U.S.—or separated from his unwavering support for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians. One example is Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, who in a recent article entitled “Trump Gives Peace a Chance in Ukraine,” wrote: “On both sides of the Atlantic, Trump’s initiative [on Ukraine] is a game changer. Those of us anxious to see peace in Ukraine should applaud Trump’s initiative…. If Trump can reject the political arguments that have fueled three years of war in Ukraine and apply compassion and common sense to end that war, then he can surely do the same in the Middle East.” But the last thing that motivates Trump is compassion and common sense when it comes to Ukraine (or anywhere else)—which is why to expect him to “do the same in the Middle East” is an invitation for ethnic cleansing and genocide. He cares not a whit about the Ukrainians, and even less about “peace.” He is concerned with extracting as many resources from as many places as he can while forging a united front with like-minded authoritarians to crush what is left of democratic norms and institutions.

    This is why Ukraine remains a touchstone of global politics. If Trump and Putin can succeed in curtailing its fight for self-determination, it will make it all the harder to advance freedom struggles elsewhere. Stating that fact does not entail supporting Zelensky or the current Ukrainian government, which clearly governs under a neoliberal agenda, any more than it entails supporting NATO (whose very existence we have long opposed). But as Trotsky noted in his writings on fascism, the truth is concrete: and the concrete truth is that to remain neutral in the face of occupation and colonial domination is to become its accomplice.

    Oleg Shein argues, “While Putin is President—and he will be a president as long as he lives—this war will continue. The reason lies within Russia: Putin does not have a positive program, for the country. External conflict is the basis of his power. It is a way to consolidate the elite and govern the people. Perhaps the war against Ukraine will enter a phase of smoldering. But as long as Putin rules in Russia, the history of external conflict will continue.”

    Solidarizing with Ukraine – and the Larger Struggle

    Ukraine is facing a difficult situation. The ground war has not been going well for it over the last year, and a cut-off of U.S. aid is sure to make the problem worse. So far, it has received half of its armaments and aid from the EU, and a number of states (such as France and Poland) promise to contribute more. It is unclear how much of a difference that will make. But what cannot be denied is the tenacity of the Ukrainians: despite some Russian advances over the past six months, they have taken far less territory than what most analysts anticipated. Zelensky will be under continuous pressure to agree to some kind of rotten compromise, but while the Ukrainian people desperately want peace, the vast majority do not want what they call “a peace of the grave,” that would deny their right to exist as a nation and a culture. It is thus likely the struggle will go on, perhaps in the form of guerilla warfare, even if a dishonorable “peace” is imposed by the great powers behind their backs.

    This too carries risks: it is possible that the far Right will grow in power in Ukraine the more desperate the situation becomes. The Ukrainian Marxist writer Hanna Perekhoda addresses this as follows: “The argument that the presence of the far right in Ukraine justifies a refusal to send arms is based on a rather blatant error of logic…. There are far-right movements in France and Germany that are infinitely more influential than in Ukraine, yet no one would dispute their right to self-defense in the event of aggression…. This argument is all the more hypocritical given that many of these same voices on the left do not hesitate to support resistance movements that include actors who are more than problematic. Why demand a purity from Ukraine that no other society is required to show when it has to defend itself? What is undeniable is that the war, which has lasted for more than ten years, has already helped to strengthen and trivialize nationalist symbols and discourse that were previously marginal. Wars do not make any society better. However, the relationship between the delivery of arms and the strengthening of the far right in Ukraine is inversely proportional. The weapons sent to Ukraine are used first and foremost to defend society as a whole against an invading army. Ukraine’s victory guarantees the very existence of a state in which citizens can freely and democratically choose their future. Conversely, nothing strengthens extreme right-wing movements or terrorist organizations more than military occupation and the systematic oppression that goes with it.”

    This is not the time to refrain from solidarizing with Ukraine—it is more important than ever. It is vital not just for their sake but for ours, as we become increasingly subjected to fascistic repression inside the U.S., the extent of which has only just begun to be seen.

  • Los Angeles Fires

    Los Angeles Fires

    The Los Angeles fires of January 2025 were a shocking and horrific catastrophe. The first concern of course is the threat to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. This goes beyond just saving people from being burned to death in the fires themselves. What kind of lives and livelihoods will be left for the hundreds of thousands of displaced people and families, after the fires have done all their damage to the Los Angeles metropolitan area? How does a society resettle the inhabitants of the second largest city and metro area in the United States?

    In addition to the humanitarian and ecological disaster, there is also the great political danger that the Los Angeles fires will amplify the threat of mass deportations faced by millions of immigrant workers. Trump has surely already aimed to take advantage of the disaster and have ICE target vulnerable immigrants uprooted and displaced by the fires, some of them living in shelters. Even for Latinos with U.S. citizenship, how will they prove it to authorities if they have lost essential pieces of documentation in the fires? Outrageous actions by Trump and MAGA in the midst of a catastrophe need to be opposed by a mass protest movement in response. In his first week in office Trump disgustingly threatened to withhold federal disaster relief funds from California, unless Los Angeles adopts his racist anti-immigrant Voter ID policy that undermines voting rights especially for Latino and Black people. It is heartening to see that the fires did not prevent large numbers of people from mobilizing for immigrants’ rights protests against Trump and ICE in Los Angeles in the first week of February.

    For the past century the ruling class in Los Angeles has targeted Black people with many of the worst forms of racial oppression. The legacy of racial segregation and racist redlining practices in the real estate industry have forced Black people to live in areas known to be the most vulnerable to environmental catastrophes exacerbated by the impact of climate change. Many Black senior citizens have worked hard their whole lives to achieve the dream of homeownership in the Altadena area, only to lose their homes in the Eaton Fire. A study by researchers at UCLA showed that the homes of Black residents in Altadena were destroyed or severely damaged disproportionately more than the homes of non-Black residents.i Even the hysterical reaction of far-right MAGA supporters against the Super Bowl halftime performance by Kendrick Lamar and Serena Williams’ Crip Walk dance is an example of the racist hostility against the expression and celebration of the Black culture of Los Angeles and Compton.=

    It is also necessary to call out and condemn the capitalist attacks on workers and oppressed people that are being carried out by Democratic Party politicians such as California governor Gavin Newsom. Last summer, Newsom ordered local officials in California to force homeless people to leave their encampments, and then threatened to take away state funding from cities and counties that did not comply with his order. Newsom’s coercive threat was akin to Trump’s method of coercive threats toward California about withholding federal disaster relief funds for recovery from the fires. In 2023, Newsom vetoed a bill that would have provided striking workers with unemployment insurance, and he vetoed another bill that would have granted important protections for laid off workers, including the extension of such protections to long-term contract workers. Even when it is necessary for socialists to make tactical decisions to take the side of Democrats against Trump’s attacks on democratic rights and freedoms, it is crucial to never forget that Democrats like Newsom remain capitalist to the core, the class enemy of workers and oppressed people.

    The Los Angeles fires are symbolic of the collapse of American capitalist society in so many ways. Unlike most other large cities in the U.S., which have centuries of history of development, Los Angeles is a relatively young metropolis: It grew from a small town to a big city in the late 19th and early 20th centuriesii, but it kept growing to become the mega-metropolis that it is today (growing larger than Detroit by 1950 and Philadelphia by 1960) during the post-war boom after World War II.iii Its enormous development was fueled by the mass adoption of the automobile, and its growth was enabled by very artificial modern engineering: It makes no natural ecological sense to have such an enormously populous metropolis—Greater Los Angeles has over 18 million residentsiv—located in an area utterly lacking any natural water supply to support such a population. But post-war American capitalism made it happen anyway. For many people on the East Coast, the relocation of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team to Los Angeles was the ultimate symbolic expression of this stage of post-war American capitalism. Los Angeles had the space for huge parking lots for all those automobiles, space that Brooklyn lacked.

    Los Angeles was rivaled only by Las Vegas, New York City, Dallas, and Miami as a symbol of American bourgeois decadence and hedonism in the middle and late 20th century, reaching its apex in the 1970s and 1980s. The Hollywood Hills, Sunset Boulevard, Malibu, and so many other iconic landmarks of the Los Angeles area were recognized by billions of people around the world in this era, seemingly immortalized in film as well as in other forms of mass media. Its status in this era was celebrated in songs such as “I Love L.A.” by Randy Newman in 1983v, criticized for its excesses in songs such as “Hollywood Nights” by Bob Seger in 1978, and also condemned for its racist greed in songs such as “Burn Hollywood Burn” by Public Enemy in 1990. Now in 2025 many of these iconic landmarks are literally burning to the ground, in a perfect storm brought about by climate change that has been greatly exacerbated by the very types of excessive capitalist measures that built Los Angeles into a mega-metropolis in the first place. It is the Earth taking its vengeance against decadent capitalism.

    The Los Angeles fires are a catastrophe of epic and biblical proportions. It is certain that significant works of literature and other artistic forms will be dedicated to portraying the story of the rise and fall of metropolitan Los Angeles. But for political purposes, the main immediate tasks of revolutionary socialists in the United States include the defense of immigrants, Black people, and other workers and oppressed people in Southern California who are and will be in great danger, both from the catastrophe of the fires and from the ongoing racist and anti-immigrant attacks by Trump, MAGA, and other capitalist forces.

    Equitable Disaster Relief: “It’s Really Hard to Do Within Capitalism”

    As the Los Angeles fires were still burning, a controversy erupted online when the actor and musician Mandy Moore made a social media post asking for charitable donations for family members of hers. Moore merely brought greater public attention to a social reality that has always existed under capitalism and in class society: Disaster relief efforts almost always take care of wealthy people much better and much more quickly than working-class and poor people; they take care of white people much better and much more quickly than people of color.

    A recent article in The Guardian, commenting on the Mandy Moore controversy, discussed the broader question of inequitable disaster relief in general. The article cited a quote by disaster historian Jacob Remes, regarding equitable disaster relief:

    “‘It’s really hard to do within capitalism, because all of these structures and policies are focused on property,’ Remes says. ‘When you’re trying to restore property, you end up restoring property.’”vi

    Leon Trotsky could not have said it better himself. “It’s really hard to do within capitalism” is exactly the point of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and his method of transitional demands. The point is that decaying capitalist society cannot afford to satisfy even the basic democratic demands of working class and oppressed people, including simple humanitarian demands such as equitable disaster relief. Thus, according to this theory and method, it will require a socialist revolution even to carry out such basic democratic demands and simple humanitarian demands in a reliably consistent and lasting manner.

    They Built This City on Racist Genocide and Capitalist Anti-Worker Violence

    The early history of Los Angeles, from the Mexican-American War in the 1840s through its booming growth in the 1920s, was a vile saga of racist genocidal violence against Mexicans and indigenous people in the 19th century, followed by decades of openly brazen and violent capitalist suppression of workers’ unionization struggles in the early 20th century.vii

    In the period after the U.S. conquest of California and other Mexican territories in the war, from the late 1840s through 1870, when Los Angeles was still a town with a small population, it already developed a reputation as the “toughest” and most lawless town in the western U.S. and possibly in the nation. Mobs of white settler vigilantes committed lynchings of Mexicans almost twice a year for two decades. The U.S. flagrantly disregarded the clause in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that required the granting of U.S. citizenship to indigenous people of the conquered Mexican territories, not granting this right until well into the 20th century. California’s state constitution deemed indigenous people to be non-persons under the law. White people could drive indigenous people out of their own homes and properties, or simply kill them, with complete legal impunity. As one report stated, the white people of Los Angeles in this period decided that the “quickest and best way to get rid of [indigenous people’s] troublesome presence was to kill them off, [and] this procedure was adopted as a standard for many years.”viii Chinese immigrants were also victims of vicious racial oppression in this period, subjected to brutal exploitation as laborers who built the Southern Pacific Railroad that connected San Francisco and Los Angeles in 1876. The most notorious act of anti-Chinese violence was the Los Angeles Chinese massacre of 1871, when a mob killed 19 Chinese immigrants at a time when fewer than 200 Chinese people lived in the city.

    Thus the white settler ruling class of Los Angeles effectively carried out a genocide of the indigenous population and subjugated Mexicans and Chinese people in the middle and late 19th century. Having accomplished this genocide, the white capitalist class of Los Angeles then combined a campaign for economic expansion with an openly brazen and violent campaign against any and all efforts by workers to form labor unions in the city. The Los Angeles Times newspaper played a leading role in this anti-union campaign in the early 20th century.

    In 1907 the AFL began a union organizing campaign in Los Angeles. In response, in 1909 the municipal government of Los Angeles banned free speech on public streets and on private property. In 1910 the Los Angeles Times building was bombed, one of the most notable actions of the early 20th century labor struggles in the United States. Unfortunately, renowned defense lawyer Clarence Darrow let down the labor movement in this instance by persuading the accused McNamara brothers to plead guilty. This undermined the socialist electoral campaign of Job Harriman and contributed to his electoral defeat in 1911.

    The IWW continued its own union organizing campaigns in the Los Angeles area in the following decade. The Los Angeles police violently attacked an IWW rally on Christmas Day in 1913, killing a person in the process. A protest movement erupted after this police attack, and in response the authorities declared martial law in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times even described taco vendors as “cultural subversives”.ix

    The last major organizing campaign of the IWW in the Los Angeles area in this period culminated in the longshoremen’s strike in San Pedro in 1923. The LAPD formed a “Red Squad” to arrest strikers, and placed 1,200 dock workers in a stockade in Griffith Park. The Los Angeles Times stated that “stockades and forced labor were a good remedy for IWW terrorism.” Author and activist Upton Sinclair was arrested for reading the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution on the private property of a strike supporter. The strike was broken when the Ku Klux Klan and the American Legion raided a meeting at the IWW union hall, attacking men, women, and children.

    The Los Angeles Economy in the Early 20th Century

    Thus, having effectively exterminated indigenous people, subjugated Mexicans and Chinese people, and crushed the labor movement—all with unbridled and deadly violence—by the middle of the 1920s the white capitalist ruling class of Los Angeles was free to pursue its own enrichment through unrestrained economic expansion with very little restriction or resistance. Among the largest sectors in the area’s economy that emerged in the early 20th century were the oil industry and the film industry. (Of course the agricultural industry was always a major part of the area’s economy.)

    Although Southern California does not have a popular reputation as an oil-producing region, in the way that places like Texas and Oklahoma do, in fact the Los Angeles area was one of the largest oil-producing regions in the world in the early 20th century. By the 1920s the Los Angeles area produced as much as 25% of the total global oil supply.

    The film industry, on the other hand, is virtually synonymous with the name Hollywood in popular culture around the world. The development of the technology for “talking pictures”—films with sound—emerged in the 1920s and went hand in hand with the growth of the Hollywood film industry.

    As the growth of these new industries attracted a larger and larger population to the Los Angeles area, the demand for housing for the hundreds of thousands of people moving to the region naturally created a boom in the real estate industry as well.

