In Kings and Pawns (Mariner Books, January 2026), Howard Bryant, the author of several books about baseball and racism, skillfully shows how the lives of Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson collided in 1949, with Robinson becoming a “pawn’’ of the ruling class and their media minions during the Cold War.

The “collision’’ was the product of two interconnected events. The first was a speech made by Paul Robeson at the Paris Peace Conference on April 20, 1949. Robeson— a superstar football player, world-renowned stage performer opera singer, self-declared socialist, and “fellow traveler” in the orbit of the US Communist Party—was world-renowned for his cultural achievements and political activism. As reported by the Associated Press, Robeson in his 1949 speech said it was “unthinkable” for Black Americans to “go to war” against the Soviet Union “on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations.”

This demanded a response from the powers that be, and who did they recruit to repudiate Robeson? Jackie Robinson. Yes, the most famous Black athlete in the US who broke baseball’s color line at great personal sacrifice to himself and his family. So, in late 1949, the second critical event occurred. Robinson, at the request and insistence of Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey, who had brought him into the major leagues, agreed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigating “communist infiltration.” Robinson told HUAC that Robeson’s remarks were “silly” and “unpatriotic,” and he set out to clearly separate himself from Robeson, who was probably at the time the most famous African American in the U.S. and most parts of the world—yet today little remembered.

Evaluating Jackie Robinson’s Legacy: Capitulator, Patriot, or Pawn?

So, why did Robinson do it? Was he a capitulator yielding to state pressure, an American “patriot” who genuinely disagreed with Robeson’s pro-Soviet rhetoric, or a pawn caught between powerful forces?” According to Bryant, he was simply a pawn:

The biggest reason he found himself pitted against Robeson is due to his employer, Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the man responsible for integrating the big leagues with Robinson in 1947. Rickey pressured and implored Robinson to appear. Jackie really felt a responsibility and loyalty to Rickey, though in his memoir he said he testified because he did not want the white allies who were sympathetic to civil rights to abandon that fight if they felt that Black citizens were disloyal to the United States…

Years later, Rickey again showed his true colors when he said that baseball’s reserve clause, tying a player to one team for life, was only opposed by those with “avowed communist tendencies.”

How did history judge Jackie Robinson? Robinson himself, as of 1960, “revisited his HUAC testimony” and according to Bryant, stated in his own book Wait Till Next Year that “I knew that many Negroes welcomed Robeson’s remarks, not because of disloyalty…but because they feared white America would never grant the Negro a position of equality simply out of a sense of justice and decency.” While Robinson never said he regretted testifying against Robeson, he did say that if asked again to testify, he would refuse.

Four months after the March on Washington in 1963, Malcolm X still was not buying Robinson’s logic or second thoughts. Malcolm wrote:

They (the White Man) sought desperately to find another Negro who would be dumb enough to champion their bankrupt “white” cause against Paul Robeson—a man who took a “brilliant stand” questioning the intelligence of Negroes fighting to defend a country that treated them with such open contempt and bestial brutality. You let them use you to destroy Paul Robeson.

Yet following Robinson’s death in 1972, Bryant also notes that the Black Panther Party remembered Robinson as:

...a man who refused to see Black people denied or exploited in the field of sports. To many he was a “Tom,” to some a lost man. The BPP believes that his contributions were great, his courage undeniable…the contributions to the total liberation of Black and all oppressed people have been many from all segments of the Black community…and we remember Jackie Robinson.

These two perspectives—Malcolm X’s and the BPP’s—point to divergent interpretations of Jackie Robinson across the different periods of his life and the changing contours of this country’s political landscape.

Bryant is insightful here but also somewhat frustrating—addressing these divergent interpretations without really staking out a position. He writes:

…it was just so representative of this question that African Americans are constantly having [to deal with] and we have to this day about belonging and about patriotism and about that twoness, that ability to, one, be patriotic and feel like you are part of this country while at the same time living in at that time a segregated society and all of the forces that sort of came to it…The complacency that we have today is very, very similar to the complacency that people felt back then [was] that we still believed in our institutions, and the institutions would save us and that common sense would prevail.

The Unanswered Question: How the Ruling Class Erased Paul Robeson

The bigger question to us in reading this book is: how could the erasure of the most famous Black person in the United States become so all encompassing? Excellent biographies on Robeson by Martin Duberman and Paul Robeson Jr. had little to say about this erasure.

Bryant’s book does a good job of tracing how Robinson’s testimony, coupled with an extensive smear campaign, legal repression, the complete denial of work opportunities, and organized violent mobs that twice tried to kill Robeson at his rallies in Peeksville, New York, deeply wounded Robeson both personally and politically.

And without a doubt, Robeson’s close ties to the Soviet Union in the midst of a mushrooming cold war had a large bearing on the ruling class’s concerted, successful effort to “disappear” him. Just as important was their ability to threaten many careers in order to eliminate Robeson’s name from public view and discussion. Bryant notes that even legendary poets and writers on the radical left such as Langston Hughes and David Halperstam sacrificed Robeson during this period to “protect” their careers and reputations. Facing subpoenas from HUAC, they did this by eliminating Robeson’s name from their stories, poems, and speeches. Hughes, at the time a world-famous African American poet, had previously collaborated with Robeson to have him record and present on multiple occasions Hughes’ famous poem “Freedom Train.”

Come the late 1970s and 1980s, Bryant writes that “America did not want to talk about race anymore, except within a conservative movement committed to dismantling civil rights gains…” Unfortunately, that is where Bryant leaves it. He does not deal with the consciousness and historical memory of the masses of African Americans in any serious way. Bryant does turn briefly to W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of “double consciousness,’’ something Du Bois wrote about regarding the “souls of Black folk’’ in 1903. Du Bois’s analysis could have shed light on a lot of unanswered questions, but unfortunately, Bryant never deepens or updates this important theory vis-a-vis Robeson and Robinson.

The ideological processes that allowed the ruling class’s stunning achievement, while not within the scope of this most worthwhile book, are a critical, missing part of this story. The book could have included something, even something short, involving this idea of ideological domination, or even a slight digression to juxtapose two similar, more recent examples of ruling class retribution directed at outspoken black athletes: Muhammed Ali and Colin Kaepernick. Both athletes had quite different outcomes that would, in turn, highlight two differences. One was the power of the civil rights and Black Lives Matter movements and the raised consciousness of people inspired by those movements. Secondly, Ali and Kaepernick were both able to continue the struggle despite the threat of prison and the impact on their careers. Ali, whose passport was not revoked like Robeson’s, fought boxing matches around the world after being banned in the US and won massive supporters in this country who supported his refusal to fight in the Vietnam war and his stand for justice and equality for African Americans. Kaepernick, a successful NFL quarterback with the San Francisco 49ers, began kneeling during the national anthem before his games to protest racial injustice and police brutality. Despite every team subsequently refusing to sign him, Kaepernick was able to successfully sue the NFL, started a social justice organization called Know Your Rights Camp, and has just written a book called The Perilous Fight.

No doubt, at least to Marxists, a big challenge conceptualizing oppression of any kind is understanding the questions of how it is organized and how it is reproduced. To answer that question, the diffuse circuitry of power and ideology must be examined. Unfortunately, Bryant cannot or will not deal with this in this book, which hinders any more thorough examination of how Robeson simply disappeared from the public’s consciousness, from US history and, most germane to Bryant’s book, from the memory of Black people today. So it goes. Still, a terrific read.

C. James was a Division 1 basketball player in early 70s till his involvement in the new communist movement. He recently retired from teaching at the University of Illinois.

Bill Silver is a community activist who recently retired after 40 years as a union member and staff organizer. Bill traces his early socialist beginnings to a high school walkout following the killings at Kent and Jackson State. He is an avid athlete and sports fan who has currently found a new home on the pickleball courts.

I first visited New York back in the early 1970s. A native Californian, I was astonished at the extremes of wealth and poverty in the Big Apple. Rich people flaunted their wealth in a way that would be considered bad taste on the Pacific coast: women in mink being helped out of limousines by uniformed chauffeurs and escorted into lavish apartment buildings by uniformed doormen. Half a block away, people were getting their meals out of dumpsters.

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Returning home, I reached out to a friend who had grown up in New York. “I don’t get it,” I said. “You’ve got people who are ostentatiously rich and people who are destitute, jammed together cheek to jowl on that tiny little island. Why don‘t they kill each other?”

My friend looked at me in surprise. “They do kill each other,” she said.

Today New York has a socialist mayor who rode into office on a wave of anger over income inequality. And “egalitarian” California is home to gentlemen whose fortunes make those Park Avenue dowagers of yesteryear look like paupers.

At last count California had 246 billionaires, about a third of the nation’s total. Their collective worth was over $2 trillion—roughly half the state’s gross domestic product. Over the last three years, their wealth has increased by an average of 158 percent.

Last year, their share of the income tax revenue collected by the state was two and a half percent.

Much of their assets are beyond the reach of the tax collector—investments, stocks and bonds, private equity. Such things don’t count as income unless they’re liquidated or sold. Other sources of revenue for the state, sales and excise taxes, fall most heavily on those least able to pay.

Local property taxes are supposed to fund public schools, but Proposition 13, an ill-considered “tax reform” that passed back in 1978, sharply limits how much can be collected, so the state assumes much of the burden.

So it is that California, which boasts the world’s fourth largest economy, still struggles to pay for its public schools, charges exorbitant tuition at its public universities, and sees hospitals and community clinics closing or drastically curtailing services as federal funding dries up. One way or another, legislative debates and campaigns for public office boil down to arguments over how to divide up a pie that never seems quite big enough to feed everyone.

Propositions 3 and 40: Putting the Brakes on Cutbacks

The electoral arena can be tough to navigate. There are tactical alliances to negotiate, struggles to define the key issues and keep them front and center, debates about candidates’ “electability,” honest questions about how they’d function once in office. If your strategic goals aren’t completely clear, it’s easy to lose your bearings.

When the issue is taxes, though, it’s a lot easier to size up the terrain. Competing interests break down neatly along class lines, much as they would in a shop floor struggle. It may take expertise to draft tax laws or even just understand how they work. But you don’t have to be an economist or a policy wonk to see how they play out in real life—any more than you need to study company balance sheets to know they’re not paying you enough to live on.

After nearly half a century, California is still feeling the effects of Proposition 13. Placed on the ballot when the state legislature couldn’t agree on needed tax relief for homeowners, it was written to benefit mainly business, whose overall share of property tax revenue shrank by nearly half. For public schools, it was a catastrophe: an education system that was once the pride of the nation sank to the bottom in state rankings.

Proposition 13 also barred the state legislature from tapping new sources of revenue without a two-thirds vote. It thus fell to the voters, through the ballot initiative process, to do damage control. A constitutional amendment was passed that required a minimum level of state funding for K-12 education and community colleges; it helped, but it wasn’t enough. A subsequent ballot measure, pushed through by the California Federation of Teachers, imposed a temporary tax on the top 2% of income tax brackets. That tax, earmarked mainly for schools, is due to expire in two years; a new measure on the November ballot, Proposition 3, would make it permanent. If it fails, public education will confront yet another funding crisis.

On top of California’s ongoing struggle to pay for its kids’ education, Donald Trump’s Big Bad Budget bill, HR-1, now threatens to play havoc with its health care. When HR-1 kicks in next year, the state will lose $100 billion in federal subsidies for health insurance premiums, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and matching funds for MediCal (California’s version of Medicaid). In anticipation of the lost revenue, health insurers have dramatically increased their premiums and half the community clinics in Los Angeles County have closed their doors. Hospitals that rely on federal Medicaid dollars to keep operating are threatening to shut down or drastically curtail services. One hospital in the Sacramento Valley has already closed, forcing local residents to drive 40 minutes to the nearest emergency room.

One in five Californians, and fully half the state’s children, are on MediCal, but the cuts will fall most heavily on California’s 11 million immigrants. Two years ago, California became the first state in the nation to grant MediCal eligibility without regard to immigration status. This was a major victory, and it did not happen overnight: it took a protracted, step-by-step struggle to extend state funds to cover those denied access by the feds—first immigrant children, then Dreamers, finally all state residents, whether “legal” or not.

With the passage of HR-1, the state started walking back its commitment. California now bars any new enrollment in MediCal for undocumented adults. Those already enrolled must pay a $30 monthly premium. Even one missed payment gets you dropped from the program, with no opportunity to reenroll. In fact, leaving the program for any reason, even temporary, means you can’t get back in. Those who remain enrolled must now pay out of pocket for dental care.

All told, once HR-1 takes effect, as many as 3 million Californians could be kicked off MediCal, another half million will lose their Obamacare subsidies, and an estimated 145,000 health care workers will lose their jobs. The California Medical Association calls it a catastrophe in the making.

The situation confirms something health care activists have known for a while: our jerry-built, market-driven health care system requires major infusions of our tax dollars to keep it afloat. Unfortunately, when the bulk of a state’s wealth is tied up in the hands of a few people and is largely exempt from taxation, there is constant pressure to throw more people overboard.

Besides Proposition 3, there is a second “tax the rich measure” on California’s November ballot. Proposition 40, drafted by a UC Berkeley economist who is an expert on inequality, is a one-time 5% wealth tax on the state’s billionaires, calculated to raise just enough money to make up for federal cuts to MediCal. Note that it is a tax on wealth, rather than income—meaning that Mark Zuckerberg, whose paycheck as CEO of Facebook is exactly one dollar, would have to make a one-time payment of $10 billion on his estimated net worth of $200 billion.

Proposition 40 has attracted some extraordinarily well-funded opposition. Google CEO Sergey Brin has already spent over $100 million to defeat it. California voters have been bombarded for weeks with TV ads, online messaging, and mailers warning them that their home equity, savings, and retirement accounts are in jeopardy, and the government will have “sweeping new audit power over every taxpayer” if the measure passes. In short, says the opposition, a tax on a handful of uber-rich is really targeting everybody.

The implicit message here is that there’s an identity of interests between the billionaires and the rest of us. Made explicit, this message would be a very tough sell. The truth is that, while tax laws have always tended to privilege the haves over the have-nots, this tendency has become so pronounced since Ronald Reagan occupied the White House that it amounts to outright class robbery. One way or another over the years, every tax cut for the rich has come out of the hides of everybody else.

The Challenge of Public Disinvestment

Back in the 1930s, when US capitalism seemed on the verge of collapse, the federal government embraced the idea that the best way to get the economy back on its feet was to put more purchasing power in the hands of ordinary people. One way to accomplish this was to make it easier for workers to join unions—which they did, through what amounted to one of the great social movements in our country’s history.

The other was through public investment—government spending on programs that put more money in the hands of consumers, thereby generating more business for capital. Though this approach is no longer in favor, there’s at least one recent example. When the Affordable Care Act passed, health insurance had become so expensive that many people could no longer afford it. It was a vicious circle: the more people who lost their coverage, the higher the premiums for those who kept theirs—until many of them could no longer afford it either.

Obamacare addressed the problem with premium subsidies for people who were struggling to pay for their health insurance. It provided access to care for millions who would have otherwise gone without. But it also served as a $12 billion handout to an industry whose drive to sustain its profits was actually destroying its market.

In our indignation over corporate greed, we sometimes forget that capitalism is fundamentally irrational. However calculating and ruthless its behavior, big business often requires some form of government intervention to curb its self-destructive tendencies or at least compensate for them. That’s why even the most enlightened and necessary public investments often involve a sizable payoff to capital.

By and large, though, the name of the game today is public disinvestment. From your local city council to the state house and all the way up to the White House, everything from Medicare to prisons is being handed over to private investors, turning public functions into sources of private profit.

Instead of bolstering the economy with public subsidies, the government uses generous tax breaks to encourage investment, on the theory that the benefits will eventually trickle down to the rest of us. What actually happens: needed services are cut back because “we can’t afford them,” while the tax burden increasingly falls on those less able to pay. Politicians’ promises of tax relief are often accompanied by attacks on public employees, whose unions are blamed for the budget crunch plaguing state and local governments.

During World War II and even more so during the Cold War, California benefitted enormously from federal largesse. Much of it went for military spending—aerospace, shipyards, and, increasingly, national defense-related research and development grants for solid-state electronics, aeronautics and space, computers and systems analysis. Stanford University became the hub of a huge defense-electronics juggernaut that embodied President Eisenhower’s oft-quoted warning about the “military industrial complex.”

Today, the surrounding region—Silicon Valley—is generating the kind of profits that no government handouts could possibly match. Still, the tax dollars keep rolling in. During Trump’s second term, Palantir’s surveillance technology has attracted close to $1 billion in contracts from the Defense Department and Homeland Security. NASA subsidizes Elon Musk’s forays into outer space. Musk and Palantir founder Peter Thiel, who mentored Vice President J.D. Vance and jump-started his political career, are among the loudest voices against Proposition 40.

An earlier generation of defense industry entrepreneurs was willing to tolerate high marginal income tax rates to keep the federal gravy train running. Today’s high-tech moguls treat their federal handouts almost as an entitlement. Their libertarian rhetoric, with its fulminations against “big government,” sounds strangely incongruous in the face of their undiminished appetite for government subsidies and their increasingly chummy relationship with the most authoritarian administration ever to occupy the Oval Office.

More often than not, decisions about public finance and government spending are made in ways that benefit the rich. But at least they provide an arena where working people can fight for government policies that address their needs and curb the power of business. When the government downsizes, they lose not only needed services but also political leverage needed to effectively defend their own interests. Budget constraints are used against every attempt to win concessions from the state, and popular movements that need to work together to win are reduced to fighting over crumbs.

Forty years of neoliberal “small government” policies have given us the kind of extreme economic inequality that has no precedent in this country’s history. Right now, demands to “tax the rich” are perhaps the best way to challenge it. If the California measures fail, the social costs will be enormous. If they succeed, they should raise the struggle to a higher level.

Peter Shapiro has been a health care activist ever since 2009, when he represented his union at the founding conference of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer. He is active in the California DSA Tax the Rich Working Group.

We are living in the period of late-stage capitalism—a stage where finance capital and large capitalists have violated the social contract of the New Deal era and embraced neoliberalism. They have abandoned their obligation to be the stewards of our productive capacity, cannibalizing it instead. The demands of Wall Street have been to make the highest possible return in the shortest amount of time no matter what the impact is on our communities, the environment, and the working class.

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In the 1960s, 700,000 people worked in the manufacturing sector in Chicago. Today, it is 65,000—a 90% decline. In the 1960s, manufacturing represented 25-30% of GDP. Today, manufacturing represents 11% of GDP and it’s still declining. The de-industrialization of America was the principal cause of the deterioration of our society, particularly in Brown and Black communities.

The libertarian right facilitated this decline through offshoring, automation, and attacks on organized labor. And starting under the Clinton administration, if not earlier, the liberal center became a willing assistant to this process. But while the left has long critiqued the right and center for facilitating neoliberalization, the reality is that its devastating impacts are our fault too.

Generally, the progressive and left community has failed to advance a strategy for developing our productive capacity and leading in the creation of wealth. Many on the left could be characterized as left economists—militantly embracing strategies focused only on issues related to the redistribution of wealth, working conditions, and justice. This focus is at the heart of the Alinsky tradition–a framework of community organizing founded by Saul Alinsky in 1930s Chicago.