    The L.A. Capitalist Class’s War on Mother Nature

    There was, however, always a huge problem with unrestrained economic expansion and population growth in the Los Angeles area: The city is located in a semi-arid coastal basin, with almost no rainfall at all during the six-month period from May through October each year. Los Angeles only has an average of about 34 rainy days per year, producing an average of only about 12-14 inches (300-350 millimeters) of rain per year. For comparison, San Francisco in Northern California has an average of about 71 rainy days per year, producing an average of about 23 inches (585 millimeters) of rain per year. Moreover, the entire Southern California region receives substantially less rainfall and precipitation than Northern California does, as the following map illustrates very clearly:

    As the map vividly shows, a city such as San Francisco is located in rather close proximity to the high-rainfall regions of Northern California. In fact, California’s two largest rivers, the Sacramento River in northern California and the San Joaquin River in central California, both flow together into the Sacramento—San Joaquin River Delta northeast of San Francisco, which then flows via a series of bays into San Francisco Bay. Los Angeles, on the other hand, is not located anywhere near any substantial high-rainfall regions. As a result, Los Angeles and the rest of Southern California never had a natural water supply sufficient to meet the needs of a population of many millions of people.x

    Only the reckless and unbridled economic expansion carried out by the capitalist class of Los Angeles in the 20th century dared to disregard the ecological factors that should have cautioned careful economic planners against the idea of building a major metropolis of many millions of people in such a region. The capitalist ruling elite, who had crushed indigenous people, Mexicans, Chinese people, and the labor movement in Los Angeles, were not about to let a small technicality like the utter lack of a natural water supply spoil their visions of seemingly unlimited profit potential in the rapid expansion of the area’s economy.

    The artificial capitalist expansion of Los Angeles in the 20th century as a metropolis with a population of many millions of people, in a location with no natural water supply in the surrounding region, is the original ecological sin of Los Angeles, from which all the additional reckless anti-environmental policy decisions have flowed. Example: the madness of building residential houses for wealthy people in Malibu, an area naturally and permanently prone to frequent wildfires, and then adopting a policy of fire suppression for the benefit of the wealthy residents, which only leads inevitably to catastrophic fires sooner or later.xi

    When the Los Angeles fires started, Trump made the false claim that the inability to contain and extinguish the fires was caused by a shortage of water in Los Angeles and Southern California at the present moment, which is not actually true. Trump is confusing the chronic long-term issue of sustainable water supply with the acute immediate short-term issue of presently available water resources to combat the Los Angeles fires right now. Trump’s demand to transport more water resources from Northern California to Southern California would do nothing to effectively combat fires either now or in the future. It would, however, contribute to even greater damage to the regional ecosystem than has already been inflicted over the past century, which would exacerbate the conditions of climate change that increase the risk of fires and make them more devastating when they inevitably occur. Trump’s proposed policy would lead to great harm to people and to fish, by deepening the disruption of the entire ecosystem.

    To be clear, human geo-engineering in itself is not necessarily reactionary or wrong—as long as it is carried out for socially necessary purposes of the sustainable development of the productive forces of society in a manner that benefits humanity. But there was no real social necessity for the development of the Los Angeles area in the manner and to the extent that capitalism carried it out, at least since the 1920s. The location of the Hollywood film industry in Southern California was not and is not a social necessity; films can be produced in many places that do not require such ecologically disruptive and unsustainable measures as the large-scale transport of a water supply to Southern California. Places like Hollywood and Disneyland are products of the epoch of decaying capitalism, developed as a type of bourgeois utopian fantasy playground for the fabulously wealthy ruling class of 20th century U.S. imperialism. Supporting such artificial enterprises is not an efficient or justifiable use of human geo-engineering technology. A socialist society would find much more efficient ways to use technology in an ecologically sustainable manner, to support the development of truly socially necessary productive forces of society, for the benefit of all people—and the planet as well.

    A Century of Anti-Black Racism in Los Angeles

    Following in the footsteps of the violent racist history of L.A.’s white ruling class in the 19th century, their descendants who inherited their ill-gotten gains then treated Black people with racist hostility in the 20th and 21st centuries. As Los Angeles grew to become a large metropolis in the 1920s and the following decades, the city’s Black population grew as well. The booming Hollywood film industry and all the wealthy and middle class people who moved into Los Angeles in this period needed a low-paid labor force to support them—not unionized, of course—and Black workers filled many of these positions.

    The racist ruling class of Southern California took measures to ensure that Black people disproportionately bore the brunt of the damage caused by the unnatural capitalist ecological disruptions in the region in the 20th century. South Central, Compton, and other Black areas of Greater Los Angeles became potential death traps in a dangerously unsafe climate prone to ecological catastrophes exacerbated by capitalism. Even in the absence of outright disasters, the steadily worsening conditions created by climate change could make life in these neighborhoods a miserable living hell. Indeed the Watts riots in August 1965 were partly a reaction to the failure of the Los Angeles ruling class to provide sufficient relief from an extreme heat wave that summer: Black people saw the class and racial divide between the comfortable air-conditioned homes and offices of their white bosses vs. the intolerable, miserable conditions of their own homes and neighborhoods.

    The LAPD cops have long been infamous for their racist treatment of Black people in Los Angeles. They inherited the legacy of the genocidal racist white settler “Vigilance Committees” of the 19th century and the anti-labor LAPD “Red Squads” of the early 20th century. After the Watts riots and other uprisings of the 1960s, the LAPD’s racist brutality got national and global attention again in the early 1990s when a resident filmed the beating of Rodney King in 1991. When the four police officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted in late April 1992, Black people, Latinos, and others who solidarized with them erupted in rioting for six days in South Central and other areas of Los Angeles.

    Labor Struggles in Southern California Today

    Undeterred by the vicious and violent history of the capitalist ruling class against labor unions and leftist activists in Los Angeles and Southern California since the early 20th century, workers and socialists continue to fight for unionization campaigns and other struggles to the present day. Shortly before the January 2025 Los Angeles fires started, Amazon workers led by drivers represented by the Teamsters union went on strike across the country during the Christmas holiday week in late December 2024, when Amazon has the largest volume of packages to deliver. Large Amazon facilities in Southern California were one focus of this strike. Socialists and other leftist activists in Los Angeles played an active role in joining the picket lines of this Amazon Teamsters strike: a detailed report has been published recently on the Tempest Collective’s website.xii

    Environmental catastrophes such as the Los Angeles fires often serve to sharpen the existing class antagonisms and conflicts already present in capitalist society. The capitalists will attempt to take advantage of the catastrophe to attack workers while they are temporarily disorganized and atomized by the disruptions of their and their families’ lives caused by the fires. Organized workers and socialists who support them will have the combined challenge of continuing the ongoing labor struggles, such as the Amazon Teamsters campaign, while also fighting back against the new capitalist attacks on workers and oppressed people in Los Angeles and Southern California in the wake of the fires. For example, reports of landlords violating laws against price-gouging in rental charges are already widespread. The organized working class has the potential power to be the central agent in the struggles against the capitalist attacks that the disaster of the Los Angeles fires will only encourage.

    Conclusion

    In many ways, the history of the status of Los Angeles in U.S. capitalist society has proceeded in parallel with the history of the status of U.S. capitalism in the world. When Los Angeles was a fledgling town in the 19th century, the United States was a fledgling capitalist nation in the world. As the United States grew to become an imperialist power in the early 20th century, Los Angeles grew to become a major U.S. city. As the wealth, power, and status of the United States in the world continued to increase during the course of the 20th century, Los Angeles continued to grow in size, wealth, power, and status within the U.S. When the economic growth of the United States peaked and stalled at the end of the post-war boom in the 1970s, the growth and status of Los Angeles also peaked and crested. And now in the 21st century, it is surely not an accident that as the political and economic chickens have come home to roost for the U.S. capitalist ruling class in the age of Trump and MAGA, so the ecological chickens have come home to roost for Southern California’s capitalist ruling class with the wildfires in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the region.

    The catastrophic Los Angeles fires of January 2025 are the inevitable ecological result of a century of unsustainable and artificial capitalist expansion in a geographic location that is simply not endowed by nature to support a large population center. The racist white capitalist ruling class of Los Angeles has spent 175 years waging war on indigenous people, Mexicans, Chinese people, labor unions, Black people, and also the Earth itself. Now the Earth has struck back with a vengeance. The time will come, hopefully sooner rather than later, when all the other victims of the racist L.A. capitalists will strike back successfully themselves.

    Notes

    ii In the period 1870-1900, San Francisco was the only West Coast city among the 10 most populous cities in the United States, at its peak the 8th largest in 1890. Los Angeles replaced San Francisco and became the 10th largest U.S. city in 1920, and then Los Angeles boomed to become the 5th largest by 1930.

    iii Los Angeles grew steadily from 5th largest U.S. city in 1940, to 4th largest in 1950, to 3rd largest in 1960, to become the 2nd largest city in the United States during the 1980s, a status that it has held to the present day.

    iv Greater Los Angeles has 46% of the entire population of the state of California. It is more populous than all other U.S. states except Texas, Florida, and New York.

    v Millions of listeners in the 1980s sang along to the chorus of “I Love L.A.” with sincere enthusiasm, not realizing that the song was actually intended as social satire.

    vii Much of the information in this section is based on the excellent and well-documented summary presented in the section “Early American era” of the “History of Los Angeles” article on the Wikipedia website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Los_Angeles#Early_American_era

    viii Cook, Sherburne F. (1971). “The Aboriginal Population of Upper California”. In Heizer, R. F. & Whipple, M. A. (eds.). The California Indians: A Sourcebook (2nd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press.

    ix “Rioters Must Face the Law”. Los Angeles Times. December 28, 1913.

    x A discussion of the complicated regional political ecology of the water supply of the Colorado River, the southern part of which forms the California-Arizona border in southeastern California, is important in its own right but beyond the scope of this essay.

  • Ukraine Solidarity Under the Trump Administration

    Ukraine Solidarity Under the Trump Administration

    On the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the United States under the Trump administration is now pushing negotiations for a “peace” settlement. The Ukraine Solidarity Network-U.S. (USN) opposes any attempt to impose a settlement that is not acceptable to the Ukrainian people.

    Anyone with an ounce of compassion wants this war to end as soon as possible, but it is morally unacceptable for outsiders to demand that Ukraine surrender. USN continues to support the right of the Ukrainian people to self-determination and to decide for themselves what are acceptable terms for a peace deal. USN will continue to build moral, political, and material support for the people of Ukraine in their resistance to Russia’s invasion, to its occupation of Ukrainian lands, and to its repressive rule over people in the Russian-occupied territories. USN will continue to support Ukraine’s war of resistance, its right to determine the means and objectives of its own struggle, and its right to obtain the weapons it needs from any available source.

    USN opposes the changes for the worse in US policy on Ukraine under the new Trump administration. The Biden administration at least condemned Russia’s illegal war of aggression and supported Ukraine’s self-defense, even if that military aid came with many strings attached and was often too little and too late to defeat the Russian army on Ukrainian land.

    Now the Trump administration is posturing as a “neutral” broker between Russia and Ukraine, as if the aggressor and its victim are equally at fault. But in practice, the Trump administration is publicly supporting Russian demands and rejecting Ukrainian demands. Trump’s calls for U.S. “ownership” of Gaza in Palestine and for U.S. annexation of Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal are as brazenly imperialist as Putin’s attempt to annex Ukraine.

    USN opposes any attempt by the Trump administration to make a deal with Putin over the heads of the Ukrainians and to try to force it on Ukraine by threatening to withdraw humanitarian, economic, and military support for Ukraine. We further condemn the Trump administration’s demands for effective control of Ukraine’s mineral resources and other economic assets. The Trump administration has already frozen billions of dollars in humanitarian and economic aid that supports millions of Ukrainians, including:

    • Millions of displaced war refugees inside Ukraine and abroad
    • Tens of thousands of disabled veterans
    • More than 100,000 HIV/AIDS patients
    • Firewood for people without power due to Russia’s war crime of bombarding civilian energy infrastructure
    • Repair and reconstruction of power plants and distribution grids
    • Grants to small farmers for seeds, fertilizer, and the replacement and repair of war-damaged farm equipment, grain storage silos, and ports for food exports
    • Independent media and civic organizations
    • Budget support for social services and public utilities

    The Trump administration has also disbanded the Department of Justice task force charged with enforcing sanctions and anti-corruption laws against Russia’s wealthy political elites and oligarchs.

    As the Russian war against Ukraine enters its fourth year, USN will continue to work for Ukraine’s victory over the Russian invaders, criminal accountability for their war crimes, and their payment of reparations to fund reconstruction.

    • We support the armed and unarmed resistance of Ukrainians against the Russian occupying power.
    • We support economic sanctions against Russia’s war machinery, including its political, military, and economic elite, its access to the international financial system, its imports of weapons-related technology, and its exports of fossil fuels.*
    • We demand that all Russians incarcerated for war resistance and political dissent be freed and that war resisters and political dissidents seeking refuge abroad be granted asylum.
    • We demand that the tens of thousands of Ukrainian children kidnapped to Russia and Belarus be returned to Ukraine.
    • We demand that the tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians from Russian-occupied territories incarcerated for opposition to the occupation be released and returned to Ukraine.
    • We support asylum in the U.S. for Ukrainians, Russians, Belorussians, Haitians, Venezuelans, Afghans and all people seeking refuge from political repression and war.
    • We demand the cancellation of all of Ukraine’s illegitimate and unjust foreign debts.
    • We demand the confiscation of Russian assets abroad to be used to support Ukraine’s military self-defense, social services, and post-war reconstruction.
    • We oppose the U.S. policy of imposing a neoliberal economic agenda on Ukraine today and for its post-war reconstruction.

    The Ukrainians’ struggle for self-determination, democracy and social justice will continue. We support the political struggles of Ukrainian trade unions, women’s organizations, environmental initiatives, and progressive political organizations to reverse the neoliberal anti-labor and anti-social policies of the Ukrainian government, to expand social, labor, and democratic rights, and to implement a just and ecological reconstruction of Ukraine. We will continue to build material aid and public education campaigns linking trade unions, civic organizations, and progressive political organizations in the U.S. with their counterparts in Ukraine. We urge all opponents of imperialism to join us.            – www.ukrainesolidaritynetwork.us

    ====

    * The question of sanctions is complicated and controversial among activists committed to Ukraine’s struggle. It’s especially important in the USA that we do not accommodate to the predatory politics of the imperialist U.S. state. The Ukraine Solidarity Network will be discussing these issues as the betrayal of Ukraine unfolds in collaboration with our Ukrainian comrades whose lives and national freedom are on the line.

     

     

     

  • Trans Rights are Emancipatory Human Rights

    Trans Rights are Emancipatory Human Rights

    Trump’s executive orders on trans rights is not just an attack on trans and intersexed individuals, but an attack on human freedom. Most problematic was the first which set the stage for setting back gender and LGBTQ+ rights decades. This order states that “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.  These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”1 On the policy front, this means that immediately those who are trans, intersexed or non-binary have lost protection from the US federal government, and have, in fact, been written out of legal existence (as has been evidenced over the debate on allowing X as a gender on passports), all of which allows for legal discrimination and targeted violence. Such legal discrimination comes from later Trump executive orders to potentially bar anyone with professed gender dysphoria from serving in the military,2 ending federal funding for gender affirming care, barring trans women from participating in women’s sports, and setting rules for how schools could discuss gender.3

    While it should be obvious what this will mean for those that identify as non-binary in a broad sense, equally problematic is the definition of sex as immutable and the order to not even discuss gender—meaning that “biological sex” is the sole basis in which the administration will classify individuals on these types of matters and that the social has no meaning outside what is decreed by Trump and his administration.4 Logic says that if there are people, no matter how small the number who are born in such a way that makes it difficult to determine whether they carry XX or XY (or XXY, XYY, etc.) chromosomes then sex is far from immutable, and that in nature a clear binary doesn’t exist.5

    Further, actual biological knowledge (v. Trump’s fascist pronouncement of “fact”) shows that biology is not immutable and with the definition in this executive order, we are all transgender. The order defines “man” and “woman” based on the reproductive cells that one has at conception—something that no fertilized egg has at this point.6 For most with XX chromosomes, egg cells are not produced until many weeks later, and for most with XY chromosomes, sperm cells are not produced until puberty. Certainly, one can say that someone with XX chromosomes has the potential to become a woman under this definition and someone with XY chromosomes has the potential to become a man, but potential implies a certain degree of uncertainty. If the “normal” process is interrupted, that potential will not turn into actuality. Not all acorns become oak trees despite their potential to do so.

    The difficulty that the Trump administration is facing is not only that biology is not destiny (human beings have subjectivity and may choose to go on a different path, although the state can make it much more difficult to accomplish), but also that simply making a decree doesn’t change the reality of a process. Certainly, it can change some people’s minds and with the power and wealth of the federal government behind it, it can force changes in policy. However, without the use of actual science, there is no way to assure that chromosomes and visible sex characteristics line up (assuming that that is even possible for science and desirable for society to dictate this as the only course possible). And of course, this says nothing about the choices of individuals who will resist being put into boxes that they don’t identify with.

    While these orders clearly target transgender, intersexed and non-binary people, the writing is on the wall for those assigned female at birth (AFAB) as well as the rest of the LGBTQ+ community. If sex is immutable and based on reproductive cells, then how far off are we from saying that “biological women” have the primary purpose of carrying children to term and taking care of them at the expense of everything else in their lives? Similarly, does that mean that those who prefer relationships with same-sex individuals are “abnormal” and need to put aside their own happiness to produce their own biological children? The recent Dobbs decision paired with Trump’s executive orders seem to point in that direction—biology is written to mean destiny and privacy isn’t guaranteed in the Constitution even in terms of bodily integrity.

    Even before these executive orders, the US was taking many steps backwards regarding issues of gender and sexuality. After the Dobbs decision, abortion is either greatly restricted or completely illegal in 23 states making it difficult or sometimes impossible for women to get the procedure. But as was indicated by a ruling of the Alabama Supreme Court, the goal of Christian fundamentalists is much broader. Using a law that calls for fetal personhood at the moment of conception, the Court ruled that an IVF clinic was liable for the destruction of embryos stored at their facility, causing a number of clinics to close their doors until the law was clarified. After much backlash, legislators carved out an exception to fetal personhood for IVF providers, however, the concept of life originating at the moment of conception remains in place,7 all but eliminating women’s reproductive choice in the state. It is far from surprising that other states are looking to Alabama as a potential model.

    As of the summer of 2024, before Trump’s election there were 523 bills up for discussion in state legislatures throughout the US dealing with such issues as what can be taught in schools, healthcare issues, bathroom bills, book bans, drag bans, and a redefinition of sex on a solely reproductive basis.8 These bills are being put forward in nearly all states, even those like Massachusetts that is known for its liberal politics. Although these types of bills are unlikely to pass in most states, it illustrates the possibilities for LGBTQ+ individuals to face scorn and even violence from those that support these types of policies in their communities. In fact, hate crimes based on sexual orientation were up 13.8% and those based on gender identity 32.9% in 2022.9 We see similar trends as well in Europe with Britain banning gender affirming care last year for minors, for example.10 Given the vitriol from the far Right on these issues, this is far from surprising. Demonization of certain groups in the name of protecting the values of others will almost certainly lead to some level of violence against the reviled group. This demonization is likely to increase greatly as it is now based on federal policy.

    Gender, the Family and the State11

    Every class-based society has clung to specific notions of what is “natural” by formulating certain social relationships as the only possible way of doing things. This is a means for the ruling class to stay in power without expending a huge amount of repressive force. From Aristotle to Confucius to John Locke, to modern politicians of all stripes, all have noted the close relationship between family and the rights of citizenship. Only those coming from the “correct” sorts of family models will be eligible for full citizenship rights.12 This was the basis for the Chinese Exclusion Act of the nineteenth century here in the US just as today’s right-wing politicians point to the supposed breakdown of the Black family, “anchor babies,” Trump’s Mexican “rapists,” economic refugees that can’t support themselves, etc. All these supposed pathologies relate back to a notion of the family and its role for economic support and political socialization. While the examples above largely dealt with issues of immigration, certainly the attacks that we have seen on the LGBTQ+ community are also based on a similar logic. One must adhere to the gender codes of the time and fall into place in the “traditional” family structure; otherwise, political rights will be minimized. Without a significant transformation of gender as a social and economic category, attacks on non-gender conforming individuals will necessarily continue—all the more so now that a fascistic administration bent on turning the clock backward is now in power using both constitutional and extra-constitutional means to do so.

    These attacks against the LGBTQ+ community and bodily autonomy more generally have played itself out worldwide as conservatives capture state power. The question remains of how to best respond to these egregious attacks on basic rights. Here, I borrow from Marx’s theory of the liberal democratic state and how it relates to individuals to illustrate the challenges faced by activists to stave off these Rightist attacks on gender nonconformists (although this was likely far from his intent).13 As Marx argues in “The Jewish Question”, the liberal democratic state at its best does not recognize the concrete individual, but only one abstracted from everything else. This citizen theoretically has equal rights in the political sphere, but in practice this is far from true since political equality is achieved only by abstracting out all difference (class, gender, sexuality, ability, education, etc.). This difference remains outside of the political sphere and can limit participation in civil society and politics. For example, a woman tasked with childcare duties may find it more difficult to lobby the government for change or even find time to vote as childcare is not provided by the state to make up for the socially unequal distribution of care responsibilities by gender, not to mention race and class. Similarly, the debate over mail in ballots often revolves around the issue of the potential for fraud rather than the issues of access for those who are differently abled and may not be as easily able to vote in person. Overall, the citizen tends to be viewed by the state as a white abled middle class cisgendered male, who can find a way to participate in politics (though this is often at the cost of access to civic participation for others).

    Any effort by the state to remedy this inequality will lead to some arguing that the state is giving special treatment to these groups. Marx offers an incipient theory of why states will necessarily vacillate on LGBTQ+ rights because the nature of the state relative to the individual is contradictory. While we cannot rely on the state to be a consistent supporter of LGBTQ+ rights, as Marx points out in “The Jewish Question” and the Critique of the Gotha Program, an understanding of how the state functions is essential for its instrumental use in times where attenuation of oppression is needed in the short term and for theorizing a way out of this racist, sexist, classist, heteropatriarchal system in the longer term.

    Marx specifically points out in “The Jewish Question” that although the liberal state is certainly a major advance over the repressive monarchies of the time, its limitations could be seen as it related to the possibility for equal rights for Jewish people. The general argument can certainly apply to any group that finds itself as a minority. As much as organization for change may have temporary results for groups that face either state or private oppression, it is clear that even state regulation of civil rights is not nearly enough to secure full emancipation for women and non-traditional gender conforming individuals, as is indicated by the current multinational debate over transgender rights because these rights cannot go far enough.

    As Marx points out, simple political equality is not human emancipation. In fact, the abolition of a distinction (often based on structural oppressions like race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, etc.) must presuppose that the distinction actually exists, “Far from abolishing these factual differences, its existence rests on them as a presupposition, it only feels itself to be a political state and asserts its universality by opposition to these elements.” 14 This distinction is then alienated from the individual’s species being: the state ignores the differences of the individual in order to bring them into the community. Thus, the individual is fractured into multiple parts where only the most abstract aspects of humanity are acknowledged by the state and by other human beings. One remains a citizen, but qualifiers must always be added which can ultimately lead to a sort of second-class citizenship, all the more so, the more structural inequality exists. For example, people who identify as non-binary under the current administration are outside of governmental protection as being non-binary rather than being a “man” or a “woman.” It is then fine to remove them from history and social commentary,15 not pay for lifesaving gender affirming treatments for depressed Trans youth or fire a teacher for talking about the gender spectrum in class. Currently, the Trump Administration is using the weaknesses of the liberal state which attempts to mediate class and other societal conflict to undermine the minimalist protections offered to non-binary individuals under Biden. It is able to do so because the liberal state is agnostic when it comes to rights for those facing these types of oppression.

    Marx also critiques the liberal state in another sense for its notion of equal rights. Such rights can only be as advanced as the society in which it exists:

    A right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal criterion, grasped only in terms of a specific aspect, for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored.16

    As Marx continues in the Critique of the Gotha Program, equal right in the labor force under the early stages of a transitional post-capitalist society could be based on how long they work. This does not account for variations in the intensity of labor that an individual can handle, nor does it account for the fact that “one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth… To avoid all these defects, rights would have to be unequal rather than equal.”17 Again, it is the neutrality of the state to issues of difference that leads to the potential for inequality for those who cannot or will not shed these differences. Only a recognition of difference and an incorporation of the uniqueness of each human into society along the lines of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”18 will lead to a society where all can be free to self-develop.

    That is exactly why it is necessary to support liberal elements that want to keep basic protections in place for all human beings while at the same time working for full human rights for all. It is nearly impossible to work for these rights under a government that doesn’t allow for freedom of speech or assembly. Full human rights for trans, intersex and non-binary individuals would mean recognition based on the concrete individual rather than the liberal abstraction. This recognition of the concrete individual would necessarily mean that the state would have to act to smooth out economic and other differences in order to create a truly equal playing field for all within the political sphere—something that is an anathema to capitalism which benefits greatly from these differences.19

    Current policies are particularly insidious for trans, intersex and non-binary individuals, who can rightly feel like they do not have the right to be themselves in public spaces. This is not only the case because of the constant threat of being “outed” and subject to physical violence, but also because of laws and governmental policies that threaten to criminalize the most basic of human functions through, for example, forcing individuals to use bathrooms that do not conform to their lived gender. Further, even when these policies are not in place, these individuals may face the ire of private citizens enforcing traditional gender codes, something that is likely to be exacerbated in the current political climate.

    It seems necessary at this point to return to the issue of identity this time in a more dialectical fashion in order to craft a strategy to fully overcome gender and sexually based oppression. To do this, a theory of the concrete individual is needed. Perhaps there is something that we can learn from Marx in his discussion of gender, albeit his interest was likely far from supporting what would become the LGBTQ+ community or fundamental change in gender roles.

    As the International Marxist Humanists (IMHO) wrote in their trans statement:

    “…Who we are, what we become, and how we define ourselves is not reducible to biology, since we are social beings with the capacity for conscious, purposeful creation. Any effort to prevent trans people from exercising that capacity violates the Marxist-Humanist understanding of what it means to be human.”20

    Alex Adamson (2024) drew exactly on this point regarding the labor of trans individuals. As individuals, cis-gendered or otherwise, we reproduce ourselves in our various identities based in part on the social norms in place at a particular time. This is a certain type of socially necessary labor that all must engage in. While not productive in the capitalist sense of directly producing surplus value, this labor is very much necessary to the continued survival of individuals and the social whole. How this social reproduction takes place can vary greatly depending on a variety of factors.

    In Transmarxism, Gleeson makes a similar point, looking directly at the ways in which trans people must work to reproduce themselves and their preferred gender identity. Because of the economic and social marginalization of trans people, this is often not possible at the individual level. As a result, real and virtual networks have been created to help trans people with basic daily reproduction as well as with putting forward their preferred self through tips that they have developed from their own experiences.21

    Adamson (2024) points to the ramifications of this labor process that must necessarily still be alienated as production of surplus labor for others is still necessary to survive and because as much as trans people may want to have full recognition of their personhood, this is simply not possible. We can look to the sorts of formal and informal networks that Gleeson discusses as starting points for an unalienated identity that acknowledges the full individual as integral to the social, but these groups, like any others will bear the scars that capitalist relations necessarily inflict. This doesn’t mean, however, that they are not a potential starting point for developing a new society:

    “If capitalism and its attendant forms of racism, cis-heteronormativity, anti-trans violence, imperialism, and ableism are a first order negation of social life, then what is called for is a negation of a second order; a negation that abolishes the capitalist totality while simultaneously creating social relations corresponding to a new social totality.”22

    The 2023 IMHO statement on Trans rights points to the need to “stand against oppression and structural violence against transgender, non-binary, and other gender expansive peoples throughout the world… [and] recognize the transgender struggle as part of the broader struggle against patriarchy and misogyny, harmful gender norms, and gender-based violence… [and] recognize that free transgender people are an integral force towards greater gender and/or human liberation.”23 This is a path that we must continue to go down especially now when so much in terms of the rights of the human being under threat. We must continue to assert the right of the individual to full self-development and work to theorize and enact the means to make individual self-development possible for everyone. Rosa Luxemburg’s argument that we face a choice of Socialism or Barbarism is particularly apt as we see an American Administration bent on hypostatizing all social relations in order to define them and undermine human self-development. It is up to us to fill in the details of what such a post-capitalist society would look like, lest we continue down the path of barbarism.

    Notes

    1 ACLU, “Trump’s Executive Orders Promoting Sex Discrimination, Explained,” https://wp.api.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/trumps-executive-orders-promoting-sex-discrimination-explained Accessed February 9, 2025.

    2 While one can justifiably question whether the right to serve in a military that’s imperialist at its base is a progressive right, the justification for possible removal of trans individuals in the military showcases the backwardness in thinking of this administration which could have implications well beyond military service. Specifically, the executive order claims that living as a different gender than the one that they were assigned at birth “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.” (Copp, Tara and Baldor, Lolita C. “Trump signs an order to revise the Pentagon’s policy on transgender troops” https://apnews.com/article/hegseth-tuskegee-airmen-dei-pentagon-480d932c8bcb4c6056abe78e34010982, Accessed February 16, 2025. Here, trans individuals are turned into undisciplined and untrustworthy individuals. When applied to a whole class of people this can only lead to discrimination and dehumanization, that given the number and oppressive nature of other executive orders on trans individuals is not likely to stay in the bounds of the military.

    3 CBS News, “Transgender rights lawsuits challenge Trump policies on passport markers, gender-affirming care for minors,” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transgender-rights-lawsuits-challenge-trump-policies/ Accessed February 9, 2025.

    4 Mulvihill, Geoff and Carla K. Johnson, “What to know about President Donald Trump’s order targeting the rights of transgender people,” https://apnews.com/article/trump-transgender-passports-prisons-eggs-sperm-da1d1d280658a8c85c57cfec2f30cefb Accessed February 9, 2025.