While continuing to lead the struggle for redistribution of wealth, union rights, and better working conditions, the left needs to lead strategies focused on the creation of wealth—work at the center of rebuilding the means of production as a foundation for a truly sustainable society. We need another organizing model.

Alinsky vs. Arizmendi: Redistribution or Control of Wealth?

The post-World War II era gave rise to two visionaries who sought to extend greater democracy and wealth to their low-income constituencies as part of a broader vision to change the world. Both were critical of capitalism as well as the kind of socialism practiced in the Soviet Union that relied solely on the state. Both mobilized the grass roots to exercise power on their own behalf and did so in the thousands, having a profound impact on the communities they served. Both are studied by young and veteran organizers around the world looking for new solutions to old seemingly intractable problems.

Saul Alinsky, influenced deeply by John L. Lewis of the United Mineworkers of America, advanced a vision for low-income communities that paralleled the successful organizing strategy of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. This was a strategy premised on the notion that the productive economy—the system through which wealth was created in the United States— was doing a decent job. After all, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. At that time, the profits of the big American corporations generally coincided with the long-term development of the sector they had invested in: GM made cars and seemed to be in it for the long term, making investments in new technology and generally keeping pace. IBM did the same with computers. US Steel did the same with steel. And traditional, typically white middle class communities where these big companies were located as well as the upper classes did quite well. But communities, workers, and entrepreneurs of color faced discrimination in every aspect of the economy and society including wages and conditions of work, access to ownership, housing, and the justice system.

Alinsky didn’t focus on the well-being of the means of production but on the improvement of the distribution of wealth that the system generated to include communities that were systematically excluded or shortchanged because they were Black, Latino, or working class. He and his organizations fought against all forms of discrimination and injustice. His pioneering organizations in Chicago—The Woodlawn Organization, the Back of the Yards, and the Organization for a Better Austin—were initiated by professional organizers recruited by the Industrial Areas Foundation, and later by emerging organizations that embraced the Alinsky approach.

In Austin, a community on Chicago’s West Side, the Organization for Better Austin imploded when a top leader turned out to be a spy for the police department. A number of smaller regional organizations such as the South Austin Community Coalition, the Northwest Austin Council, and the Northeast Austin Organization, and others formed. They mobilized and organized local residents based on their “self-interest” and around immediate and important demands for better and fair housing, for social and racial justice, for welfare reform, and other immediate issues just as their trade union parallel did in the big mills and plants around the country. They organized for the redistribution of wealth to their particular constituencies—leaving all the questions associated with the creation of wealth to corporate America.

At the same time, in the Basque region of northern Spain in the village of Mondragon, a priest named Father Jose Maria Arizmendi took a different tack. He was part of the Basque resistance to Franco, the Spanish fascist who had taken power in Spain in the late 1930s. During this time, he was arrested and narrowly escaped execution. He was assigned to the parish in the small town of Mondragon. Rather than just focusing on the broader distribution of wealth, he assumed in his approach that controlling and developing the means of production in light of the values and priorities of the local community should be the principal focus of organizing and organizational development. It was at the point of production, where work was done, that democracy should be extended, where worker-residents had the greatest leverage and power, and developed a cooperative structure to achieve this goal.

This was more complicated work but in the long run more powerful. In 1943, shortly after arriving in Mondragon, he organized a polytechnical school for young Basque people that taught both the technical skills of manufacturing and production as well as values. In 1956, with five graduates of this school, Arizmendi purchased a gas stove company and organized it on a cooperative basis—one worker/one vote and a compensation ratio of one to three (where the highest-paid manager could only earn three times the lowest-paid worker). The initial company, employing 30 worker owners,was successful. Another company was launched with another team, and then another, and then another. By the mid-1970s, they had some 45 companies employing 17,000 workers in manufacturing and retail as well as a shared cooperative bank, vocational schools, and housing cooperatives. In 2007, the Mondragon network—now the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation—had 85 companies employing 130,000 people globally, with major cooperatives in retail as well as manufacturing. Today, the Basque Country has over 3,000 cooperatives. Eroski is a big box retail store that is owned by its employees and owners and has kept Wal-Mart out of Spain.

Mondragon is the cutting edge of the Spanish industrial economy, and the region is recognized as one of the leading manufacturing regions in the global economy. Unemployment is very low and per capita income is high. Democracy is a reality in politics as well as in the economy. Arizmendi recognized the central role of wealth creation in society and the fact that market sophistication and competition could be combined with social values. Through organizing, leadership development, and organizational sophistication, Arizmendi led a movement that has contended successfully in the market and state and profoundly influenced civil society. While such worker cooperatives remain subject to the law of value and to capitalist competition, they still create seeds of a socialized economy to come.

Today, the Alinsky-inspired movement is less and less effective. The private sector has qualitatively changed. The powerful Low Road segment–seeking short-term gains by minimizing worker pay, benefits, and safety–is dominated by Wall Street and some of the large multinational publicly traded companies, shattering the social contract that made the Alinsky-inspired movement viable throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Among the most powerful companies, short-term gains for shareholders has replaced any desire or long-term commitment to particular companies, products, or sectors, much less the communities where production takes place.

The Economic Program for the Third Reconstruction

Embracing the issues related to the forces and relations of production significantly expands our influence in key areas of our economy and society. These issues must be a key component of the Third Reconstruction. It is where economic democracy takes hold and becomes a central component of the new socialist paradigm. We can lead in the expansion of the social/solidarity economy where millions of people participate in cooperatives in housing, farming, social services, health care and other sectors. We need to expand employee ownership and economic democracy in all sectors. This is where our base can learn to manage production guided by socialist rather than capitalist values—essential for revolutionary change. In production, we must embrace new technologies like robotics and artificial intelligence. Through economic democracy, it will be the working class determining how they are used, where they are used, and when they are used. Guided by a socialist vision and values, these technologies will contribute to building society rather than tearing it down.

A social movement in the US can no longer depend on limiting its role to just redistribution of wealth. Redistribution is required but no longer sufficient. It’s essential that those interested in sustainable communities take up the issues of wealth creation and find alliances with those in the business community who still share a contemporary version of the old idea of stewardship. From my perspective, Arizmendi was and is a more powerful and effective visionary in setting the course for organizing in communities than Alinsky.

Now more than ever we need to use perspectives such as his in not just asking others for development that includes community residents but making it happen in ways that remain under local control and guided by local values. We need to develop the skill and vision that allows those with a commitment to development that is environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable to compete in the market, in the state, and in civil society against the destructive Low Road trend. There is now a broad vacuum of leadership in the economy and society. We should contend with filling that vacuum with a vision that truly builds the community on behalf of its residents.

Carl Davidson is a veteran organizer with roots in the New Left of the 1960s, where he served as a Vice President and National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society. He continues to write prolifically.

“If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate,⁠ both of them, because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every ‌adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.” —Donald Trump, 09/09/2026

Vote buying has a long and storied history, dating back to ancient times and spanning the globe. To our knowledge, however, no politician ever publicly announced a vote-buying scheme, for one and all to factor into their voting decisions and household finances. None, that is, until US President Donald Trump did so a quarter century ago at his midterm convention, a.k.a. “Trumpapalooza.”

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“But wait,” an astute reporter asked the president. “If the economy is so great, why not give out checks right now? Your party already has control of the White House and Congress. Isn’t this just vote buying?” The president responded with a stream of invective involving descriptions of various female body parts. Unthinkable today, but no one blinked.

When Trump continued to promote his scheme, some career attorneys within the Department of Justice balked; Trump fired them all. Myriad democracy-oriented groups mounted lawsuits. The case ping-ponged among lower courts and quickly reached the US Supreme Court. There, the majority applied several creative legal theories to grease the skids for the president.

For instance, harkening back to the 2026 ballroom/bunker brouhaha, they opined that none of the plaintiffs had “standing.” That was because bribe implementation details had not been finalized—for example, where would the needed $1.2 trillion come from?—and no one could prove they would be harmed by receiving $5,000 should Republicans retain power.

“Who wouldn’t want $5,000?” Clarence Thomas asked. “Ginny and I would use ours to refurbish our RV, which we enjoy parking in Walmart lots when we’re not accepting the personal hospitality of our close billionaire friends on non-gift luxury vacations.”

The justices also sanctioned Trump’s DOJ shenanigans, invoking the court’s novel “unitary executive theory.” The president, they said, had complete control over the executive branch. Thus, he had every right to fire the malcontents and direct the Attorney General not to investigate a vote-buying scheme.

“The majority of us had a fun nickname for the unitary executive theory,” Justice Alito later revealed in his memoir. It was “TGDWTGD,” or “Trump’s Gonna Do What Trump’s Gonna Do.” Three members of the court, he said, were not amused. But the joke was on him when a few years later the number of Supreme Court justices changed, for the eighth time in its history.

Congress, during the Trump years, had also bought into TGDWTGD, Republicans by design and everyone else by default. But even some Republicans were fed up. “Imagine having to always be defending SNAP cuts and Nazi-themed social media posts and measles and whatnot at town halls and press conferences,” said one privately. “It’s downright exhausting.” Some wondered if they could continue coasting on their one legislative accomplishment—a regressive tax cut that massively enriched the wealthy while exploding the federal deficit.

Then, in November 2026, along came the midterm elections. About 60 percent of the electorate remembered how, two years earlier, Trump said he would end the Ukraine war on “Day One” and issue $5,000 “DOGE checks.” Neither materialized. Now, at the Trumpapalooza, he had promised that after the midterms the Iran war would end, gas prices would tumble, and if the GOP won there would be Trump Dividends for all.

Hmmm, thought the 60 percent. Maybe we shouldn’t do the same thing over again and expect a different result. That, along with housing and hunger and health insurance and ICE and mafia-style corruption and AI apocalypse and lettuce parasites, was on their minds as they went into the voting booths.

The rest is history.

Jennifer Thomas is a speculative fiction writer and occasional New Liberator contributor. You can read some of her stories at jenniferthomas.net.

This article first appeared in Convergence Magazine on September 1, 2026. Featured images by Elizabet Wendt.

Drawing on a pair of visualizations found in two well-known books of history, this sketch aims to reinforce a certain way of seeing past incarnations of the Left in the United States. That is to say, a certain way of understanding how these incarnations worked and successfully exerted the power to change the world. In turn, these visualizations provide a certain way of seeing ourselves–the kind of collective historical actor we all aspire to become as we struggle to build today’s US Left anew.

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One heartening recent development is the growing prevalence of the “Block and Build” strategy across the US Left, rooted in the concept of the united front. More and more people and organizations recognize the strategic necessity of forging a broad united front to block the Right while simultaneously building a powerful and distinguishable Left bloc within it.

But rather than see united fronts both past and present in terms of a one dimensional line, such as a segment of a conventional left-right spectrum, the visualizations sketched below highlight the value of seeing them in terms of a different geometric figure: as sets of concentric circles, with the Left forming the very core.

Set #1: Mid-19^th Century

James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, one of the most popular books on the Civil War, opens with the Mexican-American War, this country’s first major act of imperialist aggression in Latin America. While leading to the formation of the southern border that our fascist administration polices so brutally today, this war ignited the conflict over slavery.

Many critics in Northern states viewed the invasion as a concerted attempt to expand the territorial, political, and economic might of “the Slave Power,” or the white enslaver class. They joined together across the two-party aisle to back the Wilmot Proviso, a congressional measure seeking to ban slavery on all land expropriated from Mexico. Although this early example of sectional unity failed in the short run, the upswell of support for the Wilmot Proviso gave birth to the Free Soil Party.

In one early chapter, McPherson makes a memorable recommendation for how to picture the breadth of forces comprising this emerging movement:

Free-soil sentiment in 1847 can be visualized in three concentric circles. At the center was a core of abolitionists who considered slavery a sinful violation of human rights that should be immediately expiated. Surrounding and drawing ideological nourishment from them was a larger circle of antislavery people who looked upon bondage as an evil—by which they meant that it was socially repressive, economically backward, and politically harmful to the interests of free states. This circle comprised mainly Whigs (and some Democrats) from the Yankee belt of states and regions north of the 41^stparallel who regarded this issue as more important than any other in American politics. The outer circle contained all those who had voted for the Wilmot Proviso but did not necessarily consider it the most crucial matter facing the country and were open to compromise.

Indeed, as McPherson points out, the outermost circle included people like Whig Congressman Abraham Lincoln, who viewed slavery as an unqualified evil but nonetheless disavowed abolitionism at that time. Some in the outermost circle opposed the extension of slavery while vehemently disavowing any solidarity with enslaved black people whatsoever–like Democratic Congressman David Wilmot himself, who put forward his proviso out of his stated concern for the interests of “free white labor” rather than “morbid sympathy for the slave.” But when the Free Soil Party ran its first presidential candidate in 1848 (Martin Van Buren, hardly a consistent antislavery proponent), even Frederick Douglass chose to attend its first convention, fully recognizing the blinkered political and moral vision of some members, yet aflame with the possibility of forging a popular majority that could credibly challenge slavery.

Here’s a sketch of McPherson’s visualization:

It was this set of forces which eventually formed the basis of the Republican Party in 1854, founded to counteract the Slave Power’s increasing domination of the federal government. As early Republican leader Thaddeus Stevens remarked, “Even in a bad, wicked cause, [the South] shows a united front. All her sons are faithful to the cause of human bondage, because it is their cause. But the North–the poor, timid, mercenary, driveling North–has no such united defenders of her cause, although it is the cause of human liberty.” The purpose of the Republican Party was to develop precisely such a united front, and just six years later, it succeeded in sending Lincoln to the White House.

The Southern united front responded by seceding and founding the Confederate States of America–a white supremacist, fundamentally antidemocratic state revolving around the principle of racial exploitation. The goal of this state, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens infamously declared in his “Cornerstone Speech” was to become “the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth”: “that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” When this new government fired the first shots at Fort Sumter in the name of this principle in 1861, the Republican Party led the Union to war.

Over the course of the Civil War, the core at the center of this set–including abolitionists, some Union officers and soldiers, Radical Republicans in Congress and Lincoln’s Cabinet, and above all, free and enslaved black people–played the crucial role in bringing about the Emancipation Proclamation, transforming what appeared to be an ambiguous struggle to defend the Union into a definitive struggle to smash the Confederacy and its cornerstone of slavery. To quote Thaddeus Stevens once more, this core believed that the Union must “treat the war as a radical revolution,” in order to depose “a slave oligarchy which would repudiate the odious doctrine of the Declaration of Independence, and justify the establishment of an empire admitting the principle of king, lord, and slaves.”

Elsewhere across the planet, some who were busy promoting a new idea–socialism–recognized the world-historical import of this struggle. None other than Karl Marx wrote in a letter on behalf of the First International to President Lincoln after his second election victory in 1864: “The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes,” a line he reprised in the preface to the first edition of Capital. In Marx’s view, the Civil War constituted “the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.”

As soon as the war ended and the conflict to determine what exactly that “reconstruction of a social world” should look like began, the core, flying the banner of Radical Reconstruction, fought to achieve not only full political equality for black freedpeople but their complete social liberation and thereby the creation of an authentic multiracial democracy for all. The boldest visionaries championed a multifaceted program: full civil and voting rights, land confiscation and redistribution, progressive tax reform, free public education, labor rights, women’s suffrage, and government protection against white supremacist terrorism. To fight for this program, they built organizations inside and outside the Republican Party, such as the Union Leagues.

Crimes against humanity perpetrated through white supremacist terrorism against black freedpeople and their most committed white allies, combined with the defection of erstwhile white allies both North and South, doomed the radical revolution that was Reconstruction and facilitated the radical counterrevolution that was Jim Crow. This temporarily halted what W.E.B. Du Bois, Reconstruction’s greatest ever chronicler, dubbed at once “the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen” and “one of the most extraordinary experiments of Marxism that the world, before the Russian Revolution, had seen.”

Set #2: Mid-20^th Century

Du Bois wrote those words in 1935, a seminal year in the trajectory of the second set of concentric circles.

Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes, one of the most popular Marxian overviews of the 20^th century, features a revealing title for one early chapter: “Against the Common Enemy,” in this case signifying the rising tide of international fascism. To explain the strategy that many leftists embraced to take on this common enemy, Hobsbawm coincidentally makes the same move as McPherson:

Essentially the strategy put forward…was one of concentric circles. The united forces of labour (the ‘United Front’) would form the foundation of a wider electoral and political alliance with democrats and liberals (‘the Popular Front’). Beyond this, as the advance of Germany continued, the communists envisaged an even wider extension into a ‘National Front’ of all who, irrespective of ideology and political beliefs, regarded fascism (or the Axis powers) as the primary danger.

Actually, Hobsbawm offered this visualization earlier in two remarkable essays commemorating the 40^th and 50^th anniversaries of the Third International’s official adoption of this strategy at its Seventh World Congress in 1935. In the second essay, Hobsbawm adds one more outer ring: an “international front” consisting of all states and all peoples opposed to fascism around the world.

Here’s a sketch of Hobsbawm’s visualization:

Just as Marx believed that the struggle against slavery constituted a pivotal step on the road to socialism, Hobsbawm makes a similar contention about this approach to the struggle against fascism. “[It was] more than a temporary defensive tactic, or even a strategy for eventually turning retreat into offensive. It was also a carefully considered strategy of advancing to socialism,” he writes.

To prove this point, Hobsbawm offers a striking quote from the Third International in 1935: “It may be said that in a number of countries the united front government will prove to be one of the most important transitional forms [from capitalism to socialism].” Fifty years later, Hobsbawm was still convinced: “The people’s fronts remain to this day the socialist strategy which most frightens the enemy…Because they are afraid of the strategy of the broad alliance. They would much prefer the revolutionaries to isolate themselves, the more sectarian in spirit, the better.”

During the 1930s and 1940s, leftists pursued this strategy in one form or another across the Earth: from Spain (where the government of el Frente Popular and the international fighters it summoned tragically lost out in the civil war against Francisco Franco and his European fascist backers) to China (where Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party joined together in a tenuous alliance with their mortal enemy, the Kuomintang, to win the war against Japanese fascism and make a signature contribution to the theory and practice of the united front).

Leftists in the US–including a wide range of organized and independent socialists, but especially the members of the Communist Party–pursued this strategy at the height of the New Deal, organizing for a multiracial social democratic state, for industrial democracy through mass unionism in the workplace, for an end to Jim Crow in the South and all kinds of racial oppression everywhere, and for solidarity with oppressed peoples resisting fascism abroad.

This core gained inspiration from their predecessors in the mid-19^th century. As we have seen, Du Bois resuscitated the glory of the First Reconstruction precisely at this time. Leftists often steeped themselves in the iconography of the Civil War. Those who risked or sacrificed their lives in Spain called themselves the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. It’s no coincidence that the title of the most famous novel to emerge from this incarnation of the US Left, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, invoked the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” So did CIO members whenever they sang “Solidarity Forever,” words written to that very same tune. To quote the original lyrics that inspired both the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Solidarity Forever”: John Brown’s body was a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul was marching on.