    5 There is an awful history in the US that has sought to do away with this ambiguity by surgically altering the genitalia of infants, physically maiming and sterilizing them before they have a chance to decide for themselves who they are and often depriving these individuals of most or any sexual pleasure later in life. (For more on this, see for example: Anne Fausto-Sterling, 1993, “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female are Not Enough,” The Sciences. P. 20-24. Of course, we can’t expect the solicitousness of this administration for “protecting” youth from themselves to apply to these victims of a binary understanding of sex.

    6 Mulvihill, Geoff and Carla K. Johnson, “What to know about President Donald Trump’s order targeting the rights of transgender people,” https://apnews.com/article/trump-transgender-passports-prisons-eggs-sperm-da1d1d280658a8c85c57cfec2f30cefb Accessed February 9, 2025.

    7 Chung, Andrew. “US Supreme Court rejects IVF clinic’s appeal of Alabama embryo ruling,” https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-rejects-ivf-clinics-appeal-alabama-embryo-ruling-2024-10-07/ Accessed February 9.

    8 ACLU, “Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ Rights in U.S. State Legislatures in 2024.” https://www.aclu.org/legislative-attacks-on-lgbtq-rights-2024?state= Accessed June 21, 2024.

    9 Luneau, Delphine. “FBI’s Annual Crime Report — Amid State of Emergency, Anti-LGBTQ+ Hate Crimes Hit Staggering Record Highs,” October 16, 2023. https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/fbis-annual-crime-report-amid-state-of-emergency-anti-lgbtq-hate-crimes-hit-staggering-record-highs

    10 John, Tara. “England’s health service to stop prescribing puberty blockers to transgender kids,” CNN, March 15, 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/13/uk/england-nhs-puberty-blockers-trans-children-intl-gbr/index.html

    11 This section and the two paragraphs above are an edited version of sections of a talk given at the International Marxist Humanist Convention, July 2024: “The Environment, LGBTQ Rights and the Family: What Does Marx Offer for Theorizing Alternatives to Capital?”

    12 Cott, Nancy F. 2000. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    13 Marx has been rightly subject to many critiques for his largely gender-blind notions of social reproduction which led him to often ignore the gendered implications of capitalist daily reproduction and his failure to see the full impacts of capitalism on women. See for example, Furgeson, Sue. 2022. “Engaging Federici on Marx, Capitalism and Social Reproduction,” New Politics. Vol. XVIII, No. 4 for a balanced account of this type of argument. While a full explanation of Marx’s strengths and limitations cannot be fully dealt with here (I take these issues up in much more detail in Marx on Gender and the Family: A Critical Study, 2013. Haymarket Books), I am following Raya Dunayevskaya who saw Marx’s writings less as a static political oeuvre and instead sought to apply his overall theory of human society and especially the self-developing subjects of capitalism that resist and seek to overcome the limitations of capitalism. It is through these individuals and the progressive movements that they create, that we can learn about how to build a non-hierarchical post-capitalist society. See her Marxism & Freedom, Chapters 5 and 6 for an example on how Marx learned from the Paris Commune and updated Capital as a result. See also Philosophy & Revolution Chapter 9 for Dunayevskaya’s take on how Marxism should be updated to account for the US Civil Rights Movement and the Feminist Movement. One must of course remain vigilant when reading Marx this way so that the shortcomings of Marx, the human implicated in the prejudices of his own time are not glossed over, lest important grounds for critique and refinement of theory for today are lost.

    14 Marx, “On the Jewish Question”, p. 53. In McLellan, David. Karl Marx: Selected Writings: Oxford University Press.

    15 The Park Service has recently removed any mention of the trans individuals who participated in the Stonewall Riot from their website and elsewhere on federal government websites, LGBTQ has been replaced with LGB. Kim, Juliana. “Park Service erases ‘transgender’ on Stonewall website, uses the term ‘LGB’ movement” https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/g-s1-48923/stonewall-monument-transgender-park-service#:~:text=Hourly%20News-,Park%20Service%20erases%20’transgender’%20and%20’queer’%20from%20Stonewall,lesbian%2C%20gay%20and%20bisexual%20people. Accessed February 16, 2025.

    16 Marx, Karl. 2022. Critique of the Gotha Program, PM Press. p. 58-59.

    17 Ibid. p. 59.

    18 Ibid. p. 59.

    19 What societal institutions might exist following an end to capitalist social relations to transition to a higher order of society is far from settled. As Marx noted, right cannot exceed the society in which it exists. There is no reason to believe that an end to capitalist social relations, in and of themselves would mean an end to all forms of oppression. Oppression and bigotry will not disappear overnight. Instead, society will have to find ways of trying to level the playing field and bring in all voices. Marx’s support for the institution of the Paris Commune and its possibilities for a more direct and participatory democracy seem like a good starting point for theorizing a post-capitalist society. Having representatives that are not above the population because they are also workers receiving the same wages as workers and because they can be recalled by popular vote would help smooth out some contradictions to a capitalist representative democracy. More leisure time for workers would mean that they would have more time to participate in community institutions. There will likely be as many missteps as there are successes as this is all new territory. The key will be to find ways to allow all voices to truly be heard.

    20 Algabre, Damian, Heather A. Brown and Rehmah Sufi. (2023) “A Marxist-Humanist Statement in Support and Defense of Transgender Rights.” https://imhojournal.org/articles/a-marxist-humanist-statement-in-support-and-defense-of-transgender-rights/ Accessed February 11, 2025.

    21 Gleeson, Jules Joanne, “How do Gender Transitions Happen?” in Transgender Marxism, Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke, eds. 2021, Pluto Press.

    22 Adamson, Alex. (2024) “Epistemological Foundations of Transmarxism: Queer Dialectics and Marxist Humanism” The International Marxist Humanist. https://imhojournal.org/articles/epistemological-foundations-of-transmarxism-queer-dialectics-and-marxist-humanism/ Accessed February 11, 2025.

    23 Algabre, Damian, Heather A. Brown and Rehmah Sufi. (2023) “A Marxist-Humanist Statement in Support and Defense of Transgender Rights.” https://imhojournal.org/articles/a-marxist-humanist-statement-in-support-and-defense-of-transgender-rights/ Accessed February 11, 2025.

  • Solidarity with Professor Joseph Daher

    Solidarity with Professor Joseph Daher

    Sign and share the petition. Reposted from Tempest.

    We offer our support and full solidarity to Prof. Joseph Daher, who is subjected to an arbitrary procedure by the University of Lausanne (UNIL) rectorate: the alleged non-renewal of his contract (signed in May 2024) as a Visiting Professor for the spring semester 2025. This sudden, unjustified and unfounded position deprives his students of his teaching at UNIL, despite the fact that his seminar course entitled “History of International Relations Post-1945” has been on the syllabus for months. Students working on their masters’ dissertations under his supervision have also been deprived of his supervision overnight, which is intolerable.

    This arbitrary procedure, which also deprives him of the financial resources associated with his commitment, follows months of relentlessness against Joseph Daher by UNIL management. Such administrative relentlessness is a source of concern for all other UNIL employees, thereby creating an environment where no one is safe. This is even more worrying as UNIL Management has not provided any protection to Prof. Daher against the smear campaign he has been subjected to for several months in the French- and German-speaking Swiss press in connection with his defense of fundamental rights and his commitment to supporting the demands of UNIL students mobilized around the Palestinian cause.

    Prof. Joseph Daher is an internationally recognized scholar of Middle Eastern political history. The author of several books on Middle Eastern societies, he holds two doctorates (one in political science from UNIL, the other in development sciences from London’s renowned School of Oriental and African Studies). He has taught at several European universities (Ghent and Paris-Dauphine) and for several years was visiting professor at the prestigious European University Institute in Florence. He is also involved in numerous study and consultancy missions for various international organizations, NGOs and research institutes. His expertise is regularly sought by the international media.

    The sidelining of the Prof. Daher is part of a wider political context of pressure and repression against scholars involved in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. The chronology of events clearly indicates this, particularly in relation to the occupation of the Géopolis building in UNIL last May by students demanding transparency on partnerships with universities in Israel and the suspension of these agreements in the name of the precautionary principle. We are currently facing serious violations of the fundamental principles of academic freedom and freedom of expression, principles which are under threat, as highlighted by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, Farida Shaheen, in her report “Principles for the implementation of the right to academic freedom” as well as by the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, Gina Romero, as consigned in her recommendations to universities in the context of the ongoing mobilization on Palestine.

    We therefore are expressing our deepest outrage and indignation. The measures taken by UNIL’s management align on the long series of national and international attacks on the freedom to think, teach, research and learn that have affected and continue to affect teachers, researchers and students. They threaten the fundamental democratic rights of all.

    As a result, we demand the immediate reinstatement of our colleague Joseph Daher to his teaching and duties within the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at UNIL.

  • The Trumpist Coup, Fascism U.S.-Style in an Era of Capitalist Decline, and Some Loci of Resistance

    The Trumpist Coup, Fascism U.S.-Style in an Era of Capitalist Decline, and Some Loci of Resistance

    What We Are Facing in Winter 2025

    In a veritable blitzkrieg, the Trumpist fascists have changed U.S. and global society irrevocably in a matter of weeks.

    They have already carried out the following, without any real chance of reversal in the courts or Congress in the immediate future, as these actions seem to lie within the “prerogatives” of the imperial U.S. presidency:

    • Begun a massive racist, militarized crackdown on migrants, sure to be ratcheted up. This has spread an atmosphere of fear to millions of people, as thousands of members of the U.S. working class are being dragged away and deported in chains. They have also targeted refugees from Latin America, including Haiti and Venezuela, with Ukrainians also under threat.
    • Freed 1,500 hardened fascists who participated in the January 6, 2021, coup attempt.
    • Pulled out of the World Health Organization and placed anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Of all of their measures, these will cost the most lives, both in the United States and abroad.
    • Pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement and upended hundreds of U.S. environmental rules, assuring that environmental destruction will escalate. Over time, this could be even more damaging than their undermining of public health.
    • Eradicated all federal rules supporting or allowing transgender rights.
    • Eradicated thousands of federal rules supporting racial or gender justice as part of their attack on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI, in some institutions DEIA, including “accessibility” rights for people with disabilities). Large corporations like Disney and General Motors and scientific organizations like the National Academy of Sciences have hurried to eliminate DEI in anticipatory obedience, undermining decades of hard-won gains.
    • Enacted or threatened punitive tariffs on longstanding friendly nations, starting with Canada and Mexico, amid demagogic assertions that this will create jobs at home. Clearly, the era of neoliberal “free trade” capitalism is over.
    • Engaged in new types of territorial imperialism, making specific threats to seize both Greenland and the Panama Canal by military action, and vaguer ones to absorb Canada. Here, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was surely a precedent.
    • With Trump’s plan to “remove” all Palestinians from Gaza, extended and deepened the U.S.-supported genocide of the past 15 months, at the very least giving Israel the green light to carry out a total ethnic cleansing and land seizure in Gaza.
    • Pulled back support for Ukraine’s struggle against Russian imperialism in favor of a forced settlement dismembering the country.

    The Trumpist fascists have also carried out these additional measures, which could be reversed or seriously modified in the courts or in other ways, but may not be, especially as they are threatening not to obey adverse court decisions:

    • Attempted to abolish birthright citizenship, a right won during the Civil War by Black and white liberation soldiers at the cost of 360,000 of their lives and enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
    • Shut down government agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the U.S. Agency for International Development, including the latter’s massive global public health programs.
    • Taken over the federal payroll system, threatened wholesale dismissal of hundreds of thousands of civil servants, and fired hundreds of those suspected of support for DEI or racial/gender justice, or simply not kowtowing to the Trumpist fascists and their minions.

    The above constitute only the most serious actions that have taken place during the first weeks of the Trump administration.

    Every day brings new chaos and more attacks on the democratic order. Their sheer volume sows confusion, something that is in fact a Trumpist goal.  Because of this, it is important to keep in mind the most serious actions – as opposed to pure distractions like abolishing the penny – as well as their likelihood of going forward unimpeded.

    Another Trumpist goal is to shackle or dismantle those parts of the state apparatus that actually serve human needs, even if in alienated form.

    Yet another goal is to block state mechanisms that protect the rights of people of color, women, trans people, and the working class.

    While what remains of the oppositional liberal media, itself capitalist to the core, does not emphasize workers’ rights, workers with even a modicum of class consciousness can recognize in the multi-billionaire oligarch Elon Musk and his minions their own bosses, especially the new ones that come in speaking of “reorganization” or in Silicon Valley speak, “breaking things.”  Firing longtime employees at a moment’s notice, threatening others to make them quit, turning around workers’ lives by ordering them to suddenly come into the workplace after years of remote or hybrid work no matter how that will disrupt childcare, elder care, or simple human dignity, are all part of the playbook. It is as if Musk is carrying out a takeover of a company he intends to wring out like a dishrag.

    At another level, these purges – and that is what they are – echo aspects of what we have seen in the Stalinist and Maoist ones of the past. One notable feature here is the public humiliation of former leaders, like Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Fagan, the only woman to lead a service branch, who was fired for “excessive focus” on DEI on day one. Originally given sixty days to find new housing, on Feb. 4, Fagan was suddenly told to vacate her home on three hours’ notice, not even enough time to grab her personal effects. Of course, removing such leaders from the military apparatus, and replacing them with fascist-inclined or at least more reactionary ones, also helps bring about the transition from a somewhat constitutional military to a fascist one loyal to the leader. Moreover, such treatment of high officials is intended to intimidate the population as a whole.

    But the most high-pitched viciousness so far has emerged in the immigration raids. When asked about family separation, the most brutal feature of the first Trump administration, Trump officials like Stephen Miller or Tom Homan state with barely muffled glee that they won’t separate families again. Rather, they’ll just deport the citizen children born in the U.S. along with their families. The use of Guantanamo Bay as a holding area, articulated by Trump himself, has no rational basis in terms of logistics. But it does associate these new immigrant detentions with the torture inflicted on the September 11 terrorists, something Trump not only endorses but is proud to have associated with his immigrant roundups.  It is performative cruelty, pure and simple.

    How Did We Get Here?

    Trumpism burst on the scene in 2015 and has ebbed and flowed since then. To be sure, it grew out of the soil of U.S. racism and slavery, as seen in the outright authoritarianism based on racial terror that existed in the Deep South until the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964-65. Thus, the U.S. has been a political democracy even in the formal sense not for 250 but 60 years, except for the revolutionary period of Reconstruction, 1865-76.  And ever since 1965, conservative forces have appealed to veiled racism, starting with Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” something centrist liberals have often engaged in as well, even as they “support our police.” In recent years, reactionaries have been able to restrict voting rights in many states.

    Trumpism also grew out of deep-seated sexism, misogyny, heterosexism, and transphobia. These have been stoked for years by a growing Christian Right that has attacked abortion rights and other gains of the past five decades.

    Trumpism also fed off the legacy of political repression in the United States, especially the McCarthyite witch hunts and Richard Nixon’s attempts to create an overtly authoritarian state before he was forced to resign the presidency in 1974.

    Trumpism has continued and deepened the rightwing assault on any kind of environmental protection, in conjunction with fossil fuel interests both at home and abroad.

    All of the above have been staples of rightwing, reactionary politics since the 1970s-1980s, if not earlier.

    What then is new in Trumpist fascism?