In addition to opposing the rise of fascism around the world, these leftists faced a formidable threat from the radical Right in the US: the conservative coalition comprising elected and administrative officials from both major parties, particularly those in the Jim Crow South; the most reactionary corporations and their political organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Liberty League; right-wing media moguls like William Randolph Hearst and Colonel Robert McCormick; violent antiunion forces at the state level like the Associated Farmers in California and the Citizens’ Alliance in Minnesota; anticommunist government bodies like the Dies Committee and eventually the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), plus little HUACs at the state level like the Tenney Committee in California; and white supremacist paramilitaries including the Second Ku Klux Klan, the Black Legion, the Silver Shirts, the German American Bund, and the Christian Front.

Once the US entered World War II on the side of the Allied Powers in 1941, leftists contributed their energies and lives to the international front against fascism either as soldiers in the armed forces or as civilians fueling the war effort.

During and after the victory of this struggle against fascism abroad, key organizations and individuals animating what some scholars call “the Black Popular Front” ramped up their struggle against the variant of fascism ruling at home: Jim Crow apartheid. Indeed, from Ella Baker to A. Philip Randolph, most of the older generation of leaders in the fight against the South’s white supremacist patriarchal oligarchy in the 1950s and 1960s emerged from this earlier period in the 1930s and 1940s, pioneers of “the long civil rights movement.”

These movement elders joined with movement youth to build an intergenerational, interracial, cross-class movement intent on destroying the very social order which had destroyed the First Reconstruction and, in doing so, achieve the Second Reconstruction. Like the visionaries of the First Reconstruction, those of the Second saw their movement as the foundation for “a radical redistribution of political and economic power,” to use Dr. King’s phrase.

This black freedom struggle served as the bridge between the Old Left of the 1930s and 1940s, devastated by the Second Red Scare, and the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s–our most recent progenitor.

10 Theses on Sets #1 and #2

Many of the following descriptions apply not to everyone on the US Left in these two earlier eras, but rather to its most clear-eyed and farsighted members:

1. They recognized the existential threat posed by the radical Right in their respective era and its antidemocratic vision.

2. To defeat this radical Right, they operated within a united front bringing together a broad alliance of forces.

3. Within this united front, they formed a core fighting to shape and lead it by advancing a vision of transforming and expanding democracy in the US.

4. To enact this vision of transforming and expanding democracy, they fought for a political program made up of concrete structural reforms aimed toward the dismantlement of intertwining oppressions (i.e., of race, class, gender, and more).

5. They fought for this concrete political program by deploying people power, deliberately forged on the basis of interracial unity.

6. They exerted this people power by building and aligning organizations.

7. Through these organizations, they waged fights to transform and expand democracy across every terrain of the existing capitalist state and society.

8. They saw their project of transforming and expanding democracy as a revolutionary project pitted against the radical Right’s counterrevolutionary project of destroying democracy.

9. They saw the struggle between these two projects in the US as part of a global struggle.

10. They believed that the outcome of this struggle would enable or prevent the prospect of an emancipatory (for some, in particular during the era of the second set, a specifically socialist) future.

Set #3: 21^st Century

Following the united front against slavery (a form of proto-fascism) in the mid-19^th century and the united front against fascism in the mid-20^th century, today we can imagine the united front against fascism in the 21^st century as a set of concentric circles.

By now, it is beyond dispute that the main enemy of progress is the radical Right which has captured the Republican Party, and through it, control over all three branches of the federal government plus state trifecta control in almost half the country.

This radical Right seeks to roll back every advance which previous incarnations of the US Left and their broader united fronts achieved. In fact, this particular radical Right developed in reaction to those struggles, building power throughout the mid- and late-20^th century. The right-wing infrastructure buttressing MAGA preceded the rise of Donald Trump and it will outlast him. Its proponents invoke this historical lineage: honoring Confederate traitors, performing the Nazi salute in public, pursuing imperialist fever dreams of Manifest Destiny and sowing death and destruction across the Global South, all while actively erasing or peddling lies about the legacy of past democratic struggles.

Against this common enemy stands a united front consisting of millions of people and numerous organizations nationwide.

Here’s a sketch of today’s visualization:

Of course, this diagram illustrates an objective set of forces. There’s no formal coalition uniting all the organizations and individuals which make up this set, although they have come together in recent attempts to defend democracy by defeating MAGA’s candidates at the ballot box–sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Many who participate in this united front don’t think about their participation using that term. But a rapidly increasing number, especially those within the Left, do.

Up to this point, the most backward forces located in the outermost ring have represented the leadership of this united front. Namely, top centrist Democratic elected officials–opposed to the radical Right, but lacking any vision of not only defending democracy, but transforming and expanding it–have appeared as the hapless faces leading the charge. Indeed, through their ineptitude, their complicity with various ruinous domestic and foreign policies, and their fear of the Left, they have smoothed the path for the ascendancy of the radical Right and patently fail to offer a viable path to defeating this mortal danger in the long run.

But there is another actor that’s demonstrated the potential to win leadership over this loose alliance against fascism and steer it toward victory: today’s incarnation of the US Left.

This Left is made up of a finite number of various organizations operating at the national and especially the state and local levels. Most important are certain cases of mass organizations, including labor unions in our workplaces; tenant unions in our apartment blocks; independent political organizations inside and outside the electoral, legislative, administrative, and judicial arenas of the state; community and faith organizations fighting for vital causes in our neighborhoods, including from immigration defense to gender liberation to a green transition to peace, self-determination, and justice abroad. It’s also made up of an increasing number of Democratic elected officials at all levels of government who are self-described progressives and socialists, working in alliance with,and often emerging from, this organizational base. What all share in common, tacitly or explicitly, is the recognition of the paramount need to build the united front to defeat the Right and a drive to build the power of the Left within it.

Still, today’s Left doesn’t yet act on the stage of US politics with the coherence that the visual representation of the innermost circle above suggests.

To be sure, over the last fifteen years or so, this Left has taken giant steps in its development, growing stronger and more united. Amid a succession of movement flashpoints, from Occupy Wall Street to the Black Lives Matter uprisings to Standing Rock to labor strikes to Palestine solidarity (to name only a few), new organizations have emerged or expanded across sectors. Elected officials from the Left now govern in some of the largest cities and vie for state and federal offices. In the depths of the second Trump administration, these forces are pursuing ambitious defensive and offensive campaigns and organizing impressive massive mobilizations.

But paradoxically, although this embryonic Left is stronger and more united than it’s been in decades, it’s still not strong or united enough to exert the power this moment desperately requires. In a word, the organizations and individuals which make up this Left aren’t yet self-conscious enough. There’s no plausible reason to expect millions of people to recognize, support, and join the Left when we don’t fully recognize ourselves as a multifarious yet coherent bloc with the potential to operate as one.

The mirror test is one widely known method that some cognitive scientists use to measure the self-awareness of human and nonhuman animals, evaluating whether they can see themselves in their own reflections. If today’s Left were to pass the mirror test, more of our organizations and individuals would consciously share the common view that we’re fighting to build our power within a united front to defeat MAGA and transform society.

We would share our own common political program committed to expanding democracy (some call it “the Third Reconstruction”), consisting of concrete transformational reforms, distinguishable from the policies of centrist Democratic elected officials, and diametrically opposed to MAGA’s dystopian program. We would unabashedly fight for our vision across every terrain of today’s capitalist state and society.

Our organizations would follow long-term strategic plans and carry out cross-organizational short-term campaigns rooted in mass action at the national, state, and local levels. Our leaders–from those in the rank and file to those in top offices–would fight alongside each other in every given place.

Indicators such as these are already visible in fits and starts in different parts of the country. Raising them to scale would mark the shift from a Left-in-itself to a Left-for-itself.

Playing a crucial role in this shift is the core within the core: that is, 21st-century socialists who populate the organizations of the Left. I’m not referring to all self-described socialists or all members of all socialist organizations, since that would encompass people with clashing and even contradictory views. I’m referring to that discrete slice of socialists–some members of this socialist organization, some of that one, some of none–who glimpse this larger picture, believe in this strategic orientation, and contribute to mass struggles.

These socialists see the “present-as-history,” an instant in the centuries-long quest to build a truly free society conducive to human flourishing. We study every emancipatory movement from the past and mine it for lessons–just as we relinquish every illusion about the external challenges those movements faced and the internal failures they committed.

We’re fighting for a socialist future here in the United States and around the world. Though we can’t expect to experience that future in our lifetimes, we know we can pave the road toward that future by fighting through today’s set of concentric circles: cohering our socialist current; building the power of a self-conscious Left; achieving victories for today’s united front; destroying the power of the radical Right across the land; and revolutionizing democracy in our time.

The question is: How will future historians visualize today’s US Left? Will they see us as the core of a united front that saved this democratic experiment and took it to new heights? Or will they see us as the last divided beleaguered vestige of previous incarnations, a remnant which failed to see and act on its historic responsibility? Through the choices we make–or fail to make–in the coming months and years, together we will write the answer.

Puya Gerami teaches at the City University of New York School of Labor and Urban Studies (CUNY SLU) and the affiliated institute, Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice (LDSJ). He serves on the National Executive Committee for Liberation Road. He worked for many years in the labor movement and the broader Left in his home state of Connecticut.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has had a string of spectacular electoral victories. With success comes greater media attention, growing membership, and new challenges. One of the most important questions is how to build broad unity that can achieve transformative policies. And how do we criticize each other and political allies without falling into sectarian left purism where differences overshadow what we hold in common and disrupt working together?

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The specter haunting DSA seems to be the possibility of socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) joining the presidential primary. Positions within DSA range from enthusiastic support, to begrudging inevitability, to outright opposition. But the debate over AOC is just the tip of the iceberg. As DSA grows and fields more and more candidates, whom to support will turn into a constant question.

In this article, I want to draw on personal organizing experience that helped develop my ideas on coalition building. This is from my years as a labor activist, first as a steelworker, then as a teacher.

Politics in the Steelworkers Union

I worked at the US Steel South Works mill in Chicago in the late 1970s and early 1980s until deindustrialization hit with full force. At the time I belonged to the October League, a Maoist formation with cadre concentrations in five major mills in the Chicago and Indiana region, and other mills throughout the country.

Ed Sadlowski, a militant leader and head of United Steelworkers Midwest District 31, was running an insurgent campaign for union president. The national union leadership were typical conservative and corrupt bureaucrats. Sadlowski had created a lot of energy and excitement, although he eventually lost the election. But the October League had refused to support him because he wasn’t a “true revolutionary leader.” We defined him as a social democrat, and social democrats had to be exposed and removed so communist leadership could emerge. This type of sectarian and ultra-left purism led to our isolation within the entire militant wing of the union. At the time I was working in a tobacco factory in Louisville, but a year later when I got a job at South Works I saw our organizing efforts were in shambles. Cadre had even stopped going to union meetings, which they called a “circus of opportunists.”

There were about eight different communist organizations at South Works, but only one militant left caucus, which was led by Alice Puerala. Alice was widely respected throughout the mill where she had been working for about 25 years, first as a Socialist Workers Party cadre, and now as an independent leftist. For sectarian reasons none of the eight communist groups were part of her caucus. I joined with her shortly after going to work. We won the next election and she became union president–the only woman president of a basic mill with more than 7,000 workers. I became editor of the union paper, got a fellow cadre to join, and Alice served two terms as president. None of the other groups joined in.

I had some differences with Alice, most practically with her rocky relationship with a new militant Black caucus, with whom we had forged an alliance. And of course we had our feet in different historic left camps, Trotsky and Mao. But we built a solid and warm working relationship based in the fight for better working conditions, a broader anti-corporate militancy, and the need for multi-racial solidarity. These same conditions were present in the Sadlowski campaign, if not for our purism and making red lines over issues that prevented unity. Each of the other communist groups had their own red lines that kept them at arm’s length from Alice, resulting in little to no influence in the union for most of those organizations.

When I look at DSA today with its many caucuses, some with their own red lines when it comes to AOC, I think back to the mill and the difference between being isolated and being effective mass organizers. The key to this was understanding how the majority of steelworkers viewed Alice as a militant leader as opposed to our own narrow view based on categories and issues dear to the Left. Today I see the same disconnect between how millions see AOC and the complaints held dear by some in the DSA. As for the October League, the persistence of ultra-leftism in other areas of organizing eventually led to its demise.

The Faculty Association at DeVry University

After a stint in the Harold Washington administration, I along with others were quickly purged when Daley became mayor. I went on to be a teacher at DeVry University. There had been a faculty association at DeVry that had fallen into hibernation but was being revived, and I decided to run for chair. There were only 50 faculty members and I lost the election by four votes. But the count found our ballot box had been stuffed with more ballots than there were faculty. So, we held the election again and it ended in a 25-to-25 tie.

The humanities department teachers were solidly progressive/Left, while majorities in the other departments were conservative, male, and white. Instead of fighting for Left dominance and splitting the faculty, I went to my opponent (Lowell) and suggested we act as co-chairs. Lowell was an older white engineer living in a small town 40 miles west of Chicago, at the top of the seniority list, and probably a Republican. But we both wanted the faculty to have a stronger organized voice, and we had different goals that didn’t conflict. Lowell wanted by-laws and a more structured faculty association; I was interested in putting out a newsletter focused on working conditions and school issues. We agreed to work together, thereby uniting the faculty.

Unity resulted in a number of important victories. We reduced class sizes, reduced the number of classes faculty had to teach each semester, won sabbaticals, got the administration to expand the library by letting teachers order thousands of new books, and equalized wages between departments, which meant a raise for humanities teachers by thousands of dollars. When the administration met with the faculty, we were able to present a united front and coordinate demands between departments. DeVry Chicago quickly gained a reputation as the most militant campus in the DeVry network, and one that national administrators dreaded to visit.

I was openly known as a leftist and to many a Marxist. An administrator told me they knew I was a communist. But they never succeeded in isolating me or other Left faculty members because we stayed grounded in the concrete demands of teachers and the concerns of students. Left leadership successfully set a tone of confrontation and militancy based on achievable demands that benefited all teachers.

We could have taken the path of defining conservative teachers as our opponents, creating red lines and purity tests, and emphasizing differences. Instead, we built a solid coalition and won significant changes, respect for the Left, and room to bring innovative programs to the school. These included faculty workshops on Freire pedagogy, bringing in Left academics for guest lectures, and engaging anti-war Iraq veterans to speak to students. Among the guest speakers were an expert on LBGTQ history who taught at the University of Chicago, a Black scholar from Lawrence University who had been an important figure in Amiri Baraka’s revolutionary organization in New Jersey, and Bill Ayers, the former SDS and Weatherman leader who now was a respected academic reformer at the University of Illinois.

Coalitions Will Help Us Win

The challenge for the Left is to unite broadly and aim our main blow at the principal enemy. The Left has a sad history of sectarianism towards each other and towards our progressive and liberal allies. We are coming to a period in which the DSA may have the possibility to grow into a mass party of the working class. To do so I believe we must broaden our politics, build our coalitions, avoid abstract slogans, and welcome all friends and allies in the struggle to transform our country.

This is the best manner to popularize our political vision, win people to a socialist platform, and expand our membership. Coalitions don’t undercut our message, they magnify it. We thrive in the soil of mass mobilization and movement building when we stay rooted to the urgent demands of the working class and consciously build our organization.

A version of this article appeared in the Midwest Socialist, September 2, 2026.

Jerry Harris is the national secretary of the Global Studies Association of North America, and on the international board of the Network for Critical Studies of Global Capitalism. His articles have often appeared in Race & Class (London), Science & Society (New York) and International Critical Thought (Beijing). His last book was Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy. His work has been translated to Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Czech, and Slovak.

Time: Thursday, September 17 at 8:00 PM - 9:30 PM EDT

Location: Virtual Event

Moderated by Susan Kang, the panel will feature Chris Maisano, Bill Fletcher, Jr., Barbara Smith, and New York Assemblymember Diana Moreno alongside Alex Caputo-Pearl, Jeremy Cohan, Kristian Hernandez, Jose Alejandro La Luz, and Jana Silverman.

Susan Kang, an associate professor of political science at John Jay College, City University of New York, is the author of Human Rights and Labor Solidarity: Trade Unions in the Global Economy.

Chris Maisano’s influential article on democratic socialism, “A Precious Legacy,” appeared in Socialist Forum in Fall 2023. He is editor of New Labor Forum.

Barbara Smith, the pioneering socialist feminist activist and thinker, is author of The Truth that Never Hurts and coauthor of the Combahee River Collective Statement.

Bill Fletcher, Jr., is author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice, among other works. He was president of TransAfrica Forum and is cofounder of standing4democracy.org.

Diana Moreno represents the 36th district (Queens) in the New York State Assembly.

Alex Caputo-Pearl is the former president of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), currently on UTLA’s bargaining team and the California Federation of Teachers’ Civil, Human, and Women’s Rights committee.

Jeremy Cohan, a sociologist, is a member of DSA’s National Political Committee and former cochair of NYC-DSA.

Jose Alejandro La Luz was the architect of the grassroots campaign that won bargaining rights for public employees in Puerto Rico. One of the founders of DSA, he has served on the National Political Committee.

Kristian Hernandez, an immigrant rights organizer, served as national chair of DSA in 2021–23. She is cochair of Socialist Majority.

Jana Silverman, professor of International Relations at UFABC in Sao Bernardo do Campo, Brazil, is co-chair of the DSA International Committee and a foreign policy analyst with the Fundacao Perseu Abramo (the political foundation of the Partido dos Trabalhadores).

In 2002 I went to Colombia with Witness for Peace, to learn and return to build solidarity with the Colombian labor movement, whose members were being assassinated in large numbers by right-wing paramilitaries. Our group met first in Miami for a day of “discernment” to determine if you were serious about the trip and if Witness was confident you would be disciplined during the travel. They asked us to write a letter to our families that they would deliver only if we didn’t come back. Over the top, but this was Witness’s first trip to this civil war torn country. Two people were sent home. When we explained what brought us to this moment, two-thirds of the group cited a key influence: a teacher.

In Colombia we learned teachers suffered more deaths than any other union, by far. Each night, after meeting with the Colombian military or the US embassy or the families of murdered activists from unions and women’s and Afro-Colombian groups, we came together for de-briefing and emotional support. Most people offered from their religious tradition. I only had with me a battered, sweat-stained pamphlet of offerings called Ambidextrous (In Two Languages) from my favorite poet, who I regard as the poet laureate of the Chicano people, Joe Navarro. Joe’s poetry sustained me, as I pored over the book again and again, during a brutally emotional trip. I thought of this poem from Ambidextrous as school starts again and educators return to their students and their union activity.

Thanks, Joe. Get your revenge.

—Jeff Crosby

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I Got My Revenge

by Joe Navarro

I found a way
To get back
At those suckers,
Those peddlers
Of brown ignorance,
Those profiteers
Of class exploitation

I showed them;
Those who would
Sacrifice poor people
And dark people
To the cycles
Of poverty

I beat them
With my pride
I struck against
Mighty institutions
With the brute force
Of intelligence

They kicked me out
And tried to
Kick me down
Hoping to leave me
In the darkness
Of social madness,
But I found light
Anyway

I got my revenge
Me, this pushed out,
Locked out
Target of cultural genocide;
I got my revenge
...By becoming
A teacher

Joe Navarro is a Literary Vato Loco, creative writer, teacher, parent, grandparent and has been an activist for human rights, political rights, and social justice. His writing is inspired by people’s struggles for human dignity, familia, democracy, peace, and preserving our Mother Earth. He has authored seven chapbooks of poetry and has been included in eight literary anthologies and journals, including three educational publications. Joe can be reached at poetajoe@yahoo.com.

The following is based on an interview with Alejandro, who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in October 2025 and held at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, LA, for about five and a half months before being deported to Mexico in April 2026.

The 1,320-bed Jena facility, located in a remote area about 4 hours from New Orleans, is run by the Geo Group, a private prison operator. It’s the facility where former Columbia University student and permanent U.S. resident Mahmoud Khalil was incarcerated for 17 months for his involvement in the pro-Palestinian protest movement.

Alejandro spoke with The New Liberator from Mexico shortly after his deportation in April. The conversation portrays not just the conditions inside one detention center, but Alejandro as a human being of extraordinary courage, grace, and compassion. The stories of hundreds of thousands of other human beings remain untold, of people ripped from their families, often without due process, held in conditions far more horrific than those Alejandro experienced, and without the network of support that helped sustain him. Alejandro told us repeatedly he considers himself “lucky,” knowing that so many others are suffering the “worst.” We are lucky that he has shared his story here to help advance the struggle for freedom and justice.

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What Led Up to the Detention

Alejandro came to the United States on a tourist visa in 2003, at age 10; Tennessee was home for 23 years. He started working in immigrant rights at age 18. He ran his own handyman business, which gave him a lot of freedom for work that mattered to him: organizing with the ICE Out of East Tennessee network. For instance, he watched for ICE activity and posted warnings about whether it was safe to drive down the street. “New people I meet ask me what I did for fun in Tennessee. That’s what me and my friends did,” he says.

Alejandro was on probation for a Schedule II substance conviction (Schedule II involves drugs with a high potential for abuse but recognized medical uses). He had arranged his probation so that after paying his court costs, he didn’t need to show up for supervised appointments. “So I thought it was very weird when my probation officer called me in for a check-in. I did text a few people to say where I was going and that I might get picked up. I probably should have texted more people,” he says.

On October 15, he went to the check-in. It turned out that ICE officers had reached out to Smith County and asked them to call him in for a check-in so they could “scoop him.” That’s what ICE did.

From Smith County, he was booked in Nashville, transported to Putnam, then moved to an airport facility in Nashville. He and others were flown to Alexandria, Louisiana, which is a transit point, not a real detention facility. People there wore their street clothes; Alexandria wasn’t set up for stays longer than two days. “It’s literally a place where ‘all right, you’re going to be here until we figure out where to put you or if you’re about to get deported.” From there, he was sent to Jena.

Alejandro had been on ICE’s radar since at least 2011, when he was detained briefly before his case was administratively closed under the Obama administration. “Which is why I was detained for so long, according to them, because it took that long to reopen my case and get me a court case.” Once he got put in front of a judge, he says, “it didn’t take but about a week and a half, two weeks to get me deported.”

Background on Jena

The Jena Detention Center is in the Fifth Circuit (covering Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi), the federal jurisdiction with the harshest laws in the US around detainees getting out. Alejandro met people sent to Jena from all over the country (North Carolina, New Orleans, Minnesota, Seattle).

“It seemed to me like the administration had just picked Jena as their favorite spot to send people to, even if that wasn’t geographically where they would usually go.” Sending people there as quickly as possible, regardless of where they’re from, so they can’t get out, is part of ICE’s engine for getting people deported no matter what, he says.

Who Was There and Why

Inside, Alejandro met people from Bosnia, Ukraine, Iran, Nepal, Palestine, Jordan, Laos, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, and Mexico. His best friend was P., from Nepal, who had been in Jena for over a year by the time Alejandro arrived. At the time of this interview, P. had been transferred to a detention center in Texas and, as far as Alejandro knew, was still detained.

His other close friend was A., from Iran, who owned gas stations and had a green card. ICE showed up at his house and took him anyway. A. had a team of lawyers and money to pay them. But A. was stuck in limbo, because the US wasn’t deporting people to Iran given the political situation. The same was true for a man from Palestine, who was super frustrated for the same reason: he had no country to be deported to and no clear path out of detention.

“Some people,” Alejandro says, “were in some type of metaphor, supposed to be deported, but can’t go to the country they’re supposed to go to—stuck in space.”

Alejandro was classified as mid-to-high risk, because he had a prior arrest, so he was placed in the “yellow/red building.” That area mainly houses people who had served significant time, in some cases 10 years, in federal prison before being transferred into immigration detention. They were just waiting out their immigration cases before being deported. Those men were often the most patient people inside. They’d already done real time, so they knew how to wait. The people who’d been picked up off the street with no prior incarceration were more fidgety, more desperate to do something, Alejandro says. “But all you could do is sit there and wait.”

Alejandro noticed that there wasn’t much of the judgment you might expect between those two groups, the people with criminal histories and the people who had just been living their lives when ICE picked them up. “It was a cool mix of people…I never encountered people from the street who were all judgy about people that weren’t from the street,” he says.

Life Inside Jena

Alejandro described the “pods” where people are housed, each one being a big room with about 50 bunk beds in seven rows. There was a guard station immediately inside the entrance, though there wasn’t always a guard there. Sometimes a guard just hung outside of the pod in a chair looking in. Guards would also hang out in a little room in the middle of four pods. There were eight phones along one wall and bolted-down tables and stools. At the far end were bathrooms.

Self-Governance

Jena had guards, some assholes, some nice, Alejandro says, but daily life was mostly organized by the people inside. There was a strong culture of self-maintenance and self-regulation, beside whatever the guards were doing. “We made that work,” he says, “because nobody wants to be there. Nobody was in there as a punishment for a crime; they were just stuck in there waiting for court dates, or on their way to be deported. It could be a really bad time, or you could try to make the best of it.”

When Alejandro arrived, the governance structure in his pod was run by a gang that exists only inside detention. Because nearly everyone in the pod was on their way out, gang rivalries from the outside were largely suspended. But the gang required that anyone running the pod be a member of the gang. Leadership changed every few weeks, and the culture and rules shifted with whoever was in charge.

Toward the end of Alejandro’s time there, though, some of the longer-term residents—Alejandro, P., and others not part of the gang—were allowed to be nominated to run the pod. P., who had been there the longest, became the representative.

Disputes got talked out, to make sure no one was being resentful. If someone was stealing, they were kicked out. If the guards tried to move someone into the pod who the existing residents didn’t like because of the energy they were bringing, they said no, and “the guards respected that.”

What People Did All Day

Alejandro says he spent most of his time in Jena lying in bed reading, especially when he started getting Stephen King books. He could get books fairly easily once people figured out that they had to send him books directly from the seller, not from their personal library. “I was getting so much mail that the mail lady was my friend. She would say, ‘My supervisor told me I don’t have to give you this but I’m gonna let you have it because you’re cool.”

“We were supposed to be able to go outside twice a day, but that was hardly true,” Alejandro says. At times when they couldn’t go outside, a couple of fights broke out. People had way too much energy and were quick to snap at each other. The men did find ways to work out in the pod. “We just had to makeshift our own stuff,” he says, which the guards took away when they saw it. “But we would just make new stuff, because we had nothing but time,” he says.

P. was always trying to calm things down, Alejandro says, even when he wasn’t the pod representative. To discourage fighting, P. would tell people a story about an inmate who got into a physical fight with a guard and they proceeded to pepper spray the whole room. Because the guards are “a bunch of fucking idiots,” Alejandro explained, they trapped themselves in the room—the guards have to call into the radio to get the doors opened—so they were stuck in there choking on pepper spray. But then P. reminded people that if the guards use pepper spray because of a fight, all their possessions will smell like pepper forever, so that’s the last thing they want.

Food, Sanitation, Healthcare

The food, Alejandro says, “was pretty terrible, one level under school cafeteria food.” Because he has diabetes, he couldn’t eat most of the rice, but ate the beans and the protein. Once a week, they got chicken. That was the highlight of everyone’s week.

On chicken day, Alejandro collected the bones. He had access to a microwave, so he would heat the bones in water, let it steep overnight, and the next morning have something resembling broth. “It was great,” he says.

“The sanitation was 90% up to us,” Alejandro says. He heard that other pods didn’t clean every day, but his did. They cleaned every day unless they couldn’t get supplies, or if another pod had stolen their broom handles. The pod got dirty fast. “I’d always see the dust bunnies flying around,” he says. “I just cleaned. How is this happening?”

Seven rows of bunk beds meant a rotating schedule: one row was responsible for cleaning the whole room each day. If you didn’t want to clean, you could pay someone else to do it. “There was always someone willing to do that, because people always want to get extra food you know?” he says.

Healthcare was available, but access to it required persistence. You had to put your name on a list, wait, and then follow up if nothing happened. Advocate for yourself or get skipped. Once you actually got in front of a doctor, they were happy to help you, Alejandro says.

He managed his diabetes better than he expected. Working out and not having easy access to the things like candy kept his A1C in the pre-diabetic range. He also got his eyes checked for glaucoma, something he’s supposed to do every year but hadn’t done in 10 years. He was supposed to get a tooth removed but refused, because he knew they wouldn’t let him keep the tooth. He wants to make a wedding ring out of it.

What Sustained People and Gave Them Hope?

People leaned heavily on religion, Alejandro says. He includes himself in that, but not the type of religion he’d spent his outside life moving away from. He moved forward with his own beliefs, but just internally.

Of course, he got a lot of hope from receiving and writing letters. Phone calls, books, cards, and working out helped too. He was on the phone constantly, and he was writing. There was a PlayStation in the pod, but Alejandro didn’t want to occupy himself with that. He preferred to stay up until five in the morning playing cards with P. and whoever else was awake. “It’s not a life, but you could keep yourself entertained if you wanted to.”

Alejandro says that because of his personality, people would confide in him. “I found a lot of comfort in just recognizing my privilege,” he says. A man from El Salvador, immediately on meeting Alejandro shared that he was $50,000 in debt to the coyote who had crossed him over to the United States. He had just found a job good enough to start paying it back, but then he got picked up. He was facing deportation and a debt he couldn’t pay, and yet what he kept coming back to was that he’d get to go home to El Salvador and see his wife and daughters.

“Wow, if this guy is looking forward to his life back at home, even in debt and all this other stuff,” Alejandro says, “what right do I have to be sad about what I’m doing or where I’m going?” He is happy that he has three times as many family members in his life now, in Mexico, compared to when he was living in the States.

What Can People on the Outside Do to Help?

Alejandro has an immediate answer for this. The most important thing, he says, would be to create a phone number that people inside detention can call—a line staffed by people who speak Spanish, who can receive a name and an A-number (Alien Registration Number) and then connect that person to resources, legal support, or just someone who knows what to do next. He knows of an organization that tried something like this but couldn’t find enough Spanish-speaking volunteers to staff the line.

This matters more than anything else because many people inside have only one or two numbers memorized, and may have forgotten the phone numbers of loved ones. Or they may have family members on the outside who are themselves overwhelmed and don’t know what steps to take. Without a number to call to say I’m here, this is my name, please help me connect to someone, all the other forms of support (letters, books, money on the books, legal fundraising) become unreachable.

“All that letter stuff, book stuff, fundraising stuff comes after that initial connection to the outside world,” he says.

Beyond that, letters are definitely meaningful. Also, money on the books, even a small amount, is meaningful. He mentions that ICE now maintains a website where people can look up detainees; putting money on someone’s books, even $5, through that system is something almost anyone can do.

Alejandro also encountered people who had been cheated by lawyers who took their money and never worked their cases. Access to a verified list of accredited legal representatives who could be trusted was something he wished had existed inside.

What He Wants People to Know

“I got lucky,” Alejandro says. He was detained, and it sucked, but he was not in a detention center with 42 people sleeping on a floor with no beds, he wasn’t given moldy food or sexually assaulted. He knows those places exist. “The nightmare can always be worse,” he says. “And for some people it is the worst.”

So if you have the chance, he says, reach out or somehow support somebody with a letter, or put $5 on their books. “We can’t all do everything,” Alejandro says, “but we can all do something.”

He describes the chaos of landing in Mexico, where he hadn’t lived for 23 years. He got off the plane in Mexico and received a single sheet of paper saying he had been deported. He was told to return to the state in Mexico where he was born and use the paper to get an ID. The people in that state had never seen the paper. The phone numbers on it rang and rang. “Bureaucracy times a thousand,” he says. The government officials he encountered were doing their jobs and nothing more. There was “zero non-profit help.”

He made it through because one of the friends he had made inside, who was deported at the same time, called an uncle to pick them up. “So I didn’t have to get stuck in the government line for half a day for a free bus pass,” he says. “Not everyone has that.”

Now in Mexico City, Alejandro is building a new life and reconnecting with family members he hadn’t seen in years. He hopes to also reconnect with friends he made inside.

Soon after he was detained, Alejandro asked two things of the people working to support him: to take care of his mother, and to raise awareness through a public campaign. After being deported, he shared the following message with them:

“I want to thank EVERYONE who has had me in their thoughts for the last 25 weeks. It is only through the strength and love of all of you that I am alive and well and actually really excited about this next stage in my life, getting to know a world that had always been out of reach for me. There is so much I have to be worried about, but at least I won’t be looking around every corner for the polimigra as they run rampant through our communities. There is so much uncertainty, but I know I’ll have the opportunity to access higher education, a dream that as an undocumented immigrant living in TN had also seemed so out of reach in the past. These dreams are all within my grasp now due to the fact you all have held me and continue to hold me in the crescendo that I consider my beloved community. I look forward to being able to share a picture of my grateful smile in hopes to brighten your spirits in the way you all have nurtured mine.”

Abdul El-Sayed’s recent Michigan Senate race and Francesca Hong’s Wisconsin gubernatorial campaign were both important tests for the socialist left: could our growing success in deep-blue districts translate to statewide races in purple territory? The two campaigns followed similar trajectories. Both candidates emerged as early frontrunners, at points opening up commanding leads over their centrist rivals. Yet both races tightened dramatically in their final weeks, as establishment forces consolidated behind their opponents. Ultimately, El-Sayed held on to a narrow win, while Hong fell just short of victory.

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What lessons should socialists draw from these experiences? Much of the analysis so far has focused on the candidates’ ideological and cultural positioning, the demographics of their electoral coalitions, and their individual strengths and weaknesses. Here, we want to look behind the curtain at the machinery of the candidates’ campaign plans and models: which voter-contact methods they relied on, decisions about the timing and distribution of campaign spending, and how those choices shaped their ability to reach and persuade voters. The socialist left has developed a distinctive campaign model that has proven increasingly successful in deep-blue districts. Hong and El-Sayed give us an opportunity to ask how well it works at statewide scale.

We argue that the two races reveal both the strengths and limits of the left’s approach to elections. Broadly, socialist campaigns build support early and deep, relying on field and organic media to generate enthusiasm. In contrast, establishment forces often strike late and broad, spending millions to reach a wider electorate just as it begins paying attention. Winning statewide will require building an air game capable of weathering those attacks, while adapting our formidable ground game to larger, more geographically and politically diverse terrain.

The Municipal Socialist Model

Over the past decade, the left has developed a genuinely effective electoral model combining ideological polarization, organic social media momentum, and a formidable grassroots operation. At the heart of what some call the “DSA difference” is a large and increasingly skilled army of socialist activists ready to put thousands of volunteer hours into knocking tens of thousands of doors. Because those volunteers are genuinely excited about the candidate—not just afraid of the other guy—their conversations with voters are compelling, bringing still more supporters and volunteers into the campaign.

The same dynamic plays out on social media, where close to 60% of all voters, and close to 90% of young voters get their information. A few supporters share their excitement about a candidate; others repost it, make their own videos, or show up at a canvass and post a selfie. Larger content creators begin joining in, and momentum builds. Where conventional campaigns often focus on expensive air wars—raising large sums of money to reach voters through television, mail, and digital advertising—the socialist model has bet heavily on this combination of volunteer field and organic social media. In dense, deep-blue districts, that bet has paid off, powering socialist victories from city councils to state legislatures.

Two statewide stress tests

Hong and El-Sayed showed the strengths of the socialist model. Both built commanding early leads, fueled by enthusiastic volunteers, strong field operations, and enormous organic attention. But as the races entered their final weeks, both encountered challenges that suggest the limits of relying primarily on door-knocking and organic media to reach a statewide electorate in the face of concerted establishment attacks.

In both races, establishment forces responded to the threat of a left-wing victory by flooding the closing weeks with paid media. In Michigan, the Stevens campaign and six supporting super PACs spent more than $60 million on advertising—an extraordinary sum even for a costly Senate race. In Wisconsin’s lower-cost gubernatorial primary, Crowley and outside supporters still spent more than $4 million—dwarfing the state’s last competitive Democratic gubernatorial primary in 2018, when candidate spending was in the low hundreds of thousands.

That money bought something field and organic social media could not: the ability to reach huge swaths of the statewide electorate at once. Michigan’s airwaves were blanketed with opposition advertising, while in Wisconsin attacks on Hong’s past statements helped turn the closing weeks into a referendum on whether she was too radical to govern the state. In a matter of weeks, both candidates’ commanding leads collapsed.

The timing here was key. Early in a primary, the people paying closest attention are disproportionately the highly engaged voters who also volunteer, donate, and drive organic momentum online. Many less-engaged voters tune in much later; As late as July, 18% of Michigan voters and fully 45% of Wisconsin voters remained undecided. Those voters were making up their minds in the final weeks or even days before the primary—exactly when establishment forces were flooding the airwaves with paid attacks.

What allowed El-Sayed to weather these attacks better than Hong? One factor was his ability to fight back on the air. El-Sayed had raised more than $12 million by the end of June and spent more than $3 million on advertising. While still outspent, this allowed him to invest in a paid air game enough to help staunch the bleeding. Even so, some of his strongest performances came in places like the Upper Peninsula and the southwest border counties, regions largely outside the main Michigan media markets where Stevens and her allies concentrated their TV ad buys. In other words, the places least saturated by attack ads were also among the places where his early support held up best.

In contrast, Hong entered the closing stretch with far less money and a campaign much more reliant on field and organic media. Most strikingly, Hong spent nothing on traditional TV ad buys and just $150,000 on digital. When attacks against her began reaching voters statewide, she had no comparable way to answer them at the same scale. Just as less-engaged voters were tuning in, her campaign largely ceded the paid-media environment in which many were encountering the race for the first time.

The Limits of the Municipal Socialist Model

The experiences of Hong and El-Sayed point to two related challenges in scaling the municipal socialist model: one spatial, the other temporal. Spatially, deep, face-to-face conversations can be enormously persuasive, but are difficult to scale; paid media offers far less depth, but vastly greater reach. Temporally, insurgent campaigns need to build enthusiasm early, while establishment forces can concentrate their resources late—just as the broader electorate begins tuning in.

Ground vs. Air: How Scale Changes the Math

Size-wise, while a strong ground game can beat out air wars in local and state legislative races, congressional races begin to change the math, and statewide races change it even more.

Door-knocking is ultimately a game of margins. A volunteer canvasser might knock 75 doors in a shift, find 15 or 20 people home, and identify perhaps 10 supporters. In a compact district, thousands of volunteer shifts can reach a meaningful share of the electorate. Across a state with hundreds of thousands or millions of voters, even a formidable field program will touch only a fraction—particularly when voters are dispersed across cities, suburbs, small towns, and rural areas.