    First, it became an outright fascism by 2020-21. It did so by deepening and radicalizing all of the above, as seen most notably its willingness to engage in a violent coup attempt in January 2021. This was followed by its success in getting the entire Republican Party to acquiescence – or at least to remain silent – with respect to the coup attempt, something achieved gradually since 2021.

    Second, Trumpism stoked and then grew from anti-immigrant hatred, something less prominent in the United States than in Western Europe until relatively recently. This is a key indicator of the extent to which Trumpism has managed to change both elite and mass public opinion.

    Third, Trumpism has embraced and then extended all kinds of anti-public health measures, starting with the anti-vax movement under COVID-19, couched in terms of individual liberty. This is a new element not even present in 2015-16, one that has brought new layers of the population to Trumpism, even as its propaganda has expanded those layers.

    Fourth and most important in electoral terms comes Trumpist protectionism through tariffs and its talk of reviving coal and steel production inside the United States. This, combined with anti-migrant nativism, has broken away sections of the working class and lower middle class – including some Latinx and Black workers — from trade union and Democratic Party politics.  These sectors are outraged by decades of economic stagnation under neoliberalism and especially since the Great Recession of 2008, in which Democrats as well as Republicans have been instrumental, beginning with the “Reagan light” Clinton administration of the 1990s.

    Fifth, and most recently, Trumpist fascism of 2024-25 has won over a much larger than before portion of the dominant classes, particularly the tech billionaires, as exemplified by but not limited to Musk.  Moreover, it has won at least the neutrality of major liberal institutions, from the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to Harvard University. Almost all established media organs have ceased to use the word fascism, which many of them were using with growing urgency in the period leading up to the 2024 election.

    A sixth new feature is the targeting of all who oppose it, North as well as South, and including those at the highest levels of wealth and status, with violent rhetoric and precipitous actions that echo McCarthyism, or worse, lynch law.

    A lot of ink has been spilled over how Trumpist fascism has managed to win over much of the white working class, and in 2024, of the Latinx population, especially men. Yet we also need to look more closely at what has happened with the dominant classes and their shift toward Trump.  What are the key factors here?

    One, at the economic level, profit rates have been stagnant or declining for decades. The mirage of neoliberal prosperity dissipated in 2008. This has led capital into increasingly desperate efforts to shore up the profit rate, but to no avail. Why not at least try fascism then, especially in the utterly venal and corrupt Trumpist form, where one can loot the state revenues and gain something even as society itself is falling apart? The après moi le deluge mentality of these elites, which has become more widespread than ever, was captured well in the 2021 satirical film, “Don’t Look Up.” Decidedly, this is not a capitalism confident of its ascendancy.

    Second, a new kind of toxic masculinity has penetrated the highest levels of the corporate elite. Again, Musk is the standard-bearer here, but Mark Zuckerberg is not far behind with his description of Trump’s fortitude after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania as “badass.” This is linked to a kind of hyper-individualism that resents both public health restrictions and DEI or “Me Too” initiatives that call for changes in personal behavior. It should not be forgotten that these same elites welcomed Obama in 2008 and in many cases supported at least moderate attempts at racial/gender justice reform in the wake of the Movement for Black Lives of 2020-21 and Me Too. The point here is that these people from the top layers of the capitalist class have changed under the impact of Trumpist fascism, as much or more than have sections of the working and middle classes.

    A third element that moved parts of the dominant classes toward Trump was Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the massive worldwide protest movements it has sparked. Liberal politicians, leaders of universities and foundations, and the liberal media have all tended to side with Israel, just as did the Trumpist fascists. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party lost out in two ways. Sections of the youth, people of color, and the intellectuals — not to speak of Arab and Muslim Americans in Michigan — deserted the Biden presidency and then the Kamala Harris campaign. At the same time, the centrist Democrats who lead the Party, among them many members of the dominant classes, saw that the rank-and-file has turned against Israel, while the Trumpist fascists have not. This too was a factor in bringing members of these elites if not to Trumpism, at least in the direction of neutrality toward it after the election. The latter applies more to media moguls and foundation leaders than politicians holding office.

    What to Do? How to Resist? How to Fight for a New Humanist Society Amid the Carnage?

    First, we need to admit that this is a big defeat for us. It will not have positive elements for the working class, as some class-reductionist radicals are proclaiming even as they join the bandwagon vs. DEI.

    Second, we need to assess which parts of the ruling classes, especially under pressure from the left, from the streets, could spark a deepening of the kind of internal split that is a precondition of real change. Here it should be noted that some giant media institutions like the New York Times have bent but not yet buckled under the pressure and continue to hold that it is Trump vs. the Constitution. This is also true of some corporations and university officials, as well as the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

    Third, the Black Church (and the smaller but still important liberal Protestant ones) remain crucial here. Thus, it was not a coincidence that on Inauguration Day the only protest voice that penetrated amid the noise of Trumpism was that of Bishop Mariann Budde’s warning about oppression of the people. Black Churches are, as always, already on the move, as are progressive Muslim, Jewish, and other religious organizations. The Catholic Church will give us some support too, as Pope Francis has just done on immigrant rights. But their poisonous stance on gender and sexuality cannot be ignored. Nevertheless, all this will at least open up some space for the resistance to Trumpist fascism.

    Fourth, and here moving away from the middle classes, let alone the elites, another large institution that can help us even more is the trade union movement, which has already organized demonstrations in support of the federal government workers. While far more needs to happen on this front, these actions are at least beginning. Moreover, it is notable that trade unions, as well as religious organizations, depend mainly on dues from their own members, which gives them a certain degree of independence from the state, corporate capitalism, or liberal foundations. This forms a contrast with universities and other cultural institutions, which have already shown cowardice in the face of the Israel Lobby and are so far refusing to confront Trumpist fascism openly.  However, the trade unions will have to deal with noxious elements like Teamster leader Sean O’Brien, let alone their aging bureaucracies that in many cases confine themselves to supporting political candidates and will need to be replaced by a more militant leadership, as has happened with the UAW.

    Fifth and most important, resistance has to come from the streets, from the left and from the movements of Black and Latinx liberation, the rank-and-file labor movement, the feminist and women’s liberation movement, the LGBTQ movement, the environmental movement, and above all, the youth. Not surprisingly, it was thousands of Latinx working class youth, many of them of high school age, who tied up downtown LA on February 2 and the next day, as a leading part of the first real resistance on the streets to protest Trumpist fascism’s mass deportations. But the trade unions and larger immigrant rights organizations need to come out now and not wait until May 1, which is when Latinx and pro-immigrant groups intend to launch a giant series of strikes and demonstrations. It should also be noted that massive resistance is occurring in the everyday actions of the people, who are refusing to cooperate with ICE, who are stoking the “know your rights” initiatives, slowing down their racist raids on members of the working class whom the Trumpist criminals dare to label “illegal.” Here, the ongoing, persistent, and courageous Palestine support movement will also be a key factor.

    While the United States is facing its greatest crisis in decades, if not more than a century, we also need to note and learn from how, in some parts of the world, our movement is going forward. This is the case in Syria, where despite the contradictions, a real political opening is occurring after a half-century of a dictatorship that unconscionably gained the support of the worldwide campist left. It is also the case in Serbia, where a corrupt nationalist government is under huge pressure from a student movement that has persisted over the past several months.  It is true in Sri Lanka, where a pro-feminist leftwing government has been elected. It is also true in Germany, where hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets and, at least for now, blocked the political normalization of the far right.

    As the above remarks suggest, we need a leftwing network of resistance to Trumpist fascism that, while firmly anti-capitalist, avoids the pitfalls of both campism and class reductionism. Under such a banner, we can join the larger resistance movements while retaining our political independence, not least our fight for a humanist alternative to capitalism.

  • The Musk “Salutes” and the Treachery of the Jewish Establishment

    The Musk “Salutes” and the Treachery of the Jewish Establishment

    OK, we get it.  The Jewish Federations, the Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, most Jewish journals and top rabbis are passionately devoted to Israel.  Israel, right or wrong, Israel drunk or sober.  But when an incredibly important man gives Nazi-like salutes at the inauguration party for Trump 2.0 you’d think these luminaries would raise a gshrey (Yiddish for “scream”).  Nope, barely a whimper.

    Immediately after Musk did his gesticulation, observers compared it to a Nazi salute.  Here’s the Jerusalem Post headline “Did Elon Musk Sieg Heil at Trump’s inauguration?”  (the Nazi slogan “Sieg Heil”, meaning “Hail to Victory”. )  The venerable Jewish Telegraph Agency wrote on its site, “Elon Musk’s straight-armed gesture at inauguration event ignites comparisons to Nazi salute”  Jerry Nadler, the Jewish Democratic congressperson from Manhattan, called the gesture antisemitic and said other officials should condemn it.  “I never imagined we would see the day when what appears to be a Heil Hitler salute would be made behind the Presidential seal,” he remarked in a tweet. “This abhorrent gesture has no place in our society and belongs in the darkest chapters of human history. I urge all of my colleagues to unite in condemning this hateful gesture for what it is: antisemitism.”

    But then the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, which calls itself the world leading expert on antisemitism and which has appointed itself the leading group combatting that prejudice denied Musk had done anything wrong.  Just a few hours after the inauguration party the ADL tweeted that “It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, but not a Nazi salute.”

    The big Jewish organization sites who respond with rage when someone scrawls “Free Palestine” on a wall reacted extremely mildly to Musk’s arm thrusts or were simply silent.    The Simon Wiesenthal Center wrote, “It would be appropriate for him to clarify or apologize for today’s gesture and focus his energy on tackling the critical challenges ahead.”  Then they dropped the matter.  The American Jewish Congress?  Nothing at all about Musk’s salute. The Zionist Organization of America, nada.

    Search for “salute” on the site of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and you see a piece condemning Nazi salutes, but the article is from 2016.  Then they were up in arms about Richard Spencer’ supporters doing straight-arm salutes inside a federal building.  One can barely remember that event. Somehow Musk’s arm-thrust before millions seems more significant.

    How about Deborah Lipstadt? This historian served as the Biden administration’s Special Envoy Combating Global Antisemitism.  She downplayed the Musk Nazi-looking salutes and told the Jewish Telegraph Agency that essentially there were bigger fish to fry.  She also said that she agreed with the ADL that it was merely an “awkward” gesture

    Randi Weingarten is the long-time president of the American Federation of Teachers and is also active on Jewish issues.  To be fair on the 20th she did retweet Abe Foxman’s calling out Musk for his “Nazi salute.”  On the other hand, Weingarten was on a panel with Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the ADL in Davos, Switzerland on January 25 along with former Harvard president Larry Summers.  The topic was “Confronting Antisemitism and Polarization”.   After witnessing Musk’s arm-thrust, arguably the biggest neo-Nazi signal on international media since the Second World War, no one made any mention of it.  The panel only discussed antisemitism in terms of Palestine.  There was no mention even of the January 6 riot and the pardon of many rioters who were open about their hatred of Jews.  Weingarten did take time to brag that at the AFT national convention last year she was able to defeat all the “extremist” resolutions on Palestine.

    Getting down to the state level the “Southern New England Jewish Ledger” has made no mention of Musk’s gesture.  When you search for the word “Musk” on its webpage there’s a piece about Musk in Jerusalem in 2023 and an article “Antisemite of the Week.”  But that article is not about Musk, it’ piece originally from “Stop Antisemitism” which had given that designation to actor John Cusack .   Looking further at that site you find that other “winners” included Jewish writer Nathan Thrall and activist Greta Thunberg.  There’s no mention of Musk’s salute on “Stop Antisemitism.”

    The Washington Jewish Week told its readers to look at the video “What we saw was an exuberant Musk, emotionally, and yes, awkwardly, trying to connect with his adoring crowd.”  Funny, when you show love to your fans you usually do it with a smile and not a grimace as Musk did at Trump’s party.  But maybe it’s a DC thing.

    Jews in Congress?  We quoted Nadler’s call earlier asking for all his colleagues to condemn “this hateful gesture.”  AOC responded and tore the ADL a new one.  Among the 34 Jewish members of Congress, Dan Goldman, Ron Wyden and Jan Schakowsky responded positively to the appeal. From Chuck Schumer, nothing.  Richard Blumenthal, nothing, John Ossoff, nothing. Astonishing.

    There were, of course, many Jews who completely sided with Musk.  I’ll mention just one.  Jeff Donetz of the Jewish Press issued a condemnation, but it wasn’t of Musk.  He lambasted AOC.  His dubious reasoning was that Musk’s gesture wasn’t a Nazi salute because it would dumb for an owner of a car company to make a Nazi salute. “Even if he were a Nazi (which he isn’t), Musk would have to be such an imbecile, even dumber than AOC, to ‘out’ himself on national television.”  Not really.  There was once this auto giant named Henry Ford who was not at all afraid to “out” himself as an antisemite.

    Then Netanyahu completely koshered Musk.  Not mentioning the salutes at all, the self-styled leader of all Jews, Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted, “@elonmusk is being falsely smeared. Elon is a great friend of Israel.” And on and on about Musk’s pro-Israel bona fides.

    Not all were so sanguine.  Bend the Arc: Jewish Action was rightfully furious.  It immediately replied sarcastically to the ADL on Twitter. “19 year old student says ‘Free Palestine’  Antisemitic!  Musk backs Germany’s AfD and antisemitic replacement theories.  Buys Twitter so Nazis load at the top.  Sieg Heils multiple times.  Give him the benefit of the doubt.”

    The prestigious Lemkin institute for Genocide Prevention issued several tweets. In the first it noted Musk’s “clear use of the Nazi salute” and abhorred him for sending the “antisemitic genocidal signal”.  Two days later it returned to Musk and implored that Americans “take Nazi and ‘alt-right’ symbolism very seriously.”

    The political editor of the major German paper Die Zeit entitled his article “Ein Hitlergruss ist ein Hitlergruss ist ein Hitlergruss”  Hitlergruss means “Hitler Salute”.  MSN translated the whole article.

    What about those in the U.S. who are happy to describe themselves as far-right or neo-Nazis? They think Musk was speaking to them.  Rolling Stone explains they were ecstatic.  For instance, “The Proud Boys Ohio chapter posted to(sic) a clip of the Musk video to its Telegram channel with the text, “Hail Trump!”

    But what did Elon Musk say about his salute?  He sure didn’t apologize or explain his “gesture.”   He promptly replied to the ADL tweet with just two words, “Thanks guys.”  In another tweet he said criticism of what he did at the inauguration was simply “dirty tricks.”   He responded to Netanyahu’s “great friend” post with a tweet  “The radical leftists are really upset that they had to take time out of their busy day praising Hamas to call me a Nazi.”

    Now if this gesture was a one-off, we might bend credulity and maybe believe that it was an innocent expression of love to the Trump crowd of 20,000.  But Musk has a record.  After he bought Twitter, he allowed all kinds of hard-right haters and insurrectionists back and antisemitic posts skyrocketed.  In June 2023 he reposted a Q claim that Hollywood elites were harvesting a substance from children to extend the lives of the elites. The original tweet included the words, “You can do the adrenochrome or you can hate the Js.” Five months later he reposted a claim that Jewish communities were flooding the U.S. with minorities and added the comment “You have said the actual truth” to his then 170 million followers.  He campaigns for the furthest far-right party in Germany, the AfD against which thousands demonstrated in 2024 when it was learned leaders had met with neo-Nazis.  Only a fool or a knave would give Musk the benefit of the doubt.

    Musk showed his contempt for critics and his Jewish lickspittle supporters on January 23 by tweeting Nazi themed puns, like “Stop Gőring your enemies!” and other jokes using the names of Nazi war criminals. A few days later Musk’s face was projected on a giant screen in Germany as he told AFD supporters that children shouldn’t be guilty for what their “fathers” or “great-grandfathers” did.  It was a wink, wink to those in Germany who want to forget the Nazi horrors of World War II.

    Besides what people said, what did they do or not do to counteract Musk?  Congress  bloviates frequently on claims of antisemitism there but no member introduced a resolution.  There are no online petitions from mainline Jewish organizations nor did any  propose an action to protest Musk.

    However, two protests should be noted.  In Berlin Germany an activist group with the interesting name “Led by Donkeys” used a projector to put a display on a Tesla building.  It showed video of Musk doing his salute along with images of Musk supporting the far-right all over Europe.  It also projected the words “Heil” next to the name “Tesla” on a massive factory wall and then projected the word “Boycott” next to “Tesla”.

    In the USA a Milwaukee TV weather reporter named Sam Kuffel denounced Musk on her personal Instagram page.  The post was private, but someone must have ratted her out.  She was fired by channel CBS 58.  A petition was launched in her defense. A billboard that was rented by the Minocqua Beer Super PAC facing the building of CBS 58 depicts Musk’s salute and has the words, “Stand with Sam Kuffel, Boycott CBS 58, Don’t ‘Obey in Advance’.“

    By deeming the Nazi-like salutes no big thing, the big machers (translation “doers”) are failing in their basic duty, to protect the interests of U.S. Jews.  Certainly, they know the history of fascist persecution of Jews, but they think this time they can join with the persecutors and the Jews (or at least the big shots and their friends) will be spared.  It’s a thickheaded treacherous strategy.  The leaders of all these big Jewish institutions should be scorned, shamed, opposed, ousted and replaced.

     

  • The Sean O’Brien Show: Take Two

    The Sean O’Brien Show: Take Two

    From as far back as 2012, Sean O’Brien wanted the media spotlight. That year he was the subject of a television pilot for a proposed A&E reality show titled The Teamsters, to be produced by Mark Wahlberg. Wahlberg, along with the Afflecks (longtime O’Brien friends), seem attracted to a certain image of the working class: white, male, and macho, the same image idolized by the American right.  The series never aired and in 2014, O’Brien’s Local 25 was in the news not as the subjects of a reality show, but for yelling racial slurs and threats at the star of one, Padma Lakshmi of Top Chef.

    That was back when O’Brien was a big fish in a small pond, the President of Local 25 and a member of the union’s international executive board. Now, as general president, he can afford to hire a staff to produce his own show. That podcast, Better Bad Ideas With Sean O’Brien, debuted January 15th with left-leaning Twitch streamer Hasan Piker as a guest. The second featured a discussion with Christian nationalist U.S. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri.

    The interview was nothing more than a love fest. This isn’t surprising. Last year O’Brien posted on Twitter that Hawley’s article assailing corporate America for “using [their] profits to push diversity, equity, and inclusion and the religion of the trans flag” was “100% on point.” O’Brien wrote his own piece for Compact, the publication Hawley’s diatribe ran in. It’s worth noting that the senior editor of Compact had to resign last year due to her promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

    O’Brien spent much of the interview gushing over Hawley. He runs through the man’s career as Missouri Attorney General and in the Senate like a devotee in thrall to a movie star. Under O’Brien, the Teamsters gave $5,000 to Hawley’s 2024 Senate campaign, despite his opposition to the Butch-Lewis Act that bailed out Teamster pensions and his 11% lifetime score from the AFL-CIO. “I’m a big fan,” he said, as if listeners couldn’t pick up on that fact. O’Brien expressed optimism over Trump’s victory, saying for Teamsters “there seems to be a sense of hope out there that didn’t exist prior to this election, regardless of the result that happened.” Hawley, who denies that Trump fairly lost the 2020 Presidential election, couldn’t agree more.

    The two find further common ground discussing immigration. “I think the biggest problem,” O’ Brien said, “is people are trying to protect illegal aliens that come over here and commit crimes.” He continued, “Social issues are all well and good, but protecting illegal immigrants that come into our country to commit crimes and steal jobs, that’s a tough pill to swallow.” O’Brien’s professed distaste for criminals is laughable due to his own history of threatening Teamsters and his local’s past as a jobs program for the Boston mob.

    O’Brien’s xenophobia is part and parcel of a recent turn towards Teamsters solipsism. In a social media post opposing flag burning he declared #usagainsteverybody. One wonders how Canadian Teamsters feel about that one. The Teamsters have begun selling merchandise boasting “Teamsters vs. Everybody.” “Everybody” includes the International Association of Machinists. The Teamsters ended a no raid agreement with them last year.

    O’Brien’s comments are miles away from a true giant of the Irish labor movement, James Connolly. “Let no Irishman throw a stone at the foreigner; he may hit his own clansman. Let no foreigner revile the Irish; he may be vilifying his own stock.” O’Brien’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is no “better bad idea.” Stirring up nativism is a boon to the rich and multinationals, particularly as the Teamsters try to unionize the heavily immigrant Amazon workforce. At the JFK 8 Amazon workforce in Staten Island, the first unionized Amazon warehouse in the country, 50% of the workers are immigrants.

    What is the purpose of Better Bad Ideas? Given the presence of advertising for blinds.com, the ABC cop drama The Rookie, and others, it seems like a moneymaking venture. But if it is meant to further expose Sean O’Brien to the wider public, there are problems. The debut episode with Piker notched over 100,000 views. By contrast, the follow up with Hawley, as of this writing, is stuck below 5,000. This viewership for the president of a union with over a million members. Clearly, it doesn’t seem like O’Brien is much of a draw.

    This lack of viewership may have been a gift to O’Brien, since when people actually heard what he was saying the response was swift and negative. Teamsters Mobilize, a rank and file movement within the union, put out a statement saying O’Brien’s words are “an insult to everyone, especially all Teamsters and children of immigrants. There is no room for nationalism and xenophobia in the Teamsters.” Several Teamsters called into the Valley Labor Report taking him further to task for his statements. Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) the reform movement of old released their own statement that the Teamsters fight “for the rights of all Teamsters regardless of their immigration status.”

    Yet TDU have maintained their “see no evil, hear no evil” attitude as O’Brien has further ingratiated himself with the Trumpian right. Their statement does not mention him. They put out no statements on O’Brien’s speech to the RNC, his promotion of Hawley’s transphobia, or his piece for a far-right publication generously funded by plutocrat Peter Thiel.

    What all of this has made abundantly clear is that O’Brien has not fundamentally changed from the man who took over his local union in 2006 as an anti-reform candidate. He is still following the same script. “We needed to go back to our old-school values,” he thundered. The Teamster reform movement, then, needs to go back to its own old school values and drop a bigot like O’Brien.

  • No! Where are you really from?

    No! Where are you really from?

    Looking back at the last sixty odd years, at different times and different places, I have to say I have been asked that question about once every year. Mostly by suspicious white folks. Take away the “no” and the “really” parts then it’s a question of curiosity. I mean, “no” implies I was answering the wrong question and “really” means, I was giving the wrong answer.

    Occasionally, the question is accompanied by some curiosity about my “accent” and sometimes, when aggression is the better part of valor, followed by “Why don’t you go back to where you came from?” My answers have been different depending on the situation, the context, and then I recovered this article from The Guardian—with a direct reference to our master’s voice.

    In Buckingham Palace and outside it, we know what it means when people ask ‘where are you from’

    I realized too that like Malcom X’s “house negro” many among us deny hearing that voice. So, I thought further review and elaboration may be in order.

    In the beginning was the word! About a month after I got to the US, (that would be midway between the Birmingham church bombing and JFK assassination) I was invited to a super-rich stockbroker’s house, with a kidney-shaped swimming pool and a museum-like kitchen. And with lots of guests with champagne glasses. At the end of the evening, as I was waiting for my hostess in that kitchen, birthplace of colossal shrimp, for a ride home, she arrived with a model-like woman, glistening and bejeweled. My hostess said to me, “This is our friend Sally, who’s in real estate,” and to Sally, “this is one of our student friends from India.” Sally’s smile was wide, welcoming and sexy. She lowered her voice and spoke thus: “you must be wondering why I didn’t speak to you earlier.” (I had noticed her stunning appearance of course, but also the shunning attitude.)

    Sally continued, “I avoided you ’cause I thought you were Mexican.” I was dumbfounded now. “Oh, I have nothing against Mexicans,” Sally lowered her voice some more and added, “But you must admit they are kind of filthy.” On the way home, my hostess said, “Oh that Sally is a good soul. She owns several apartment buildings and sometimes her tenants are unruly!”

    That was my first lesson about origins. I felt ashamed for being spineless and speechless, but learned that in 1960s California, a rare Indian was kinda okay, but Mexicans of all hues, not so much! Of course, the narrative has changed as more and more Indians have shown up in America, specially the rich ones, but by then I was not ready to go back. We had a war to resist.

    About the other Indian. Years later, once when I was visiting the Taos Pueblo, evening arrived suddenly and the Pueblo, lit only by petromax-kerosene lamps looked like a ghost town. It felt a little eerie in a huge space with a “chiaroscuro” ambiance. Anyway, I entered a store to check out some artifacts and saw there wasn’t anyone at the counter, but a strong scent of ganja filled the air. I looked around and noticed a panel with various currency notes pinned very neatly behind the glass. The British Pound, Swiss Franc, Brazilian Real, Swedish Krona, Deutschemark, Japanese Yen, Mexican Peso… were all represented, but I couldn’t see any Indian Rupee. Then I heard a voice from the depths, “What d’ya think of my display, eh?”

    I peered into the darkness and said, “It’s fine but I don’t see my currency there.”

    “What’s that?” The voice asked.

    “The Indian Rupee,” I answered.

    “You from India?” The voice again.

    “Yes.” Said I and there followed a long pause.

    Suddenly a man leaped over the counter and stood in front of me. A man with shiny skin and long hair. He then gave me the warmest, most welcome hug I have ever got.

    “You are the real Indian man, if it wasn’t for that fuckin’ Columbus and other assholes, I’d be called just Taos man or sumphin’ like that.”

    This led to a soul-searching discussion of Indian history. Both kinds. In the end, my friend said with a lot of pain, only slightly alleviated by marijuana, “We were here first, you know. But our story has been wiped out forever.”

    I have never forgotten that encounter, and over the years have had to contend with the various aspects of being, and occasionally of nothingness too. But the contradictions in a contemporary immigrant identity in the U.S., fostered yet denigrated by structural racism in the Western world, I understand best through an example from the twenty-first century.

    One day, when I was driving in Bucks County, near Newtown, PA an aggressive van driver swung from my right to my left directly in front of me, causing me and other drivers to brake suddenly and honk horns. Then the van driver, now on my left slowed down a bit until I came alongside. A woman rolled down the passenger’s side window and tried to speak to me. So, I too rolled down mine. She shouted after a few tries, “Why don’t you go back to where you came from!” Said with much vehemence I should add. I caught a glimpse of her young white driver-companion as well.

    Those days, I was teaching at Bucks County Community College in Newtown. About a week later, me and two colleagues were introducing ourselves and our team-taught course on “The Culture of Affluence” in an auditorium classroom that could hold about 200 students. As was my practice, I stood scanning the student faces when I noticed a familiar countenance around the tenth row. Our eyes met for a second. The student was the driver of the van, companion of the woman who wanted me to go back! The young man lowered his head and kept it lowered throughout the session. After that, we never saw him again. My colleagues thought this was good riddance. I thought the student, victim of false consciousness, might have learned something from a critique of the consumerist trap in America.

  • Indigenous migrants in the US fight renewed segregation

    Indigenous migrants in the US fight renewed segregation

    The beginning of Donald Trump’s second presidential term on January 20 was a crucial day in international politics and for Indigenous migrant communities in the United States.

    The inauguration took place in the wake of the brutal fires in Los Angeles that began on January 5, devouring more than 37,000 acres, including large parts of Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and Pasadena.

    The fires destroyed more than 12,000 structures, including homes, schools, churches and businesses, but they impacted far more than buildings alone. They killed at least 29 people, exacerbated the already existing housing crisis in the city and will likely worsen unemployment. 

    Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo (CIELO) set up food pantries and distributed masks to Indigenous migrants affected by the fires. This enabled them to appreciate that the fires will have a vast impact on people’s lives, given that countless jobs no longer exist: dishwashers; waiters; cooks; plumbers; window cleaners; house cleaners; gardeners and caregivers for children, the elderly and pets among other essential jobs. 

    To a great extent, Indigenous migrants from Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, the Philippines and elsewhere do this work. Many have had to migrate because of the effects of structural adjustment or after extractivist policies displaced them from their territories. 

    Structural adjustment policies or extractivist policies that displaced them from their territories forced many to migrate, and Indigenous communal lifeways have long been antagonistic to the capitalist economic system. 

    Upon arrival in the United States, Indigenous migrants work two or three shifts, while also facing structural racism. Among Los Angeles’s large population of Indigenous migrants, Zapotec, Q’anjobal and K’iche peoples are the majority, according to a census that CIELO conducted in 2024. The survey also details the main areas in which Indigenous migrants from Mexico and Central America are employed. This includes restaurant, domestic, and janitorial work. They typically work in the most exploitative sectors and, because few have papers and many do not speak colonial languages, they have limited possibilities of career advancement and often face long periods of  unemployment. 

     On the first day of his second term, Trump initiated a package of presidential actions against immigrants, enabling mass deportations and allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to enter schools, child care centers, shelters and churches. He declared a national emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border, threatened family separation, and called for the elimination of birthright citizenship. These are just some of the actions that the white supremacist billionaires now running the country have implemented.

    Disciplinary strategies

    Discipline involves imposing norms and rules on social behavior in order to compel obedience and facilitate  maximum exploitation. What migrants in the US are experiencing today is another phase of disciplinary anti-immigrant policy.

    For the last three years, I have been in Los Angeles researching a new book titled No es por el sueño americano, es por el despojo [It’s not the American dream, it’s dispossession]. The book includes a series of interviews with Odilia Romero, a Zapotec woman who directs CIELO. I spoke with Romero the day after Trump’s inauguration, and she shared reflections on the impacts of the state of terror among migrants. 

    “The government’s announcement that immigration agents will be entering schools, hospitals and churches has sparked fear among undocumented Indigenous migrants and the children of migrant families, and has caused many migrants to stop going to work,” she said. This strategy of disciplining migrants is part of the scaffolding of migration governance: a political system that puts lives on a hierarchy, creating a system of differentiation and racialization among migrants, differentiating between those who are undocumented and those who are not. 

    Various people are among those considered undocumented: people who have work permits and those who do not, people awaiting an asylum or refugee claim, those who already have refugee or asylum status, and other categorizations that divide and fragment. In the lexicon of migration, undocumented people are a complicated and heterogeneous population. 