The larger the race, then, the more important the role of the air wars becomes. And while organic social media can play a role here, it too has limitations. Algorithms often segregate the content of people with different media diets. This can give a misleading impression that a candidate is broadly going viral, when really that momentum is limited to a particular echo chamber of the internet.

This is where paid media comes into its own. An ad offers nothing like the depth of a conversation on the doors, but it can reach hundreds of thousands of voters at once—including the large majority who will never answer a canvasser’s knock or see that left influencer’s TikTok post. That breadth is often unnecessary in municipal races, where buying television means paying to reach an entire media market for a relatively small electorate. But as the electorate grows, the scale of the race begins to match the scale of the medium. Whether on broadcast television, or targeted social media ads or ads on streaming, it’s only through paid media that a statewide campaign can ensure it reaches ALL the voters it needs to.

The Establishment’s Late-Break Advantage

Establishment candidates also have a temporal advantage. Insurgent candidates need to define themselves early if they want to recruit volunteers, raise small-dollar donations, and build organic momentum. Establishment candidates face less pressure to inspire that kind of early commitment. They can remain relatively undefined, accumulate money and endorsements, and wait for the race to take shape.If the insurgent looks capable of winning, establishment forces have a strong incentive to consolidate behind the strongest alternative, pooling endorsements and money just as the broader electorate begins tuning in.

Money held in reserve also becomes more powerful late, when the broader electorate is finally paying attention and beginning to make up its mind. Because left candidates have to show their hand early, opponents have had ample time to scrutinize their positions and identify potential lines of attack. And negative advertising is particularly well suited to the task. The establishment doesn’t necessarily need late-deciding voters to love its candidate—just to make them nervous enough about the insurgent to vote for the alternative. This means statewide socialist campaigns need a real air game of our own. We may not match establishment spending dollar for dollar, but we need enough paid media to absorb the blow and counterpunch.

Adapting the Left’s Ground Game

Does this mean the left should abandon our focus on field? Absolutely not. A formidable ground game remains one of our greatest comparative advantages. But just as we need to add an air game at statewide scale, we also need to adapt our field strategy to larger, more geographically and politically diverse terrain.

The socialist field model has been refined primarily in dense urban districts, where existing left networks are stronger and organizers can reach large numbers of voters relatively efficiently. Statewide campaigns have to organize across suburbs, small cities and rural areas where supporters are fewer and farther between. El-Sayed’s performance in the Upper Peninsula offers one example of how to approach that challenge. His strength there wasn’t simply a product of escaping the opposition air war. He repeatedly traveled to smaller cities and rural communities, encouraged local organizing, and built a visible presence well before election day. By late June, El-Sayed signs were ubiquitous in parts of the UP, far outnumbering those for either Stevens or Rogers.

Statewide races also involve talking to voters with much more varied ideological identities than one encounters in Brooklyn’s “commie corridor” or other deep-blue urban districts. This requires learning how to communicate left politics beyond our existing base. El-Sayed did this particularly well, framing equality and dignity for immigrants, trans people, and other marginalized groups as fundamentally American values. When a heckler disrupted one event, he and his supporters responded by chanting “USA.” Hong’s former comments about Thanksgiving, by contrast, gave opponents an easy opening to portray her as outside the cultural mainstream. To build a political majority, the left needs to root our politics in widely shared values while fighting to define those values on our own terms, rather than positioning ourselves outside the cultural mainstream.

Implications for electoral strategy

Winning at statewide scale will require expanding the socialist left’s electoral toolkit. We need to preserve the organizing depth and grassroots enthusiasm that have powered our victories so far. But we also need to learn how to:

• Raise money at a greater scale without becoming dependent on the donor class. Socialist candidates running for Congress and statewide office need to build the capacity to raise millions from a broad grassroots base. But with establishment super PACs able to dump tens of millions into a race, candidate fundraising alone will rarely be enough. We also need to expand our independent-expenditure capacity, building up groups like Justice Democrats, Working Families Party, and others that can pool movement resources and mount serious outside spending when establishment money floods a race.

• Contest paid media rather than treating it as inherently inferior to organizing. The unparalleled reach and power of paid media is undeniable when we are taking on responsibility to win congressional and statewide races. We can continue to advocate for campaign budgets that put more resources into organizing than establishment consultants might suggest, but we can’t avoid making large investments in paid media.

• Preserve the power of volunteer-driven conversations while adapting how we reach voters. Volunteer-driven conversations should remain at the heart of our field model, but statewide campaigns will need to rely less exclusively on traditional canvassing and more on relational organizing—building networks of local volunteers who can organize their friends, coworkers, neighbors, and communities.

• Develop political messages capable of persuading much more ideologically heterogeneous electorates. Statewide campaigns need messages that can move voters who don’t share the left’s existing political language or cultural reference points. We need to root our politics in widely shared values, even as we fight to redefine those values on our own terms.

Bennett Carpenter is a queer Southern organizer, trainer, and movement strategist. They are a member of the National Executive Committee of Liberation Road.

Jeffrey L. has done bothersome and occasionally disruptive labor, community, and political organizing in the South and on the East Coast. He also sometimes writes.

Max D. organizes workers on the West Coast, and regularly tries his hand at elections.

Now past the five-month mark, the US/Israel-Iran war has no end in sight, with some reasonable fear of escalation (Saudi Arabia has joined in, and Red Sea traffic has been targeted). A July Reuters survey found that 79% of people in the US believe the war will last for the foreseeable future. And the war is mostly at a standstill with neither side making a strategic military breakthrough, and diplomatic talks failing repeatedly. What was supposed to be a rapid assertion of US power has instead become a costly war of attrition—and an increasing political liability for Trump and MAGA.

Trump and Netanyahu started this war on the mistaken belief that a decapitation strike, taking out the leadership of Iran, would create favorable conditions for a rapid political takeover. If Hegseth hadn’t forced out a vast swath of the senior military leadership, perhaps he would have advised Trump against such a fool’s errand. Yes, Iran has been an official enemy of the US since 1979, but no other president was dumb enough to test Iran’s ability to block the Strait of Hormuz. And the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the main military/political force in Iran, has enough redundancy and decentralization to withstand leadership changes.

Now the conflict has become a war of depleting armaments and the resolve to withstand the damage being done. The US is rapidly running out of interceptor missiles—enough so that missiles are being pulled from other areas around the globe. Iran is also slowly running out of long-range missiles as well, although drones are cheap and easily replenished.

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This war won’t be ended on the battlefield. Trump does not have the domestic support to launch a ground invasion, and bombardment and missile strikes have never won a war. All of the threats to destroy Iran will just cause more pain and suffering. So far over 2,000 Iranians have been killed, 26,000 have been wounded, and 3.2 million have been internally displaced. This is not enough to move a regime that just last year violently put down the latest surge of unrest and killed thousands of unarmed protesters in its streets.

For Trump and the MAGA forces, the suffering has been political. It is time-honored wisdom in the US: When gas prices go up, incumbents lose elections. But it is not just gas prices; the vast majority of the country do not support this war, and feel the US is being hurt by it. Naked imperialist intervention has clearly become a constitutive element of Trump’s governing agenda, despite his former bogus claims to isolationism. This has angered a section of the MAGA base, presenting opportunities to split and erode support for the Trump regime.

With the mid-terms in less than 100 days, Trump’s choices are narrowing quickly. Perhaps the only way out is to accept Iranian demands—giving up any dream of US control of the Strait, dropping demands to curb Iran’s nuclear activity or dismantle its ICBMs—call it a victory, and pull US forces back from the Gulf. Barring that, the elections may be a disaster for the MAGA leadership.

The broad anti-war front in the US has struggled to gain momentum. There has not been enough time or focus to build broad anti-war movements at the base. Movements take time to build, and we are in a period where many other important fightback initiatives compete for attention.

The antiwar strategy initially focused on pushing for a war powers resolution to reassert Congressional authority. In June, the passage of a war powers resolution by both chambers of Congress marked a historic breakthrough—the first such congressional rebuke of an ongoing war under the War Powers Act—even if the non-binding resolution did not by itself force Trump to end the war. The next fight, which is happening right now and for the next few months, is to block funding for the war. And unprecedentedly, anti-war Democrats, centrist DNC leadership, and anti-war Republicans have been solidly united into a real bloc.

While no one can be sure exactly how the war will end, it has accelerated the decline of US hegemonic power in the region. The Gulf states, seeing that the US has broken the compact to be their protector, are beginning to look to an independent future of common defense and to the possibility of working with multiple great powers—China in particular. Whatever the precise terms of a settlement, Iran and the Gulf states may increasingly take responsibility for negotiating the security and operation of the Strait themselves. The US will have lost a large amount of international standing, and there may be a cascading effect of other allies planning for an independent future to protect their interests.

While Trump and Netanyahu tried to use “regime change” to justify this unjustifiable war, the Iranian regime is more powerful than it was before. Domestically, the Iranian regime has used the war as an excuse to ramp up internal repression, months after the massacres of January, and continues to execute political prisoners. Internationally, it has expanded its geopolitical power now that it has managed to survive the US and Israeli intervention and won newfound control over the Strait of Hormuz.

There are recent reports of Iranian officials and propagandists now putting forward something of a “rebrand” for the regime, and even for instance welcoming unveiled women to join pro-regime rallies. This might signal the increased power of the Revolutionary Guard relative to the clerical establishment. Under their influence, the Islamic Republic might evolve into something less overtly theocratic but no more democratic—a military-dominated authoritarian state that relaxes some religious restrictions while using nationalism and resistance to US and Israeli power to legitimate continued domestic repression.

What should the left in this country be doing? We should work to turn Trump’s failed war into a political defeat for MAGA: keep pressure on Congress, ensure that the anti-war bloc stays united, and work to erode whatever dwindling support the war has at the base. We can ensure that the war becomes a kitchen table issue in the midterms. We also need to tamp down and challenge anti-Muslim/Iranian/Arab bigotry and stand in solidarity with Iranian-Americans facing threat of deportation for anti-war activism.

We can follow Iranian-American voices on the left, including groups like Iranian-Americans for Peace and Democracy. We have to simultaneously oppose the war and demonstrate solidarity with the forces inside Iran seeking to challenge the regime and win a genuine democratic republic. Finally, if the war ramps up, we should be prepared to pursue mass mobilization focused on ending the war, to an extent not yet accomplished during this conflict.

The world’s sports attention for the last month has been focused on the World Cup which is held once every four years. The dozens of matches, pitting national teams against each other, bring out the best in hospitality, cross-class national solidarity, and mass excitement, joy, and fun. It also brings out the worst in big country power politics, rabid nationalism and racism, corruption involving hundreds of millions in bribes, special payouts, and finally, of course, labor exploitation of the human condition. The stakes are high. As Dave Zirin recently wrote in The Nation magazine, “nothing unites the world’s eyeballs like the World Cup. This makes it political. Every nation, and every world leader, knows that victory will feel not only like a soccer triumph, but a national triumph. Winning the World Cup gooses the political commodity in the shortest supply, hope.’’

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World Cup Background

The Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) is the governing body that has organized the tournament every four years since 1930. The World Cup is globally regarded as the most prestigious association football competition, as well as the most widely viewed and followed sporting and cultural event in the world. The viewership of the 2022 World Cup was estimated to be 5 billion, with about 1.5 billion people watching the Final. Estimates for 2026 are significantly higher.

FIFA: Corrupt, Secret, a Tool of Power Politics

According to Fifacolonialsm.com, FIFA operates like a mafia outfit, characterized by intimidation, loyalty demands, the suppression of dissent, and political treachery. Back in1938, the tournament in France took place following Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria. FIFA allowed the Nazi regime to absorb the world class Austrian team into the German team and in doing so, promoted a “Greater Germany.”

The more recent tenures of past presidents Sepp Blattner and Gianni Infantino have been marked by allegations of rigging elections, silencing critics, and outright corruption. FIFA was an institution with over $2 billion in revenue and $2.9 billion in assets at the time. In May 2015 14 FIFA officials were arrested and indicted after an investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Justice Department. They were charged with wire fraud, racketeering, and money laundering—accused over a period of 24 years with receiving approximately $150 million in bribes. The arrests in Zurich, conducted on the eve of FIFA’s annual congress, caused shock to the sporting community. FIFA subsequently awarded the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, a nation with no tradition of soccer and few labor and human rights standards. Multiple investigations by authorities in the U.S., France, and Switzerland have revealed widespread evidence of bribery by Qatari officials in order to secure the votes needed to host the 2022 tournament.

The Good, Bad, Ugly, and the Bizarre of 2026 World Cup

The 2026 World Cup offered striking contrasts between the discriminatory and repressive policies of FIFA President Infantino (and close ally Donald Trump) versus the bonds of friendship, resistance, and solidarity that develop among fans in the U.S. and around the world. The 2026 games were held in 11 cities throughout the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. The number of countries qualifying increased this year from 32 to 48. For the first time ever, 10 African countries qualified, nine of whom advanced to the knockout round of 32.

Originally Trump and Steven Miller proposed having ICE agents stationed in every U.S. stadium and at all entrances. They had to back off after a major pushback from immigration rights groups, labor unions, and even FIFA executives who feared mass immigration crackdowns would create chaos among participating countries.

Still, the Trump administration enforced its current bans on new and non-immigrant visas for citizens of 39 countries, including four countries who qualified for the World Cup—Haiti, Iran, Ivory Coast, and Senegal. Despite a warning from Infantino that “any team, including the supporters and officials of that team, who qualify for a World Cup need to have access to the country,” the U.S. defied this warning with no repercussions from FIFA.

The U.S. prohibited visas for fan supporters of Haiti, Iran, Ivory Coast, and Senegal. It denied Iran the opportunity to practice in the U.S. forcing them to stay and practice in Mexico before traveling to and from the U.S. for their games. The U.S. government revoked the entire ticket allotment provided for the Iranian Federation. Immigration authorities detained Iraqi striker Aymen Hussein for seven hours upon his arrival at O’Hare International Airport. All Moroccan supporters who had purchased tickets in advance were denied U.S. visas without explanation.

Omar Abdulkadir Artan, named Africa’s best referee and the first Somali selected to referee a World Cup game, was denied entry by U.S. immigration authorities at the Miami airport with no explanation or appeal rights. He was prevented from officiating despite having been cleared, vetted, and given a visa by FIFA. This was an act unprecedented in modern football (soccer) history. FIFA raised no protest to this racist act, calling it “unfortunate,” but claiming FIFA was “not involved in host country immigration processes, including visa adjudications.” The president of the Union of European Football Association (UEFA) said he was “aghast” at Artan’s treatment and he boycotted the World Cup final to protest. Back home, Somalis gave Omar a hero’s welcome, filling up a stadium in Mogadishu to show their support for him.

Racism also has long roots among some World Cup players and fans. 2026 was no different. After a match won by France over Paraguay, a Paraguayan senator referred to French superstar Mbappé (born in France by parents from Cameroon and Algeria) as a “colonized Cameroonian, pretending hard to be French,” a “brute” who never learned to write, who “sucked on coconuts” and “the most intelligent things he heard were chimpanzees.”

Following this attack, worldwide support for Mbappe flooded in. The French Football Federation stated, “the racist remarks made by Paraguayan Senator Celeste Amarilla targeting Kylian Mbappé are utterly abhorrent and unacceptable.” These remarks are criminal and deserve condemnation. They must be prosecuted, here and elsewhere.” Mbappe himself said the senator was a “despicable woman” and that he “will never allow people like her the freedom to spread their hatred and racism across the world.”

Meanwhile Argentina, world champions in 2022, faced and lost to Spain in this year’s finals. Argentina is the most European of all countries in Latin America, with a white population of around 80%. Argentina’s fans and team members have been repeatedly associated with racist and violent incidents. At a game between Argentina and Egypt, multiple complaints were filed accusing some Argentina fans of throwing beer bottles at Egyptian and Cape Verdean fans. Other complaints at that game were in response to Argentina fans displaying Israeli flags to provoke the Egyptian fans, players, and the pro-Palestinian coach of the Egyptian team. FIFA also investigated multiple racial abuse in social media against popular Black American streamer IShowSpeed, among other things, stating that he should “go cry at the zoo.”

And of course, most fans (and non-fans) have heard of Trump’s unprecedented intervention to dispute a red flag against an American team member (more on this later).

Yet Humanity, Friendship, and Resistance Still Flourished All Over the World Cup

Examples of joy and solidarity abounded in the 2026 World Cup.

Scottish Tartan Army fans drained all the beer from Boston bars and joined with baseball fans at Fenway Park in Boston to serenade the stadium with the Scottish ballad “Bonnie, Bonnie banks of Loch Loman.” When the Scots’ coach buses failed to arrive to take them to other match sites, the Scots used school buses instead. With the money they saved using school buses, the Scots donated $40,000 to disadvantaged child charities, and $15,000 to a Rhode Island hospital and a music school that taught Americans how to play bagpipes.

The Aussies, meanwhile, did their share of beer chugging and hundreds marched through west coast cities chanting “Aussies on a bender—Trump’s a sex offender!

Haiti made its first appearance in the World Cup since 1974, and its fans rallied in Mattapan Square chanting Grenadye Alaso!—a Haitian symbol of unity, shared struggle, and anticipated victory. This was a pointed message of solidarity with all the Haitian communities here in the U.S. threatened with recent Trump termination of their Temporary Protected Status.

Bosnian fans whose parents fled ethnic cleansing by the Serbs rallied in celebration at the World Cup that their country “had not been erased.”

Several acts of kindness occurred, such as Japanese and Brazilian supporters staying after games to help clean stadiums, and fans helping the small number of Senegalese to raise their national flags at the Senegal matches.

The “Viking Row” was a massive delight throughout the games. Norwegian fans brought their booming “Viking Rowing” celebrations to public spaces in every possible site, including escalators in Boston and Times Square.

Despite Trump’s treatment of the Iranian team, the Iranian national team left heartfelt thank-you notes for fans on the west coast, advocating for peace, respect, and friendship among nations. “Perhaps a team can advance from a group, but only through fairness and honour can one stand tall before history. Thank you Seattle for your hospitality, and thank you to all Iranians…who gave their hearts, their voices, and their whole being for Iran.”

Lumumba Vea, whose real name is Michel Nkuka Mboladinga, is well known from this year’s and previous World Cups. Vea stands without moving in a statuesque pose throughout all the games played by his homeland of the Democratic Republic of Congo. His arm is raised with a finger pointed like a pistol to his head. This action is an homage to Patrice Lumumba, the country’s first prime minister who led the fight to win the country’s independence from Belgium in 1960, and who was also an early founder of Pan-Africanism unity. Lumumba was overthrown by a CIA-backed military coup in 1960 and ultimately executed.

Soccer fans in Seattle and elsewhere finally won the right to wave rainbow flags at World Cup games, including at a game between Iran and Egypt. This came on the heels of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar where FIFA security confiscated rainbow flags, detained a journalist for wearing a rainbow t-shirt, and threatened team captains for wearing “One Love” armbands—all to avoid “offending” Qatar (and other repressive countries). At the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup, FIFA reneged on its own anti-discrimination campaign until mass outrage around the world forced them to relent. Fans were allowed to wave a sea of rainbow flags at the Iran Egypt match in Seattle—an action aimed at two of the major countries that criminalize LGBT people and supporters.