    According to Romero, there are several mechanisms for containing and disciplining migrants, but they have precedents in U.S. immigration policy. They are not new. “Anti-immigrant policies have always worked, and in fact, several deportation flights that took off on the day Trump took office were the result of processes initiated by the previous administration,” said Romero. “This was also true of the approval of the bill to deport undocumented immigrants who commit minor crimes.”

    According to Romero, there is a continuum of anti-immigrant policies, although they will intensify in the Republican era.

    Indigenous migrant communities in the US

    It has been several decades since one could say that Mayan, Otomanguean or Quechua Indigenous communities live exclusively in Mesoamerica or the Andes. Today there are K’iche’, Zapotec, Mixtec, Miskito, Lenca, Kichwa, Garifuna and Ixil communities, among hundreds of others, in the U.S. They work in construction, agriculture and restaurants, in caregiving, delivery and many other industries across the country. Guatemalan consular records indicate that Guatemalans live in 50 states, including Hawai’i. 

    The Guatemalan Consular Network indicates that 3,256,047 Guatemalans live in the U.S. Of them, 1,152,699 live in Los Angeles, with the K’anjobal, Mam, K’iche’ and Kaqchikel peoples being the predominant among Indigenous peoples. With Guatemala’s population at 14.9 million, 21 percent live in the U.S. 

    Thus, K’iche’ people no longer only live in Momostenago, Totonicapán or Nahualá, in the western Guatemala, but also in Los Angeles, New York, Texas and Boston. Likewise, Chuj, Akateko and Q’anjob’al people live in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Kentucky, Chicago and New York. This is true of several other peoples, including the Garifuna, Miskito and Kichwa. 

    Information compiled by CIELO allows us to build a more complete vision of how these communities contribute to the economic stability of the places they’re from, where improved access to health, education and local living conditions are overseen by communally organized political systems. To do so, remittances from migrants are vital.

    “Indigenous migrants do more than contribute to their communities of origin. They sustained the city before the fires and during the pandemic and they are the ones who will rebuild Los Angeles,” Romero said.

    A time for reorganization

    Migrant workers have responded to the persecution and terror in different ways.

    Notably, agricultural workers in California, Florida and Texas have taken direct action by refusing to show up for work. There are poultry workers who did not go to their workplaces out of fear of raids. Worried about their parents’ arrests, children stayed home from school. Religious services have been moved online for the same reason.

    “We should learn from the struggles of the African-American communities in the United States, who with their strength and organization managed to break the country’s segregationist system, because we are entering a new regime of segregation,” said Romero. “There is a precedent for this, because in 2022 our African-American comrades fought alongside us against racist and anti-Indigenous policies, when LA City Council members made statements against Indigenous migrants from Oaxaca.”

    Mam, Ixil, Mixe and other Indigenous migrants from across the continent have, despite devastation, displacement and injustice, shaped our world. With their remittances and their knowledge they have supported their families, the defense of their territory, and the creation of important communal festivities and gatherings. In doing so, they have sustained the economies of their countries of origin.

    It is urgent that we focus our attention on the struggle and strategies of resistance of migrant Indigenous communities, heed the call to learn from the history of people of African descent, support potential alliances and think beyond the terror and inter-elite disputes so that we can imagine the actions we want to take.

    It is up to all of us to break the system of segregation and institutional racism.

    First published in Ojala.

  • Elon Musk Is Leading an Electronic Coup D’État

    Elon Musk Is Leading an Electronic Coup D’État

    Elon Musk, the multibillionaire and advisor to President Donald Trump who now heads a team called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been taking over U.S. government agencies—the Treasury Department, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), General Services Administration (GSA), and the United States Agency for International Development, and perhaps others—a process that at least in some cases appear to be illegal. Where officials have resisted, Trump has removed them from their positions. Musk’s take-over is tantamount to a coup, and far more effective, serious, and dangerous than the insurrection that Trump organized on January 6, 2021.

    Controlling the executive branch, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court, Trump apparently believes that he and Musk have the power to carry out a coup with impunity. With Trump having purged the Justice Department, the FBI, the Inspectors General, there is, in fact, no one to call out and stop these attacks on the government bureaucracy from within. The Democrats and groups such as the ACLU have been filing suit in various courts with some success, but if they end up at the Supreme Court, given that the Supreme Court ruled in July 2024 that the U.S. presidents have absolute immunity for their official actions and broad immunity for most other actions, Trump is likely to win.

    Trump and Musk, who have been calling for reducing the size and cost of government, now have the power with the push of a computer key to stop the two trillion dollars in payments made by Treasury each year affecting tens of millions of people from children to the disabled to the elderly, local and state governments, and private contractors. They now have their hands on the computers at OPM that handles the records of virtually all 2.5 million government employees. And have taken over the computers at the GSA oversees government real estate, land and buildings. Musk’s team now had its hands on computer that mange almost $43 billion in foreign aid for foreign economies, education, and health, such as for HIV programs.Trump and his pliant Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth already control the U.S. military’s $820 billion budget.

    We are witnessing a tech coup d’état. The Democratic Party has failed to stop Trump and Musk, and at the moment has no plan to do so. The social movements and the left are too weak and distant from power to do anything immediately and are only likely to develop a strategy when Trump’s attack on the lives of millions of Americans forces them to act.

     

     

     

     

  • Trump’s Illegal, Brutal, Callous Attack on Working People; And an E-Coup by Musk?

    Trump’s Illegal, Brutal, Callous Attack on Working People; And an E-Coup by Musk?

    In his first two week in office, President Donald Trump has violated the Constitution and broken the law to carry out measures that threaten millions working peoples’ jobs and the health, education, and social welfare programs of the elderly, children and the poor. Blocked at various points by the courts, Trump has given his advisor billionaire Elon Musk, now head of the team called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), power to take over government computer systems in a move that looks like an electronic coup. The president is acting with the unanimous support of the Republican Party, while Democrats dither and fail to oppose him.

    Trump’s actions are mind-boggling.

    • He attempted to impose a spending freeze on all government grants and loans that would have affected 20 million children who depend on school lunch programs, 2 million elderly people who receive meals-on-wheels at their home, 79 million Medicare recipients and 93 million who receive Medicaid and Children’s health insurance, and others. Two federal judges blocked Trump. But Musk and his team have taken control of the Treasury Department’s computer systems and could block payments. Is this a kind of e-coup?
    • Trump sent over two million federal government employees the “Fork in the Road” email—a virtual copy of Musk’s November 2022 emails to Twitter/X employees—telling them they can resign now and continue to work from home to receive pay, and benefits until September 30, 2025. If they choose not to resign, they must return to working in their offices, but have no guarantee that they will keep their jobs. One need only reply to the email with the word “Resign.” Depending on how many resign, this could result in depopulating various government agencies.
    • Trump plans to launch a trade war against Mexico, Canada, and China, imposing 25 percent tariffs on products from Mexico and Canada, and an additional 10 percent tariff on China. They are America’s three largest trading partners. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum have already announced that their countries will respond in kind. Given the integration of North American industrial production, these tariffs could, for example, lead to the shutdown of auto plants in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The tariffs will also make more expensive the importation of lumber to the American construction industry.
    • Trump has begun the roundup and deportation of undocumented immigrants using military planes, only several hundred so far, but promising to deport all of them, which he estimates at 20 million though experts say there are 11 million. Many immigrants are now afraid to go to work, school, the hospital, or to their church or temple.

    All of this forms part of Trump’s goal of reducing the size and cost of the federal government and ending the welfare state.

    Trump has fired 17 inspectors general whose job was to stop fraud, abuse, and corruption, so there is little effective opposition within the bureaucracy. So far, the political opposition is using the courts to try to block Trump, with some success, but ultimately court cases will go to the conservative Supreme Court which has tended to support Trump.

    The Democrats have failed to speak out in a unified and clear voice and have not been able to slow Trump’s onslaught. Progressive Democrats have called upon the party to reassert its historic claim to represent the working class which dates back to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. But the party just elected as its president Ken Martin, who talks about reaching the working-class, but is fundamentally a moderate apparatchik.

    Because Trump’s attack has been so fast, so far reaching, and so intense, there is so far no mass response from below. Unions, Black and Latino organizations, women’s, LGBT groups, and the left are discussing and planning, but do not yet have a strategy.

    This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party of France and will also appear on the website of International Viewpoint.

     

  • Trump’s New Cuba Policy: Bad for Cuba and Migrants

    Trump’s New Cuba Policy: Bad for Cuba and Migrants

    On his return to the presidency on January 20, Donald Trump rescinded his predecessor Joe Biden’s short-lived removal of Cuba from the State Sponsor of Terrorism (SSOT) designation. The SSOT designation will further isolate Cuba diplomatically and economically.

    Biden only removed Cuba on January 14. Cuba was originally designated as SSOT in 1982. As the U.S. State Department explains, “Cuba was designated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism in 1982 because of its long history of providing advice, safe haven, communications, training, and financial support to guerrilla groups and individual terrorists.” Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Fidel Castro and the Cuban government offered support to young revolutionaries fighting against reactionary governments, civilian dictators, and military juntas—so long as those groups reciprocated by adhering to Cuba’s political line.

    The Cuban Revolution of 1959 had inspired revolutionary guerrilla groups throughout Latin America, and the Argentine-Cuban revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara and the Cuban government of Fidel Castro encouraged and supported them. French intellectual Regis Debray popularized the concept of guerrilla warfare in Europe and beyond. Within a decade, however, the guerrilla movements had been crushed by military coups in Chile (1973), Uruguay (1973), and Argentina (1976), and in the 1970s in the Central American nations of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras dictators and military juntas defeated the guerrillas there. Only Nicaragua’s Sandinistas were victorious, and only for a few years. Idealism and heroism were not enough to win. The guerrilla organizations generally had no base among the working class or the peasantry and their violent tactics often alienated the rest of society. Debray himself criticized the guerrilla warfare idea and listed its faults in his later book Critique of Arms. The moment passed and in the 1990s, Cuba stopped supporting guerrilla groups and hasn’t done so now for over 30 years. In any case these guerrilla organizations weren’t terrorists if terrorism means the use of political violence against non-combatant bystanders either deliberately or as a result of gross negligence. In general, they fought oppressive states and their military and police.

    There was another issue, however, a big one. The U.S. government’s opposition to Cuba from the early 1960s to the 1990s was also once motivated by Cuba’s alliance with the Soviet Union and the Communist Eastern Bloc. In May of 1962, Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Cuban leader Castro agreed to placing nuclear missiles in Cuba, leading to the Cuban missile crisis. While the missiles were withdrawn, Cuban and Soviet ties grew stronger. By the 1970s Cuba had been completely structurally and politically assimilated to the Soviet Union, a totalitarian one-party state controlled everything and secret police who rotted out opponents. Cuba supported the repression of the Czechoslovak Prague Spring, a movement for democratic socialism, in 1968. And it also backed the Polish Communist government’s crackdown on the Solidarity union movement of 1980 that was also fighting for democracy. The United States supported all sorts of other dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere, but Cuba’s alliance with the Soviet Union justified a variety of embargos, trade restrictions, and other measures, including attempted assassinations of Castro. But of course, the Soviet Union fell in 1991, and the Communist Bloc disintegrated and are not an issue today.

    The U.S. government also keeps Cuba on the SSOT list because of Cuba’s “subversion of U.S. justice.” This refers to Cuba having given sanctuary to a number of Black radicals of the 1960s and 70s, some of them Black Panthers, who were involved in violent incidents that included murder, among them Assata Shakur, Ismael La Beet, and Charles Lee Hill, all now in their late 70s and 80s. Some felt they could not get a fair trial in the United States. The U.S. suspects or criminals being harbored in Cuba include some CIA agents who defected. Cuba no longer has political relationships to groups like the Panthers, and these individuals no longer pose any threat to the United States. Certainly, Cuba’s having offered them refuge 30 or 40 years ago has nothing to do with supporting terrorism then and there is no such issue today.

    Just before Trump came to power, the Cuban government, negotiating with Pope Francis, but also implicitly with the Biden administration in its last days, agreed to the release of 553 prisoners. Most had been arrested in July 2021 in the massive marches of thousands protesting high prices and, in some cases, demanding democratic rights and an end to Communist rule. Apparently 100 have already been released, but given Trump’s hardline on Cuba, what will happen to this amnesty now? Neither Trump nor the Cuban government can be trusted to see to their freedom, and Pope Francis has only moral suasion. As Stalin once remarked cynically, “How many divisions does the Pope have?”

    Ironically, another U.S.-Cuban relationship is developing. Trump ordered the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare the U.S. base and prison at Guantanamo, Cuba (Gitmo) to receive 30,000 migrant prisoners. It was at Gitmo that the United States imprisoned 780 people, most from Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Algeria, and tortured many of them. This does not augur well. The location of the immigrant prison on a military base in Cuba but not Cuban territory, will make it difficult to monitor their conditions and provide them legal representation.

    Finally, Cuban immigrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti who were living in the United States under a temporary humanitarian parole program set up by the Biden administration that allowed them to live and work here for two years, are being targeted for deportation as revealed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) document that became public last week. Cubans had once been a privileged and protect immigrant population, but no more. Now they are just “illegals” like the others—though obviously no human being should be called “illegal” and treated as a pariah.

    Terrorism is a problem, state terrorism that is, and Trump is the terrorist.

    Thanks to my good friend Samuel Farber for his suggestions.

     

     

  • After the Fall: Hope Amid the Ruins of Post-Assad Syria

    After the Fall: Hope Amid the Ruins of Post-Assad Syria

    A few weeks after the epochal fall of the Assad dictatorship, Syria remains in flux. It could not be otherwise after 53 years of the strangulation of civil and political life under one of the world’s most murderous regimes. Nonetheless, some broad outlines of where Syria is going can be discerned.

    But before entering into that, it is necessary to savor the moment.  First, the fall of Bashar al-Assad (who ruled from 2000-2024, succeeding his father Hafez Assad, 1971-2000), constitutes a major historical turning point for the region and even the world.  It shows above all that the spirit and reality of the Arab revolutions of 2011 have been smoldering underground all these years.  This should give no comfort to local rulers who have snuffed out the 2011 revolutions in their societies, especially those in Egypt and Tunisia.

    Second, the sudden collapse of the Syrian regime, within a matter of days, shows the fragile and brittle character of political class domination in general. Marxists have often repeated that, despite its unprecedented accumulation of wealth, capitalism is inherently unstable, a system where “all that is solid melts into air,” as Marx and Engels once wrote (Communist Manifesto, MECW 6, p. 487). We saw this in the 2008 economic collapse. But this is equally true of the capitalist state, no matter how solid and impregnable it might appear in a particular context, even in our era of state-capitalism. We saw this in 2011 in the Arab world, when the Tunisian and Egyptian governments fell to revolutionary youth and workers in a matter of days, and we have seen it in Syria today. (In 2023, we saw how another “strong” state, Israel, was taken by surprise not by a mass uprising but by a determined attack across one of the world’s most closely guarded borders.)