Final Notes, the Final Match, and Donald Trump

As most fans are aware by now, President Trump intervened with FIFA president Infantino to help overturn a one game suspension of American player Folarin Balogun. This was done prior to a game between the U.S. and Belgium. Such a reversal of a red flag suspension was unprecedented in a World Cup game. Complaints rolled in from not just the Belgium team, but from federations around the world. Balogun himself said, “My initial reaction was I was happy to be back on the team. But when I kind of started to reflect, I knew it was going to cause a lot of controversy,” Balogun said. “And I could almost see within my teammates, a bit of nerves because it was something that’s so unique.”

Prior to the start of the final game, the Vice President of U.S. Soccer, Nathan Goldberg Crenier, blasted Trump claiming that he left a “moral stain” on the tournament and then called out Infantino for “tarnishing the entire sport to win Trump’s favor” and for “blessing Trump’s wars in the name of soccer.” Crenier noted that Infantino created the FIFA Peace Prize which he promptly awarded to Trump.

Trump’s insistence in being a main feature of the final’s award ceremony became a totally pathetic display of Trump’s ultra-toxic narcissism. Fans and players let Trump know it. Trump was loudly booed by fans at the final when he was shown on the jumbotron and again when he walked in for the presentations. Several Spanish players, including the team’s star forward, Lamine Yamal, walked by Trump and refused to shake his offered hand. Yamal flashed the peace sign in Trump’s face. Spain forward Borja Iglesias joked that he would only shake Donald Trump’s hand to avoid going to prison. Even Infantino attempted to pull Trump away during the closing ceremonies so he wouldn’t appear in a photo shoot with the victorious Spanish team. As it was, several official photos had to crop Trump’s face out of the picture.

Trump’s intervention with Infantino to reverse the suspension of U.S. player Folarin Balogun also had an ironic twist. It was brought to light that Balogun’s Nigerian mother only gave birth to her son in the U.S. because she was not allowed by the airlines to fly home due to being seven months pregnant. If birthright citizenship had not existed, as Trump has wished, Balogun could never have played at all for the U.S.!

In Closing

Nothing—not even Trump and Infantino—could take away from such a wonderful World Cup. The World Champion Spain team gave a masterful effort in its 1-0 victory against Argentina and their superstar, Lionel Messi. True soccer fans could only breathe a sigh of relief that, given Spain’s total domination of the game, it was not decided by penalty kicks. Much of the world was later inspired to see Spanish star Yamal waving a Palestinian flag during Spain’s massive victory parade.

It is a great time to remember back to 1995—one year after the fall of apartheid—when Nelson Mandela walked onto a rugby pitch in a Springbok jersey—the symbol, to Black South Africans of decades of apartheid oppression—to give the rugby World Cup trophy to the team’s white captain. According to the Nelson Mandela foundation, it was a statement meant to show that one’s existence is not determined by “where you were born” or “what you look like” and that no one should ever be a presumptive enemy based on these characteristics.” How appropriate!

Bill Silver is a community activist who recently retired after 40 years as a union member and staff organizer. Bill traces his early socialist beginnings to a high school walkout following the killings at Kent and Jackson State. He is an avid athlete and sports fan who has currently found a new home on the pickleball courts.

C. James was a Division 1 basketball player in early 70s till his involvement in the new communist movement. He recently retired from teaching at the University of Illinois.

In 1963, following George Wallace’s January speech demanding “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” following the daily sit-ins and marches of the SCLC’s spring Birmingham campaign, following MLK’s Letter From Birmingham Jail, following the attack on the Birmingham Children’s Crusade with dogs and firehoses, following the June Jackson Mississippi assassination of Medgar Evers, following the August March on Washington, following the September KKK bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church killing Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, and following the November assassination of JFK, my white New York family packed up our blue Rambler American station wagon and drove south to the Florida Everglades. It was just 65 years since the final violent overthrow of Reconstruction and only 8 years since the lynching of Emmett Till.

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We saw oranges and grapefruits in the trees, armadillos on the ground, and alligators in the swamps. But as a wide-eyed 12-year-old, after experiencing the “colored” and “white” water fountains, benches, bathrooms, and counters, and the Black chain gangs policed by shotgun-wielding sunglassed white police, I was never the same.

I didn’t read W.E.B. Du Bois’s magisterial Black Reconstruction in America until 11 years later. Du Bois had absorbed everything there was to find about Reconstruction; he relied on reams of government reports, primary sources, and unpublished research theses “by young Negro scholars.” He divided his copious secondary sources into “Standard—Anti-Negro,” “Propaganda,” “Fair to Indifferent on the Negro,” historians who “have studied the history of Negroes and write sympathetically about them,” and “Negro Historians…some judicial, some eager and even bitter in defense.” His is a work of stupendous scholarship, documentation, interpretation, and applied Marxism, and for me it opened up the continent of U.S. history.

Du Bois states of Reconstruction “…there was being put into force one of the most extraordinary experiments of Marxism that the world, before the Russian revolution, had seen” (358). He ends by observing, “We are still too blind and infatuated to conceive of the emancipation of the laboring class in half the nation as a revolution comparable to the upheavals in France in the past, and in Russia, Spain, India and China today” (708), finally closing with “…we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labor movement…” (727).

White Communists Weigh In

Communist Party historian James S. Allen wrote Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy 1865-1876 in response to Du Bois’s work. Allen’s book was published in 1937, two years after Black Reconstruction, and republished by the CPUSA in 1942, 1943, 1955, 1963, 1966, 1970 and 2021. Reading Du Bois and Allen side by side is an instructive study project—especially for those of us concerned with the history and prospects of the U.S. labor movement. Two themes among others stood out for Allen: the objective limits to what could be accomplished in Reconstruction, and the relative “immaturity” of the (white) proletariat.

The “Editor’s Foreword” to Allen’s book responds directly to Du Bois, calling Black Reconstruction “praiseworthy” and noting condescendingly that it is “A refreshing antidote to the traditional acceptance of Negro inferiority and passiveness…” The International Publishers editor goes on to lecture Du Bois on Marxist theory (with which Du Bois was in fact well acquainted):

Du Bois’s failure to grasp the fundamental bourgeois character of the revolution leads him to the mistaken notion that what was occurring in the South during Reconstruction ‘was one of the most extraordinary experiments in Marxism that the world…had seen.’ Du Bois therefore very naturally falls into the error of characterizing the Reconstruction governments of the epoch as dictatorships of labor (that is, the proletariat) despite the fact that at the time such a type of dictatorship was out of the question (11).

Thus Allen’s aim was, in part, to rescue Reconstruction from Du Bois’s supposed idealism and, above all, to exonerate the white section of the working class from any responsibility for the revolution’s defeat. As against both Marx and Lenin, and like many in the Communist Party at the time, his theory was rooted in an evolutionist form of what Lenin might call “left-wing” economism. It implied that if only the Black workers could have waited for the maturation of a self-conscious industrial proletariat, their full freedom might have been won, but in the moment it was simply impossible. But Black workers would not wait; instead, for example, in the world as they found it, they were forced to create a “Colored National Labor Union” alongside William Sylvis’s white-only National Labor Union. The great communist labor leader William Z Foster in his 1954 book The Negro People in American History generally followed James Allen’s position, but he did point out:

The N.L.U. had no Reconstruction program for the South. Practically no attention was paid to the fight for the right of the Negroes to vote, and none at all to their struggle for the land. Sylvis, the most advanced of the N.L.U. leaders, denounced the Freedmen’s Bureau as “a stupendous fraud.” He proposed instead “to loan the planters a few millions of dollars at a reasonable rate of interest…$20,000,000 loaned in this manner,” he said, “would have done more to ‘reconstruct’ the South than a thousand millions spent upon the Freedmen’s Bureau.” The first convention of the N.L.U. endorsed the policy of President Johnson which was for “a speedy restoration of the South” at the expense of the Negro people, and ultimately, also of the white workers in the North (347).

(Du Bois, on the other hand, asserts that “In the Freedmen’s Bureau, the United States started upon a dictatorship by which the landowner and the capitalist were to be openly and deliberately curbed and which directed its efforts in the interest of a black and white labor class,” and goes on to call it “the most extraordinary and far-reaching institution of social uplift that America has ever attempted.” 219)

Working-Class Political Power Hiding in Plain Sight

Ask yourself what has been the political highwater mark in the rich history of U.S. working-class struggle: the 1877 railroad worker and miner uprisings? The late 1880s battle for the 8-hour day? The 1912 Bread and Roses strike? The two million votes for Eugene Debs in 1912 and 1920? The 1935 founding of the CIO coupled with the 1937 Flint sit-down strike?

Yet it was precisely in the Civil War, and especially in Reconstruction, that the characteristic form of capitalist rule in the young United States was most radically exposed and threatened. It was the closest thing to the Paris Commune that we have ever known–when the African-American people, the overwhelming majority of whom were workers, coalesced and with a diverse mix of working-class and other allies used the federal government as a shield behind which to organize their revolutionary democratic struggle. And it was by reversing the working-class gains of Reconstruction—taking advantage of white labor’s indifference or worse, northern betrayal, southern terror and Jim Crow—that the Redeemers at both state and federal levels engaged in the first significant restructuring of white privilege since the establishment of racial slavery. It was at least as violent a counterrevolution as the defeat of the Paris Commune.

If you’re willing to wade through pages of Lenin’s 1921 denunciations of Trotsky and Bukharin, you’ll arrive at this timeless Marxist assertion: “…politics is a concentrated expression of economics...Politics must take precedence over economics. To argue otherwise is to forget the ABC of Marxism.” Here’s a simple way to think about that: if there’s one thing capitalism likes more than making profits, it’s continuing to make profits, and the political level of the class struggle is all about that continuation.

In historical fact, the closest thing to working-class political power this country has ever seen occurred in the Confederate states between 1863 and the bloody Wilmington Coup of 1898, and it’s remarkable how many socialists are blind to that actuality, even though today the country is in many ways closer to 1875 than to 1935.

Capitalism in the abstract exists exactly nowhere; instead, each capitalist social formation develops in the concrete conditions of its own inheritances and class struggles. And here in the U.S., just 150 years from our first Reconstruction and 80 years from our second, today’s Redeemers throughout three federal branches and half the states are engaged in the largest restructuring of white privilege since Jim Crow. And as Black and Brown working class people are hunted and murdered in our streets by federal agents and the flag of the Confederacy is carried throughout the country, it is worth remembering the foundational and continuing role played specifically by white supremacy in this particular historically constituted brand of capitalism. All leftists should be reading Black Reconstruction today and making our plans steeped in its lessons.

* * *

In June of 1964, just before the Civil Rights Act was signed into law and 14 months before the signing of the now-gutted Voting Rights Act, six months after our tour of the segregated South and less than 90 years since the defeat of the First Reconstruction, my white Jewish family moved from Long Island to the northern suburbs of Chicago. On my first day there, my father drove us through the small towns with large trees and larger houses. “This one,” he said, “is ‘restricted’: no Blacks or Jews allowed.” The Second Reconstruction had not yet made its way north. The Third is yet to come.

Tom Goodkind is a longtime machinist, rank-and-file labor activist, union president, and Liberation Road member.

Nuclear nonproliferation requires national sovereignty; states must believe that they can preserve their security without nuclear weapons. Where international law is respected, and powerful states can be constrained from attacking weaker ones, the incentives for nuclear proliferation decline. Where these conditions disappear, the logic of nuclear deterrence becomes increasingly compelling.

This is the dangerous lesson being taught by our current era.

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The Trump regime’s attacks on Iran, its threats against Cuba, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and numerous other examples have done immeasurable damage to the notion of nuclear nonproliferation. If you know there is a continuous danger of aggression from a great power, why not have a few A-bombs in your arsenal? North Korea’s determination to develop nuclear weapons, for example, makes grim strategic “sense” in a world where agreements mean nothing and there is no way of enforcing even the basics of international law.

As we enter an increasingly dangerous era, our movements must forge a common understanding of the relationship between nuclear nonproliferation and national self-determination. Only by defending both can we begin to rebuild an international order in which countries no longer believe that their survival depends upon possession of the bomb.

The Foundations of Nuclear Nonproliferation

The battle around the issue of nuclear nonproliferation began at nearly the moment that the first atomic bomb was tested in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1945, but certainly in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nuclear weapons spread from the US to other countries, and were factored into military planning, though it took decades for much of the global military community to finally accept that the strategic use of nuclear weapons could not win a war.

The world coming to the brink of nuclear war in October 1962, with the Cuban Missile Crisis, alerted humanity to how quickly events could unfold and lead to global disaster.Various forms of nuclear nonproliferation agreements were developed after much of the scientific community united with mass anti-nuclear movements to change the popular narrative regarding the survivability of nuclear war—that is, to make clear that humanity would not survive it.. Splits within ruling circles also contributed towards these agreements.

Military establishments attempted to circumvent many of the restrictions on nuclear war through the sophistry of tactical nuclear weapons, i.e., lower-grade nuclear devices that could, allegedly, be utilized on the field of battle. Much of the world paid less attention to this threat as such discussions were sanitized.

An Unequal Nuclear Order

Nuclear nonproliferation, however, has never been an across-the-board set of equitable agreements. The US and, later, the USSR (followed by Russia), laid claims to the permanent possession of nuclear weapons. Over time, other countries joined the “club,” including Britain, France, China, India, and Pakistan. And then there were those that joined the “dark web” version of the nuclear community, such as Israel and their ally, apartheid South Africa , who would not acknowledge possession of nuclear weapons nor sign the nuclear non-proliferation agreement (at least, in the case of South Africa, until apartheid was defeated).

The early 1990s brought with it two interesting developments. The first was the newly independent Ukrainian government disinvesting from nuclear weapons and, literally, turning their weapons—as residue from the Cold War—over to the Russian Federation. The second development, on a very different note, was the escalating allegations that certain countries, particularly Iraq and North Korea, were either in possession of nuclear weapons or were on their way to possessing them.

Much of the discussion, at the time, revolved around nuclear nonproliferation and the threat from allegedly rogue states that might entertain using such weapons for strategic or tactical reasons. In the US media, fear was inflamed about the alleged danger of nuclear missiles being able to fly from Iraq and/or North Korea, potentially hitting US targets. Ironically, when probably the greatest danger of a nuclear exchange was between India and Pakistan—both of which admitted to possessing stockpiles of nuclear weapons—little global attention went towards the denuclearization of the Indian subcontinent and, instead, to a focus on alleged rogue actors.

Rather than any exploration as to whether and why Iraq, North Korea, and later Iran might have any interest in nuclear weapons, the focus in the global North—and particularly within the US—turned towards the alleged insanity and aggressiveness of the respective leaders of those countries and the supposed ease with which they might decide, willy-nilly, to push “the button” to ignite a nuclear conflagration.

The Incentives to Go Nuclear

The 2003 war against Iraq, the current war against Iran, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, along with the threat of war against Cuba, should render a more sober discussion on the motivations of smaller nations when it comes to nuclear weapons.

Not only was the US wrong in falsely arguing the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003, but they created a dilemma, particularly for smaller nations, which we have been living with ever since. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had been a strange ally of the USA. Within a matter of weeks after Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the US and Iraq became enemies. Iraq suddenly became the target of US allegations regarding nuclear ambitions. As we all know, a war then ensued. Was the lesson that the Iraqis should have developed nuclear weaponry? Was the lesson that friendship between nations, even friendship between toxic administrations, was irrelevant?

When Ukraine became independent of the USSR in 1991, Russia recognized Ukraine’s borders. In 1994, in exchange for an agreement that Russia would never invade or threaten Ukraine, the Ukrainians turned over their nuclear arsenal. In 2022, Putin’s Russia carried out a massive invasion of Ukraine. Was the lesson that Ukraine should never have turned over its nuclear weapons?

In 1962, the USSR provided Cuba with nuclear missiles for the purpose of self-defense against US aggression. The world came very close to war. The Soviets withdrew their missiles in exchange for the US withdrawing missiles from Turkey and an understanding of no military attack on Cuba. In 2026, in clear violation of international law, the Trump administration began strangling the Cuban people and threatening an armed invasion. Is the lesson that Cuba should have developed weapons of mass destruction?

The history of the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea offers an alternative example. Regardless of how one views the government of the DPRK, their possession of nuclear weapons has been a real factor in how countries around the world weigh whether it’s wise to attempt regime change. Given the extent to which the DPRK fears an armed and possibly nuclear assault by the US and the Republic of (South) Korea, their development of nuclear weapons is quite understandable, even if one disagrees on the proliferation of nuclear weapons. After all, as the saying goes, just because one is paranoid does not mean someone isn’t out to get them.

Particularly in the post-Cold War period, the guard rails on both nuclear proliferation and national aggression are unraveling. Where no international accountability exists to protect nations under armed threat, taking the direction of weapons of mass destruction becomes completely logical, if at the same time horrific. One need only look at the US/Israeli war against Iran following Trump’s destruction of the Obama administration-led international treaty with Iran regarding nuclear weapons and power, combined with the Israeli intent to keep western Asia in complete turmoil. Topping this, during negotiations between Iran and the US, Trump decided, twice, to initiate armed conflict. Is the lesson that Iran needed nuclear weapons?

Toward a Stronger Movement for Peace and Justice

To a great extent, at least in the US, there has been a strange space or wall between movements and efforts against nuclear proliferation, movements against war, and movements to defend the national sovereignty of peoples and states under threat by imperialists or national bullies. These movements occasionally overlap but they do not seem to include the same people. The reality of the current world situation is that there is an actual and practical overlap in the issues and, therefore, there must be an overlap in response.

Thus, at a critical movement such as this, opposition to nuclear weapons and the need for nuclear free zones—as is desperately needed in western Asia and on the Indian subcontinent—must be linked to larger matters of national sovereignty and the right of nations to settle internal matters in the absence of foreign interference. We certainly should have learned this lesson in 2003 in the context of the Iraq War, but many of us looked at it too narrowly and focused on the arrogance and aggression of the US alone, not recognizing the longer-term implications of the invasion. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the US/Israeli attack on Iran, the stakes have heightened and the desire for a nuclear counter-threat to aggression appears to become more reasonable for those facing assault.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a longtime socialist, trade unionist, international solidarity activist, and writer of fiction and nonfiction. @BillFletcherJr; billfletcherjr.com

The fight against Trump’s mass deportation of migrants has raged for some 17 months.

Immediately when he took office, Trump announced his massive deportation efforts, and just as quickly it became clear that he had no interest in deporting violent criminals (who in any case have the right to due process, documented or not). Rather, the regime was rounding up and deporting your neighbors, co-workers, fellow worshipers, and school children—all through racial profiling. In my own community of Lynn, Massachusetts, they are deporting what we can only call “the best of the best,” shredding the fabric of our community and taking away our beloved friends and community leaders.

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Victories have been won, and battles lost. In the face of vicious attacks by ICE and other federal agents, there has been massive resistance, both spontaneous and highly organized. The experience is now there to sketch the outlines of the strategic and tactical resistance to ICE as it has been built on the ground by our blood, sweat, and tears.

This article describes the three legs of a “resistance triangle” for defeating ICE: mass resistance and mutual aid, demands on public institutions, and ending corporate support for ICE. It also shows how success in these fronts and a growing public outcry has forced the Trump regime to shift tactics in its ethnic cleansing campaign. In this new terrain as well, the three fronts presented here provide a framework for the powerful and creative resistance needed to end the deportation machine.

Fighting—and Winning

1. MASS RESISTANCE AND MUTUAL AID

This front includes ICE watch, whistle mobilizations and cameras, direct nonviolent confrontation, and mutual aid. The goal is to make every neighborhood a fortress. Every school a fortress. Every union a fortress. Every church/temple/mosque a fortress.

This is foundational, the base of the triangle. Without any of the three sides of the resistance, the triangle weakens and collapses. But mass direct resistance drives everything else. The Minnesota resistance is the high point so far. It has been costly, and has already been paid for in arrests, beatings, and blood. The rest of us owe them a debt that cannot be repaid. Without the mass resistance, ICE would still be surging in the Twin Cities, fascist great-coated Bovino would still be in charge, ICE Barbie would still be Secretary of Homeland Security, and the number of detentions would not be dropping.

In an essential DIG podcast, Minnesota leaders described how the resistance there was built. A dozen years of efforts to align core elements of labor, immigrant communities, and faith organizations built support for each other’s campaigns. Joint staff training, political education, and experimentation was involved. Different social movements were understood to have different strengths and weaknesses, different cultures and structures. No one organization or group of organizations tried to “brand” the movement as their own. Alignment meant agreed-upon goals and values; it did not mean agreement on everything. Rather it meant working together despite disagreements, with respect to all. And in moments of upsurge, it was understood that the resistance had to include a broader front than anything that had come before, often out of the hands of the people who had built the infrastructure of the movement.

The particularities of Minnesota history and culture backgrounded the effort. Minnesota has a long tradition of civil society activism, including the highest voting rates in the US. The labor movement in Minnesota has a proud history, from the Iron Range mines to the Teamster-led general strike of 1934 to the Local P-9 meatpacking rebellion in Austin in 1985-1986. The Minnesota resistance built, politically and organizationally, on the previous upsurge in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. The state has a strong tradition of faith organizations welcoming immigrants.

While this particular history is important, most every city and state in the US has its own working class social movement history, whose footprints need to be recovered and popularized. This is certainly true here in Lynn, Massachusetts, with its labor, abolitionist, women’s, and queer history and struggle that date back 200 years.

The larger battles on this front are well known: Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte. But the stunning breadth of the support for immigrant families and efforts to protect them has not been told and may never be recorded. It took place in smaller towns as well. For instance, while attending a G-League basketball game in Portland, Maine, I met a high school teacher who had delivered class materials and food in her small Maine town of Saco to her students’ Latino and Congolese families who were afraid to attend school or shop.

Key to success is both building a broad united front and including the voice of the most directly affected people. In Lynn that has meant both strengthening long-term relationships and developing a group of affected migrants and their families to play a leading role.

There is much discussion in our movement about what role mutual aid or other services play in all of this. I believe it is essential and powerful, even though as a Minnesota immigrant leader put it, “We can’t food bank and fundraise our way to freedom.”

Our experience in Lynn is that support for families—those threatened or those who have already lost loved ones and breadwinners to ICE—is deep and broad. The performative cruelty of Trump’s campaign has sparked disgust and anger. We have organized several events in Lynn such as baby showers for immigrant moms and received contributions even from Trump supporters. In a patriarchal society where women are at the core of caregiving and family resilience, resisting attacks on children and families resonates powerfully among women and in the largely gendered helping professions like nursing and K-12 education.

The work of power-building organizations is to take that response, build organization, educate, and create something sustainable with an upward spiral of political consciousness. This isn’t easy—we have struggled here in Lynn to build an organization out of our Food Aid program which provides support to 750 families monthly—not least because ICE kidnapped our staff driver, Manny Kenga. As a friend in North Star Socialist Organization warned me, with good reason, “In the conflict between service and power-building, service wins every time.” In a DIG podcast, SEIU’s Greg Namacher in Minnesota recommends getting any staff out of mutual aid projects as soon as possible after the program is established. It is certainly true that the pressure of sustaining aid programs can be burdensome and divert organizing resources.

But unions both service and organize. Most partner groups of our New Lynn Coalition (a permanent force of labor, community, and faith organizations), such as the Worker’s Center and the Lynn United housing organization, do both with considerable success.

A socialist approach needs to distinguish itself from the work of our allies in the nonprofit and faith worlds whose work is limited to advocacy or purely service, and from anarchist-influenced approaches that divorce mutual aid from a power-building strategy.

I would put it this way:

Mutual Aid + Organization + Political Education = Resistance

The New Lynn Coalition has held three actions against mass deportations. Working with the statewide resistance campaign organized by LUCE, we followed their lead and developed our own six elements of resistance:

1. Verification/Patrolling: The program of LUCE and Neighbor to Neighbor (N2N) in which people patrol neighborhoods to find ICE and “verify” by asking for their ID and filming them, in some cases causing them to leave.

2. Information: A WhatsApp site where people identify ICE presence to a hotline and centralize it for the community.

3. Organizing/Outreach: Neighborhood walks, store visits, contacting new organizations and individuals.

4. Material Aid/Survival: Financial and moral support for those who have lost loved ones, especially breadwinners, to ICE. New Lynn adds families to our Food Aid program where possible.

5. Electoral/Political: Asking questions during endorsement processes about what the candidate is doing to stop ICE, pushing them to uncomfortable positions beyond what is “practical.”

6. Unifying our Communities (Buen Vivir): Events like one New Lynn held for the Haitian community earlier this year, or music festivals, barbecues, potlucks. Safe spaces and joy—the joy of community, the joy of resistance. The joy of a vision of a better world.

This can be streamlined to verifying, mutual aid, organizing, and electoral work. The combined effect is to protect as many people as possible, as our forebears protected freedom seekers from the Fugitive Slave Act. Direct action can disrupt the conveyor belt of courts, police, and lack of legal support that leads our neighbors to detention and deportation.

2. DEMANDS ON PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS

This front involves laws, executive orders, and resolutions.

When pressed to take a stand, state and city officials, even in blue areas, will cite federal pre-emption on immigration enforcement as a reason not to fight. Of course there are legal obstacles to states and cities blocking or disrupting ICE. But so what?

There is plenty these officials can do, and playing it safe is a betrayal. As a union officer for many years, I came to appreciate the legal advice of our attorneys, but also understood that their advice would always be conservative. They saw their job as protecting the union from any legal consequences.This was advice I should have ignored!

For our part, we make decisions in a way that will win a particular fight and build organization and class consciousness: “Win as much as possible and weaken the enemy through collective action, spread class consciousness and build the unity of the working class through education and organization, and recruit people to socialism by promoting international solidarity, agitating against capitalism, studying and providing a program to build an alternative world.” Needless to say, this approach may mean reaching for new legal ground or rejecting legal advice entirely.

After multiple meetings with undocumented migrants and their families, the mayor of my city of Lynn signed an Executive Order restricting ICE activities (jointly with several others including Boston’s Mayor Wu, which gave him political cover). It forbade ICE from using any city property (they had been assembling at the city graveyard), required local police to record and file ICE misconduct for possible legal action, and specified other positive steps. The Massachusetts state legislature, Governor Healey, and our local district attorney are working on a bill that would prevent ICE agents’ presence in district courthouses, their favorite and most effective hunting ground. It is at the courthouses where the LUCE ICE watch is focused now—volunteers identify ICE officers, expose them, scramble for legal advice, track people they seize, etc.

Other local officials have gone farther. Denver Mayor Mike Johnson has declared that local police have a duty to intervene directly when force is used by federal agents that “could cause death or serious bodily injury.” Reformer District Attorney Larry Krasner in Philadelphia has promised ICE agents: “This is how it works. You commit crimes within the jurisdiction that is the city and county of Philadelphia, I prosecute you...No, the president cannot pardon you.” In blue states we often have the power to refuse to follow federal policy in diverse ways.

Our experience at courthouses shows how the fields of engagement are constantly changing, and how each step is important but insufficient by itself. On the day the Executive Order was issued in Lynn, we received four reports of ICE sightings. Through the federal database, ICE can still identify people without papers who are arrested for any petty issue like running a red light, and wait for them outside police stations. If we are successful in keeping them out of the courthouse, they will lurk outside—and we will follow them there.

The strategic goal of political and legislative resistance is to split the municipal and state governments from the federal government and the New Confederacy—using the US system of federalism to our advantage. This is a critical step to stop the consolidation of the New Confederacy’s power grab at all levels of government, throwing sand in the gears of the kidnapping machine in every way possible. Cities and states (and counties) can restrict ICE activities, set up defense funds, investigate and prosecute ICE crimes, challenge warrantless home break-ins, and use their soapbox. Massachusetts has supported a bail fund for immigrants taken by ICE. Lynn set up a fund which can be used in part to defend immigrants—and through a campaign led by Neighbor to Neighbor, the City Council just rejected the Mayor’s budget, demanding more funding for immigration defense.

A sympathetic but hesitant district attorney told me, “We need the perfect case to proceed. When you go against the king…” But even symbolism matters. The breakthrough will come when local officials, police, and district attorneys arrest and prosecute ICE agents. That is the crisis we want, and a first breach happened in April, again in Minneapolis.

As with mass resistance and mutual aid, the political and legislative resistance has been varied and widespread beyond what anyone can track. In NH, the three county commissioners representing Rockingham County applied to hold ICE detainees in the Rockingham County jail. Two Republicans outvoted the one Democrat. Several citizens who became known as the “Deerfield Five” (one of whom I’m proud to say was my sister) organized turnout to speak out at county commission meetings and had several direct, thoughtful discussions with one of their Republican commissioner. After hearing all the testimony and watching the videos of the ICE murders in Minnesota, the commissioner flipped his vote. He told the town that as someone with many years of background in law enforcement he just “could not make sense” of what ICE was doing. Another small, important, and unheralded victory.

The townspeople overturning a county jail ICE hold in Deerfield, New Hampshire, and the teacher helping immigrants in Saco, Maine, registered no national attention, but they built the resistance. We are everywhere, even when we don’t know it.

3. ENDING CORPORATE SUPPORT FOR ICE

This means shutting down the corporate profiteering that makes the terrorizing of our communities possible.

ICE relies heavily on the private sector to help carry out its Gestapo-like crusade against immigrants and their allies. Without the logistical, financial, and political support of large private corporations, its capacity to terrorize our communities would crumble.

As I stated above, it can be fruitless to search for and defeat the logic of a particular Trump policy, since he rules more by spectacle than policy. We face not goose-stepping Nazis in full regimented bloom but a contradictory clown show of Silicon Valley Psychos and Pseudo Proletarians. Yet the essential driver is always power serving profit.

Trump has made it clear that he isn’t even opposed to migrant workers in US fields—as long as they are paid even less than they are now. There is money to be made and political benefit to white supremacy. “There is now a white fear industrial complex, where many people get very rich and very powerful by telling white America that they are under constant assault,” as a recent PBS documentary (“White with Fear”) put it.

The private prison industrial complex is also part of Trump’s “we.” Our dear Lynn friend Manny from the Congo was seized by ICE when he showed up for his regular check-in at the ICE office in Burlington, MA. He has a work permit, worked two jobs in community service, and has no police record of any kind. He drove the New Lynn Coalition’s Food Aid van, delivering support to 750 families. We found him in the hell hole called the East Montana detention center in El Paso, now held in a tent with 75 other people for 23 hours out of every day—for 8 months. It was built for $1.2 billion in a secret contract handed to an unknown private for-profit company with no experience in the task at hand. The tent city has seen chilling cold temperatures and brutal desert heat, measles and tuberculosis outbreaks, multiple suicides, and at least one confirmed homicide. One billion two hundred million dollars to create a torture chamber where they put the best of the best our society has to offer. Your tax dollars at work.

We need to choke off the profiteers from their profit. And it can be done—has already been done, as shown by the Avelo “Abduction Airlines” victory. A broad coalition decided on a campaign that targeted Avelo Airlines which transported ICE detainees. The coalition aimed to shut the Avelo flights down, and set broad political goals as well for a campaign that:

1. Helps us build a BIGGER working-class base

2. Strengthens strategic alignment

3. Connects attacks on immigrants to billionaire attacks on the multiracial working class

4. Weakens the New Confederacy

The coalition also looked for a winnable campaign, which meant targeting a corporation with a public-facing brand that was vulnerable to political and economic pressure, had some financial vulnerability, and relied to some degree on government support and subsidies. Avelo Airlines fit the bill. And they are now out of the deportation business.

Organizers assembled a broad national coalition of unions, faith organizations, and others, from Indivisible and Democratic Socialists of America to the Association of Flight Attendants (a CWA affiliate) to newly emerging local immigrant groups. The flight attendants pointed out that they are required to evacuate a plane in 90 seconds or less in the event of an emergency, which is hard to do when “an entire flight of people handcuffed and shackled would hinder any evacuation and risk injury or death.” Churches denounced the moral atrocity of the abduction industry, and city leaders denounced the use of taxpayer dollars for subsidies. And all pointed to the corporate profits skimmed from the suffering. There were street protests across the country wherever Avelo landed or took off, 97,000 letters to corporate leadership, and the withdrawal of subsidies and municipal and union investments.

This:

Led to this:

There are similar campaigns against Citizen’s Bank, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Hilton, Palantir, and other corporations who have contracts with ICE. Direct resistance is not enough; we can actually stop ICE by eliminating corporate support, dealing material blows to the capitalists behind the attacks, not just targeting bad politicians or evil fascists (although there are plenty of them!).

The Regime Adapts to the Strength of the Resistance

We are in a new phase of the resistance. As arrogant as the Trump administration is, even they aren’t entirely ignorant of the reaction to their ethnic cleansing campaign: they now avoid the “surge” of thousands of federal agents into high-profile performative attacks on big cities. The tide has turned, and support for mass deportation has collapsed, at least with a widespread belief that Trump has “gone too far.” The issue that Steve Bannon bragged had “80-20” public support has stimulated the strongest—and fabulously multiracial—mass movement against the dictatorship so far. Court cases are collapsing and judges are openly raging at the blanket refusal of ICE to follow court orders.

When even Florida sheriffs are rejecting the draconian mass deportations of Governor DeSantis, who prides himself with being the most anti-immigrant governor in the United States—the tide has indeed turned.

But the underlying goals and methods have not changed. Mass deportations of migrants continue in service of the only consistency beneath the spectacle: power to serve profit, with white supremacy as the essential throughline.

Fewer spectacular “surges” of zombie police in some ways makes our task more difficult: mass deportations grind on in more insidious ways. Our friends and neighbors are still being kidnapped and disappeared. Warehouses are snapped up to “house” human beings. Racial profiling has been blessed by the Supreme Court. ICE officials are fired who do not kidnap enough people to meet assigned quotas, like managers at GE (where I worked for 33 years) were fired for failing to make Friday shipping quotas for aircraft engine parts. Immigration judges, in the separate court system controlled by the executive branch, are fired (100 of them) if they allow someone their freedom to live here. And while most of us were looking away, thousands of National Guardsmen from the Old Confederate states have occupied Washington, DC—something they could not even accomplish during the Civil War.

Fear of kidnapping and disappearance is just normal life here now. We’ve gone from shock and awe to WWI-style trench warfare. The machine grinds on.

The focus on the “surges” has actually misrepresented the actual impact of the mass deportations. There were more ICE detentions in the southern cities of Miami, Dallas, Atlanta, and San Antonio, where state government fully supports ICE depravities, than there were in Minneapolis/St. Paul during the Minnesota “surge.” Trump and wannabe cowboys like Bovino rule by spectacle more than policy. But the attacks on migrants by a thousand cuts —ripping away food, housing, education, and health care—continue. The regime tried to go so far as to declare 2.7 million migrants to be officially dead at Social Security, which would cut off their ability to access bank accounts, credit cards and social services, creating,—all the more pressure to self-deport.

Migrants are widgets on a cruelty efficiency chart. But unless you live in the directly affected communities, it may be below your radar.

The Resistance Triangle Will Win

The immigrant defense campaigns are growing and multifaceted. The three fronts are of course interrelated, and a particular campaign or tactic may not fit neatly into a single category. There is no single magical response that will turn the tide until the MAGA fascists are expelled from office and eradicated as a political force—which will take midterm victories and more: years of both social mobilization and electoral organizing.

From Deerfield, New Hampshire, to Saco, Maine, and Lynn, Massachusetts, to Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, and Minnesota, the people have spoken and ICE is in political retreat. But the abductions are changing tactics. The splashy “surges” have provided red meat to the MAGA base, but have also boosted mass resistance. The deportation machine continues in less obvious but perhaps more effective and efficient ways.

To win, to decisively defeat ICE, we need to build deeper organizations of mass resistance, sharpen and deepen the divisions between municipal and state governments on one hand and the national power of MAGA at the federal level, and go on offense against the corporate ICE profiteers. Their ethnic cleansing campaign against migrants is the cutting edge of their white supremacist imagination, and white supremacy is the brutal sinew of the MAGA program: power serving profit.

We have to win this. Flood the Resistance!

Jeff Crosby is a labor and community activist and a socialist. He worked as a grinder and elected union official at GE in Lynn, Massachusetts, for 33 years, and as Executive Director of a community/faith/labor coalition, the New Lynn Coalition, for 10 years.

Major anniversaries of the Declaration of Independence have a way of coming at inconvenient times. When the bicentennial took place, the United States had suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam, Congressional investigations had revealed massive FBI spying on US citizens, and Richard Nixon had just resigned in disgrace. Public confidence in the government was at a low ebb.

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The centennial in 1876 was even worse. The federal government was about to abandon its commitment to Reconstruction, pulling troops out of the South to bribe Florida electors into voting for a Republican presidential candidate who had, in fact, lost at the polls. Nearly a century of Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, lynchings, and Klan terror would follow. In the South, a brief experiment in biracial democracy abruptly ended; in the North, robber baron capitalism was in full swing. Within a year, a largely spontaneous railroad strike prompted pitched battles across the country between federal troops and street protesters enraged by the depredations of the railroad barons.

The 250^th anniversary of the Declaration is a few days away. For many, the current occupant of the White House bears a striking resemblance to the sniveling monarch in the hip-hop musical Hamilton. The real King George was supposed to be ruling by Divine Right; Donald Trump seems to think he is as well, turning his ICE brownshirts loose on city streets, using his office to enrich himself and his family, flouting laws, and starting wars on a whim only to become bored with them weeks later. Despised by much of the population, he clings to his diminishing mass base with naked appeals to white racism and male supremacy. He plasters his name on every public venue he can think of and honors the nation’s founding with a cage match on the White House lawn.

So what are we supposed to celebrate? The men who signed the Declaration were hardly heroes. Most were wealthy merchants and/or slaveholders. They had an agenda that reflected their class interests. The revolution they led left slavery intact, accelerated the dispossession and outright murder of Native peoples, and reserved political power for a narrow slice of the population. After 250 years, we are still dealing with these contradictions.