    CLR James stressed, based upon a passage in Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, that radical change is characterized by “leaps” and breaks rather than gradualness (Notes on Dialectics: Hegel-Marx-Lenin, Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1986 [1948], p. 99). The years 2023-25 in the Middle East certainly exemplify that. But this is only part of the truth, for both the state and capital have a deep, structural existence, and such moments of collapse or breaks are rare enough. For as Marx intoned after the old order reasserted itself with a vengeance once the 1848 revolutions had met their defeat: “The tradition of all the dead generations lays like a nightmare upon the brains of the living” (Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 104).

    The Unfolding of the New

    Keeping all this in mind, let us look at what is new in post-Assad Syria. Few noticed a year-and-a-half ago when the Syrian people surged into the streets for the first time in years with anti-regime, pro-revolution slogans as they targeted economic catastrophe and corruption. Notably, the predominantly Druze town of Suweida joined in in August 2023, breaking with the regime tactic of pitting ethno-religious minorities against the Sunni Arab majority. Demonstrators chanted, “One, one, one, the Syrian people are one.” Across a number of towns and cities, “the flags of the Druze and Kurdish communities were raised alongside the [2011] revolution flag. And there were numerous displays of solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance” (Leila Al-Shami’s blog, “Syria: Revolution reborn,” Aug. 29, 2023).

    As late as last summer, many EU countries, among them Italy, Denmark, Poland, and Austria, were seeking to end the boycott of the Assad regime, to reopen relations with it, and, above all, to force out the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees who had streamed out of the country during the suppression of the revolution. These EU countries called for “a more realistic” policy, given that “Bashar al-Assad remains firmly it the saddle” (Jean-Baptiste Chastand, “Plusiers pays de l’UE veulent renouer avec la Syrie,” Le Monde, July 25, 2024).

    Jumping to December 2024, when the 53-year-old regime tumbled after a six-day offensive spearheaded by a small Islamist-led force from the northern opposition enclave of Idlib, many have noted the almost complete failure of the large, well-armed regime forces to fight back. According to Middle East scholar Stephen Zunes:

    “While it was the advancing military forces of Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) who marched into Damascus as Assad and his family fled, there are indications that it was unarmed civil resistance led by the resurgent popular committees and local councils, which initially came to the fore in the early nonviolent phase of the revolution back in 2011, that actually wrested control of much of the local governance from the regime, particularly in Daraa and Suweida provinces in the south” (Daniel Falcone: interview with Stephen Zunes, “The Ousting of the Brutal Assad Regime Brings Euphoria and More Questions,” Counterpunch, Dec. 11, 2024).

    In the town of Daraa, where the revolutionary uprising began in 2011, joy and sadness were mixed as crowds gathered to welcome home exiled revolutionaries. These included Sheikh Ahmad Al-Sayasna, whose sermon had helped galvanize the March 18, 2011, “Friday of anger” after local youths were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. Too old and frail to give a full speech, he declared in just a few words, “We are a great people who deserve freedom and who know not hatred.” A young woman in the crowd cried out, “Syria is retrieving all its colors.” Another young woman who also experienced exile stated: “The Westerners are worried, but they need to understand that this is the first time decisions are in the hands of the Syrian people” (Eliott Brachet, “À Deraa, l’étincelle ravivée de la révolution syrienne,” Le Monde, Jan. 9, 2025).

    In early January, the people of Suweida remained on revolutionary alert, holding onto the weapons they had wielded in December as the regime began to fall. As the Assad regime suffered territorial losses under the blows of HTS-led forces from the north, Suweida also rose up.  Its armed networks, which had survived underground, reopened contact with a coalition of rebels from southern Syria, the region where the 2011 uprising first spread widely. “It was coordinated in secret. Once Aleppo fell, we formed the Operations Network [Chambre] of the South. Then, on December 7, we liberated our region as our allies marched on the capital,” stated a commander of the Druze Mountain Brigade, which claimed a force of 7,000 under arms. Also in Suweida, Druze, Christians, and Muslims gathered around a Christmas tree amid revolutionary slogans, especially, “A free, united, civic, and democratic Syria” (Eliott Brachet, “En Syrie, la circonspection des Druzes,” Le Monde, Jan. 7, 2025).

    In Damascus, there was a pervasive sense of picking up where things had left off in 2011. At a December 12 funeral procession for a young revolutionary murdered in prison during the last days of the regime, one participant declared, “It is very moving to march again all together with citizens of Syria from all four corners of the country, on the same route that we took at the beginning of the revolution” (Hélène Sallon, “A Damas, les poignantes obsèques de l’opposant Mazen Al-Hamada,” Le Monde, Dec. 14, 2024).

    In newly liberated Syria, as the poet Samar Yazbek has observed, the main slogan repeated incessantly by the joyous crowds was, “Syria is one and indivisible, it belongs to all Syrians, and everyone is entitled to the same rights.” She saw this as a clear repudiation of the Assad regime’s divide-and-conquer strategy and also of efforts by Israel, Türkiye, and other outside powers that are seeking to dominate the new Syria, even as others like Russia and Iran were exiting the scene (“Bashar al-Assad est tombé, mais la véritable révolution des Syriens ne fait que commencer,” Le Monde, Dec. 24, 2024).

    These revolutionary crowds also entered en masse the regime’s notorious prisons, vile dungeons where tens of thousands met their deaths over the decades, this in addition to the 500,000 Assad and his allies killed in their repression of the 2011 revolution. In December 2024, the people freed those remaining and searched desperately for other survivors or evidence of what had happened to all those who disappeared into these houses of torture.

    Summing up upon his return from exile, the noted Syrian intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh observed concerning the rapid collapse of the regime, “It’s the best thing that could have happened and it took place in the best way possible, without destruction, without massacres, without a great deal of human suffering” (Hélène Sallon, “Le retour doux-amer de Yassin al-Haj Saleh en Syrie,” Le Monde, Jan. 3, 2025).

    Some Syrian Arab intellectuals have also begun to speak out more strongly in defense of the large Kurdish minority (10% of the population) than their earlier counterparts like Saleh. During the civil war the largely Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) established the progressive, pro-feminist autonomous zone of Rojava, now under threat from the Türkiye-funded Syrian National Army (SNA), which has been allied to HTS. As the young Marxist analyst Joseph Daher writes, “The uprising in 2011 allowed an unprecedented emergence of a deep Kurdish national dynamic in the history of Syria. The Kurdish question raises many other issues about the country’s future, including the potential for a pluralist identity not solely based on Arabness or Islam, as well as the nature of the state and its social model. Ultimately, these are all challenges that are intrinsically connected to the desire for true emancipation of Syria’s popular classes” (“The Kurdish Struggle Is Central to Syria’s Future,” New Arab, Dec. 29, 2024).

    Internal Contradictions

    Many in the Western media have noted the relative tolerance of minority religious communities on the part of the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), whose quite small armed forces – probably less than 20,000 in a country of some 25 million – drove down from Idlib in the north to Damascus amid only token opposition, as the Assad regime and its military forces simply collapsed. Given that HTS originated as part of the ultra-fundamentalist Al Qaeda network, although those ties were severed about eight years ago, there is much apprehension about its agenda as it has begun to take over the state. This is especially the case within more secular, leftwing, and feminist sectors of the Syrian population. As Al-Haj Saleh asked upon his return from exile, “Who will be oppressed? People like us, democrats, liberals, people on the left.” He added that so far, there has been “a type of religious and cultural inclusivity but not a political one. I fear they may not accept political pluralism,” noting that HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has surrounded himself with like-minded people in his administration (Sallon, “Le retour”).

    In the new Syria, the negative role of HTS and other radical Islamist groups during the 2011-13 civil war continues to be noted, even as they seem to have moderated their perspectives somewhat. As Shireen Akram-Boshar noted recently: “Syrians within Syria and in the diaspora are wary of HTS. Syrian activists have long described Nusra and other Islamist groups as a second pole in the counterrevolution, after the Assad regime. Syrian activists for years have lifted the stories of Razan Zeitouneh, Wael Hamada, Samira Khalil and Nazem Hammadi — four democratic activists who opposed the Assad regime as well as the Islamist groups, and were kidnapped and disappeared at the end of 2013, most likely by another, similar Islamist militia” (“As Assad Regime Falls, Syrians Celebrate — and Brace for an Uncertain Future, Truthout, Dec. 11, 2024). This connects to one of Raya Dunayevskaya’s key dialectical insights, wherein “the discernment of the counter-revolution within the revolution became pivotal” (Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao, p. 106).

    HTS rule over the rebel enclave of Idlib over the past seven years, while not redolent of Taliban-style reactionary policies, is hardly reassuring. Funded to an extent by Türkiye, HTS developed an authoritarian system in which women’s rights were restricted, open sale of alcohol prohibited, and dissidents imprisoned and tortured.  After protests in 2021 against repression, HTS loosened controls somewhat.

    Now in control of Damascus, HTS has appointed an old Assad regime bureaucrat as chief of the national police and has tried to confiscate arms from the people, especially the youth. HTS has moved decisively to take control of the legal system, dispatching eleven of its minions from Idlib to take charge of the central body of Syrian attorneys. In response, a petition signed by 400 Syrians, 130 of them lawyers, has demanded that the legitimate purges taking place of corrupt and repressive Assad legal officials does not result in their replacement “by others also lacking any electoral legitimacy” (Hélène Sallon, “En Syrie, des avocats s’inquiètent de la mainmise du pouvoir sur le barreau,” Le Monde, Jan. 20, 2025).

    Syrian women have also expressed grave concerns about the future. In Aleppo in December, a women’s demonstration was called off after threatening messages were received by organizers. The HTS-led government has also sent out mixed signals. After an HTS spokesman said in late December that women’s leadership roles would have to be limited to “functions that correspond to their nature and biology,” protest demonstrations broke out in several cities. HTS leader al-Sharaa has expressed a somewhat different line publicly, naming human rights leader Aisha al-Dibs to a bureau of women’s affairs, but the latter has denounced feminism and called for a society based upon Islamic law (Céline Pierce-Magnani, “En Syrie, la méfiance des femmes face au nouveau pouvoir,” Le Monde, Dec. 30, 2024).

    The strongest worries about the new Syria have been expressed by the Kurds, who have come under pressure from the Turkish-backed SNA as well as the Turkish military and air force.  Kurds have already been forced out of some areas. The town of Kobane, where the SDF and its women’s units held off ISIS in 2014 in a legendary battle that broke the back of those Islamist reactionaries, is again in danger from SNA and Turkish forces. Recently, Commander-in-Chief of the Kurdish SDF’s People’s Protection Forces (YPJ), Rohilat Afrin, expressed concern about the direction of the new Syria, in terms of both Kurdish autonomy and women’s rights: “We believe that the war in Kobane was a war for humanity; a war to protect all women and land. We are confident that a state of public alert on a global scale will be raised and solidarity will be provided should Kobane be attacked again…. The mindset entrenched within the new government makes it clear that there is no place for women there — or only a place where women must accept to cover their heads and adopt a patriarchal mindset. Avoiding the above will require a great deal of organization and struggle. This is a serious danger that we need to recognize” (Rojava Information Center, “Syria: ‘We cannot hand over our weapons while attacks on women and our territories continue’ — An interview with YPJ Commander-in-Chief Rohilat Afrin,” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, Jan. 12, 2025).

    Imperialist and Subimperialist Threats… and Syria’s Future

    The fact that the Assad regime since the 2011 uprising has been propped up by Russia, Iran, and the Iran-aligned Hezbollah militias from Lebanon, was shown in how quickly this five-decade-old edifice collapsed once these outside powers began to withdraw in late 2024. Russia pulled out most of its forces by then and refused to do what it had done a decade earlier, conduct indiscriminate air attacks on Syrian rebels and civilians. Here the determined resistance of the Ukrainian people played no small role in weakening Russian imperialism, while Ukraine’s drones gave actual material support. Hezbollah, weakened by Israel’s attacks in the fall of 2024, which had caught its leadership off guard, assassinating them in one swoop, was in no position to aid the regime either. And Iran, reeling from Israeli air attacks and expecting more especially with Trump’s election in the US, also refused to do anything for Assad.

    It should also be noted that Russia and Israel had a tacit understanding under Assad, allowing Israel to attack Syria at will. In addition, after the fall of Assad and the weakening of Hezbollah and Iran, some in the Israeli and US governments are under the dangerous illusion that they can now move on to re-order the region by toppling the Iran regime from without.

    But even as various imperialist and subimperialist powers – Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah – were leaving the scene, new ones were appearing, or at least appearing with greater force. Türkiye, whose President Recep Tayyip Erdogan harbors neo-Ottomanist ambitions for the whole region, not only backed HTS and its “own” SNA, but has also exercised huge direct influence on the new government. Erdogan wants the new Syrian government to leave the Kurds to him and the SNA, but here he comes up against other forces, not least the Kurds themselves, but also their tacit backers in the US military, who have seen SDF as a bulwark against the resurgence of ISIS.

    Israel has intervened in post-Assad Syria in several ways, sinking the small Syrian navy out of the water, destroying from the air many military bases, and taking over a considerably expanded territory around the Golan Heights, which it already occupies illegally. The Israelis have given their usual alibi for their war crimes: fighting “terrorism.”

    All of these powers, and others, are seeking to take advantage of Syria’s economic weakness, born of years of civil war and the exploitation of the country by the Assad family amid epochal levels of corruption. These powers are seeking to dismember or divide Syria into regions and enclaves they hope to dominate. Hence, the constant call by Syrians today for the unity of the country.

    Some on the left, especially campists, have gone so far as to say that the collapse of the regime was orchestrated by Israel and the US and that all this serves imperialism and reaction, with little or no liberatory content to be seen. This logic is extremely questionable. For as longtime Marxist analyst of the region Gilbert Achcar observed in the wake of Assad’s fall, “There are those who believe that any local actor is but the puppet of some external actor. Such people can’t acknowledge any agency for local actors. That’s, of course, a very poor way of perceiving the situation” (Stephen R. Shalom, “The Collapse of the Assad Regime: An Interview on Syria with Gilbert Achcar, New Politics Online, Dec. 13, 2024).

    Such a logic also fails at the human level. Who can defend, excuse, or minimize the brutality of a regime that turned the whole country into a giant torture chamber and death camp? Who can forget the regime’s watchword during the uprising and civil war, “Bashar or we burn the country”? When the time came, in December 2024, the long-suffering Syrian people shook off the regime, with the armed forces melting away as the leaders slinked off to Moscow.

    The people of Syria now have an opening, of a type not seen since the early, heady days of 2011. Let us hope that they can make something positive out of this, not only for Syria, but also for the region and the world, which is in such great need of hope at a time when authoritarianism and fascism are descending on us in so many parts of the world. Let us also salute the persistence and the resilience of the Syrian people, who never gave up in the years since 2011, whether inside the country or in exile, and who continue on today amid myriad obstacles. Let that be a lesson for all of us, everywhere.

     

  • Book Bans & Erasure of History Are Weapons of Authoritarians & Fascists

    Book Bans & Erasure of History Are Weapons of Authoritarians & Fascists

    The greatest weapon which fascist thinkers have in their arsenal starts with misinformation and disinformation.  That is an attack upon the mind by way of erasing historic memory.

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