But revolutions, even conservative ones, have a way of taking on a life of their own. The American Revolution could not have succeeded without the support of ordinary people whose interests did not neatly align with those of the Founding Fathers. And once the revolution was over, the Declaration’s afterlife exceeded the intentions of its authors. Its promise that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed” and its assertion that “all men are created equal” would be taken up, again and again, by people the founders would never have imagined as political equals: enslaved Africans, workers, women, and anti-colonial revolutionaries around the world.

Founding Fathers, or Deadbeat Dads?

The contradictions that confronted colonial society on the cusp of the revolution were real enough, but nowhere near as momentous as Thomas Jefferson’s soaring rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence would suggest. “No taxation without representation,” the battle cry of the revolution, hardly seems like the sort of demand that would arouse the masses. Measured against the popular grievances in British colonies like India and Ireland, where the economic stakes were greater and the human cost far higher, the “long train of abuses and usurpations” cited by Jefferson look like small potatoes.

But the leaders of the revolution, Jefferson among them, had class interests to protect that distinguished them from most colonists. They saw British trade and taxation policies as detrimental to their businesses, and many of them feared that Crown-appointed colonial administrators lacked the resources and the wherewithal to protect them should the masses of people show any signs of restiveness.

Jefferson identified with the philosophers of the European Enlightenment, who challenged hereditary rule by royal families and a landed aristocracy. For them, and for much of this country’s revolutionary generation, political power properly flowed not from bloodlines but from property. The Declaration’s famous line about governments “deriv[ing] their just powers from the consent of the governed” is widely seen as a call for democracy, but it was also a defense of private property—including property in slaves. Significantly, there was already a growing debate in England about the morality of the slave trade, and American slaveholders regarded it with deep unease.

Jefferson himself was deeply ambivalent. Born into the Virginia aristocracy, Jefferson disliked the idleness and self-indulgence of the planter class; he believed that slavery not only robbed enslaved people of their natural rights but also corrupted the slaveowners. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” he would write in 1782. But he was too burdened with debt to consider freeing his own 600 slaves—even after he fathered several children with one of them. And politically, abolishing slavery outright was a bridge too far. A denunciation of slavery in the original draft of the Declaration was left on the cutting room floor, replaced by a specious claim that King George had “forced” it upon the colonists.

The “chosen people”?

If Jefferson thought the Southern planters were morally compromised, he pinned his hopes on the white yeoman farmers whom he considered “the chosen people of God.” He envisioned a democracy of small producers and hoped that the settlement of the frontier would allow their emergence as the dominant social class in the new nation. They already made up a majority of the population of colonial America.

But wealth in the colonies was concentrated in the hands of a few whose fortunes were tied to transatlantic trade, mainly shipowners and large planters growing crops for export. For anyone else, the largely unsettled west held out the best hope of an independent livelihood.

Lacking access to markets in the coastal cities, farmers in the interior produced mainly for their own use. What business they engaged in was apt to involve barter with their neighbors. If taxes imposed by the Crown affected them, it was because without access to currency they had no way to pay them. Tax collectors on the frontier sometimes came in for rough treatment.

What really rankled, though, were British restrictions on settlement west of the Appalachians. After a long, grinding war, Britain had wrested formal control of the area from the French, but it was still wilderness, and for all practical purposes it remained Indian land. Occupied with expanding and defending its empire in other parts of the world, Britain had no stomach for colonizing the Mississippi Valley, much less policing it. But people still defied the British ban on settlement, and they resented that the government would not protect them from Indian resistance, or even provide them with authorization and resources to protect themselves.

It was an issue that united hardscrabble yeoman farmers of the West and wealthy land speculators from the East. In deference to their interests, Jefferson would include the Second Amendment when he drafted the Bill of Rights 10 years later. The “right to bear arms” enshrined by our current Supreme Court was originally about Indian removal, a process that would continue a century longer as the nation expanded westward.

Black lives mattered

Yet if the Declaration meant property rights and political independence to the founders, and land and local autonomy to frontier settlers, its promise of equality took on a very different meaning in Black hands.

The much-quoted passage in the Declaration that “all men are created equal” seems truly revolutionary even today. With a few exceptions, the Founding Fathers never suggested that the Declaration’s embrace of equality applied to Black people. But that did not stop Black people from acting as though it did. The Declaration actually served as an inspiration for Gabriel’s revolt, an aborted slave rebellion that occurred in Virginia 25 years later. The abolitionist movement repeatedly invoked it. In a famous Fourth of July speech in 1858, Frederick Douglass excoriated white America for betraying its promise. In the Gettysburg address, Abraham Lincoln—his own racism notwithstanding—said the Civil War was being fought to defend it. Every struggle against racism in this country, every effort to extend democracy in the face of capitalist power, has found the idea indispensable.

By the same token, antebellum slaveowners found it increasingly hard to swallow. At the time of the Revolution, they typically defended slavery as a necessary evil and viewed their slaves mainly as a source of cheap labor. But as the abolitionist movement gained steam, drawing strength and moral authority from Frederick Douglass and others who had escaped bondage and fled North, they stopped apologizing and started justifying their ownership of human property as a good thing, indispensable to civilization’s survival. In the South Carolina low country, where Blacks outnumbered whites by as much as eight to one, the perceived threat of rebellious slaves loomed as large in the minds of slaveowners as the fabulous wealth being wrested from their labor.

In 1822 a well-organized conspiracy led by a free Black carpenter named Denmark Vesey probably would have seized control of Charleston had it not been betrayed at the last minute. Nine years later, in tidewater Virginia, Nat Turner led a bloody slave uprising and remained at large for weeks until he was finally caught and executed.

The Southern slaveocracy concluded that any talk of abolition was a menace and had to be stopped, lest it encourage further rebellions. South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, their leading voice in Congress, took the Senate floor to declare that the Declaration’s assertion of equal rights was “the most false and dangerous of all political error.” Other spokesmen for the planter class insisted that slavery was not simply a labor system, it was “the step-ladder by which civilized countries have passed from barbarism to civilization.”

After slavery was finally abolished, Jim Crow laws were justified with the same language of social control, though the term “separate but equal” paid cynical lip service to the Declaration. In 1896 the Supreme Court offered its blessing to the charade in Plessy vs. Ferguson. Nearly six decades—marked by often bitter struggle—would have to pass before the high court finally acknowledged that segregation and inequality were functionally related.

Consent of the governed?

The Declaration of Independence has another abiding message today: its affirmation of the right of revolution. The mere fact that the American revolution occurred encouraged a succession of anti-monarchical and anti-colonial uprisings in Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean that were more socially transformative and often far bloodier. In 1946, when the people of Vietnam had defeated Japanese occupation and were preparing to resist recolonization by the French, the Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh would draft a national constitution taking entire passages word for word from Jefferson’s text.

At a time when too many politicians reflexively talk about the “right to exist,” it’s worth noting a central premise of the Declaration: states derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” No government possesses an inherent right to exist, independent of popular will. Governments do not have rights; people do.

Jefferson believed in the rights of the individual and insisted that there are some areas of our lives where the government has no business going. This tradition has yielded important gains. Jim Crow laws that dictated where Black people could live, work, and go to school have fallen. More recently, movements have challenged the state’s ability to dictate whom people can marry, whether women should have children, or how people live their private lives.

But the right of revolution goes beyond rejecting government intrusion in our personal lives. It’s not only about how we are treated as individuals, but about our collective destiny.

The Black liberation struggle—indeed, the struggle of any oppressed people—is all about making that distinction. Martin Luther King Jr. famously observed that the right to sit at a desegregated lunch counter doesn’t mean much if you can’t afford the price of a hamburger; he spent his last years challenging the class contradictions that kept people from affording it. Malcolm X didn’t pontificate about a “color-blind” society; he called for an end to white people’s power over Black people. The Ten Point Program of the Black Panther Party didn’t demand equal treatment and an end to discrimination; it demanded “the power to determine the destiny of our Black community.” A Latino leader of the Third World strike at San Francisco State College in 1968 summed it all up nicely: “We don’t want equality, we want self-determination.”

Implicit in the call for self-determination is Jefferson’s argument that governments that rule without “the consent of the governed” should be overthrown. He spoke of “the tree of liberty being watered with the blood of tyrants” and at one point mused about the need for a revolution every 20 years.

Mao Tse-tung, who pinned his hopes on the rising national liberation struggles in the Third World, believed that their fate was inextricably linked to that of the Black liberation movement in the United States. He pointed out that colonialism and imperialism had their roots in the African slave trade, and the capitalist system grew and flourished on the backs of enslaved African American labor. Viewed in that light, Black people’s confrontation with the ambiguous language in the Declaration of Independence is truly a global one.

For 250 years, Americans and people around the world have been fighting over the meaning of 1776. They still are. The Declaration of Independence has always contained profound contradictions. Simultaneously a defense of slavery and an inspiration for slave revolts, a justification for settler expansion and a touchstone for anti-colonial liberation, the Declaration remains contested terrain.

Revolutions may be defined by the class outlook of those who lead them, but they invariably hold out the promise of something bigger, a vision of human liberation. When they fall short, they inspire us to keep struggling—in ways that no cage match can contain.

Peter Shapiro is a longtime labor activist living in Oakland. Many years ago he studied US history at UC Berkeley. More recently, he wrote Song of the Stubborn One Thousand: The Watsonville Canning Strike 1985-87 (Haymarket Books).

The announcement of the US/Iran Memorandum of Understanding allegedly ending the war between Iran and the USA/Israeli axis has brought forth more confusion than I can remember in the aftermath of any crisis. And, how can we even use the word “aftermath” when, shortly after the “signing” of the Memorandum, Israel continued its relentless war against Lebanon, and Iran—as a result—announced another blockade of the Straits of Hormuz! And then, on June 21st, Trump, once again, threatened Iran and specifically threatened to kill the Iranian negotiating team! We will get back to this in a moment. First some background.

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Though the mainstream media and liberal commentators have consistently referred to the USA/Israeli assault as Trump’s supposed “war of choice,” such a designation entirely misses the mark. Would one call Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 a war of choice? Perhaps in a very technical sense since it was not a defensive war, but the reality was that it was a war of naked aggression. History has identified it as such and there has been no ambiguity, except among a certain ring of fascists.

Additionally, consider that Trump twice engaged in what were supposed to be good-faith negotiations with the Iranian government, only to launch military actions against them during the negotiations. The Japanese did exactly the same thing in the leadup to Pearl Harbor and, in fact, Japanese negotiators were in Washington, DC at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. History has been very unkind to the Japanese for such duplicity. Why should it be anything different with Trump?

Let us be clear that this has been a war of aggression on the part of the USA and Israel, countries which had similar and different reasons to attack Iran. They carried out the attack with a high level of hubris, poor intelligence, an irrational view of air power replacing soldiers on the ground, and an overall lack of preparation. In fact, they could not even define the objectives of the war.

During the course of the war there have been liberal commentators who have criticized Trump for failing to enter the war with a set of clear objectives, including but not limited to the failure to overthrow the Iranian theocracy or definitively crippling their military. This point of view is astounding since it suggests that had Trump been clearer about destroying the Iranian military and overthrowing the Iranian regime the war might have been justified! As any student of international law can attest, an unprovoked military assault against a country that offers no evidence of an imminent attack is in violation of international law and such actions have, since World War II, been condemned, with the exception of the “pass” regularly provided to Israel.

The contempt for international law demonstrated by Trump, et al., went hand in hand with a dismissal of human rights. On the first day of the war of aggression, US aircraft killed 175 Iranian civilians, mainly children, in a missile attack on a school. The attack at first appeared inexplicable except when it was later revealed that the US intelligence assessment of that area was completely out of date. Trump’s response? According to the New York Times, Trump replied most recently, “Mistakes are made. War is nasty.”

Trump’s contempt for the victims of US atrocities matches his contempt for people from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean unless, of course, they are Afrikaners from South Africa. It is in Trump’s contemptuous view of the global majority that we see the parallels between the Trump administration on foreign and domestic policy. The ethnic cleansing and atrocious treatment of immigrants in the USA—documented and undocumented—who have been warehoused and denied humane treatment displays the same attitude the Administration has taken towards the Iranians, including attacking civilian targets and attacking non-military Iranian targets on the high seas. The basic principle that applies is that no principle applies! This is what so many people failed to understand when they classified Trump as a supposed isolationist. He and his administration are not isolationists! Instead they are a regime that believes that no law, foreign or domestic, should constrain a US administration from undertaking policies driven by perceived self-interest, however avaricious.

The Memorandum signed by Trump is as odd as a four legged duck. Despite the denunciations of the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action— the Iran nuclear deal of 2015—by Trump and MAGA and their insistence that it be obliterated, Trump has won nothing of substance for the US ruling elite. As has been acknowledged in both Left and Right circles, the Strait of Hormuz was open before the war; the price of oil was down; the global economy was not teetering on the brink of recession; billions of dollars per day were not being thrown into war; and Iranian civilians, neighboring Arabian/Persian Gulf nation-states, along with US personnel in western Asia, were not facing war and terror. Trump has won nothing for the US elite or his MAGgot millions. And, as should be obvious, the people of the United States have won nothing through the pirate assault on Iran.

How should we understand this situation? First, these are the steps of a 15 year old encased in the body of an 80 year old who displays serious cognitive issues. Second, these are the actions of a segment of the US political elite that wishes to reshape the world in the interest of transnational capital, particularly the fossil fuel and tech sectors. Third, these are the actions of an Administration that exists in both unity and tension with Israel wherein it, for ideological and strategic reasons, wishes to reinforce Israel, while at the same time Trump does not particularly value chaos in western Asia (the latter appearing to be a major objective of the Israeli government).

This war and settlement are an abomination. The entire process of engaging in this war of aggression must be denounced, if not ridiculed. The stand of people of good will must be that there was never any justification for this war and, indeed, the USA and Israel need to supply Iran with reconstruction assistance. They cannot afford to walk away and shrug.

There is one more critical lesson. Our fight against rightwing authoritarianism and neofascism at home is not now and has never been separate from our duty to oppose wars of aggression and acts of tyranny on the global stage (the latter including standing with the Iranian people not only against the USA/Israeli aggression but, separately, against the repressive Iranian theocracy). Trump and MAGA have a global vision which includes domination of the Western Hemisphere; transactional relationships with other countries insofar as it benefits transnational capital and US political elites; and strong relationships with other tyrannical powers under a 21st century version of spheres of influence. The global majority has no interest in such a vision. And such a vision will not succeed to the extent to which we succeed in taking down rightwing authoritarianism and neofascism in our respective countries.

We moved far too slowly in responding to the Iran war. We sit awaiting a possible US strike against Cuba, not to mention other possible Trump targets. Those of us standing against rightwing authoritarianism and neofascism simply cannot sit out the global struggle.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is coordinator and cofounder of standing4democracy.org. He is a longtime trade unionist, international solidarity activist, and writer of fiction and nonfiction.

Long ago I peered into a pool of water and fell in love with my own reflection. I was, after all, the most beautiful man in the world. Little did I know that I’d been cursed by Nemesis, goddess of revenge, for ignoring the men and women infatuated with me. She made it so whomever I loved could never love me back. Naturally, the reflection in the pool couldn’t love me, and I was distraught.

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At that point I turned into a daffodil. But now, millennia later, I find myself back in human form—this time in Washington, DC, with its Mount Olympus vibe and phallus-shaped temples poking the heavens. Is Nemesis giving me a second chance?

I come to a giant pool and, forgetting my earlier trauma, peer into the water. Luckily, it’s clouded with globs of green and flecks of blue, so no reflection. Crisis averted.

I wonder what’s brought me to this time, and this place. I seek answers from other mortals around the pool. They are laughing about a “no-bid swimming pool contractor,” scooping up blue flakes, and pointing tiny, seemingly harmless weapons at each other. Several of them compliment my attire—a figure-hugging yet tasteful tunic—and wish me “Happy Pride Month.”

It’s all so confusing. But in the ensuing days I learn much from my fellow mortals—in particular, how the gods of Washington display the very traits that got me in so much trouble. To wit:

• They declare their talents and achievements superior to all. “This was highly sophisticated material... that could last for 100 years, applied by very talented people, many of whom came from the Great State of Oklahoma, where I won 77 out of 77 Counties, THREE TIMES, the only President to ever do so.”

• They make up stories to burnish their image. “The Reflecting Pool water is crystal clear, and our National Park Service team is now vacuuming up the dead algae resting on the bottom of some parts of the Reflecting Pool—just like the destroyed Iranian Navy resting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf.”

• They find others to blame for their purported mistakes. “We’ve had some real problems with Vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool…Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail!”

I hear the mortals bemoan a “personality disorder” and warn of consequences for excessive self-love. But what consequences could there be? The days of condemning sinners to eternal torment or turning them into flowers are long gone.

Still, these gods’ magic is wearing thin; discontent blooms like algae across the land. Out of character for me, but I have to admire these people defying their rulers. In the battles sure to come, I’ll be rooting for my fellow mortals.

Jennifer Thomas is a speculative fiction writer and occasional New Liberator contributor. You can read some of her stories at jenniferthomas.net.

This year and every year, we are reminded that the great liberation of Black people on Juneteenth 1865 is a call towards more life, wider commitment, and deeper freedom. In the shadow of Callais and on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the United States, we must honor the best of what our ancestors have struggled, died, and lived for by struggling and fighting for the hearts and minds of millions.

In this moment we look to an address by W.E.B. DuBois at the Southern Negro Youth Congress in Columbia, South Carolina, October 1946, urging young people to regard the South as the battleground in the struggle for emancipation of working people, Black and white. He called on them to fight for “a new nation, a new economy, a new culture in a South really new.”

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Behold the Land, by W.E.B. DuBois

The future of American Negroes is in the South. Here three hundred and twenty-seven years ago, they began to enter what is now the United States of America; here they have made their greatest contribution to American culture; and here they have suffered the damnation of slavery, the frustration of reconstruction and the lynching of emancipation. I trust then that an organization like yours is going to regard the South as the battle-ground of a great crusade. Here is the magnificent climate; here is the fruitful earth under the beauty of the southern sun; and here, if anywhere on earth, is the need of the thinker, the worker and the dreamer. This is the firing line not simply for the emancipation of the American Negro but for the emancipation of the African Negro and the Negroes of the West Indies; for the emancipation of the colored races; and for the emancipation of the white slaves of modern capitalist monopoly.

Remember here, too, that you do not stand alone. It may seem like a failing fight when the newspapers ignore you; when every effort is made by white people in the South to count you out of citizenship and to act as though you did not exist as human beings while all the time they are profiting by your labor, gleaning wealth from your sacrifices and trying to build a nation and a civilization upon your degradation. You must remember that despite all this, you have allies—and allies even in the white South.

First and greatest of these possible allies are the white working classes about you, the poor whites whom you have been taught to despise and who in turn have learned to fear and hate you. This must not deter you from efforts to make them understand, because in the past in their ignorance and suffering they have been led foolishly to look upon you as the cause of most of their distress. You must remember that this attitude is hereditary from slavery and that it has been deliberately cultivated ever since emancipation.

Slowly but surely the working people of the South, white and Black, must come to remember that their emancipation depends upon their mutual cooperation; upon their acquaintanceship with each other; upon their friendship; upon their social intermingling. Unless this happens each is going to be made the football to break the heads and hearts of the other.

White Youth is Frustrated

White youth in the South is peculiarly frustrated. There is not a single great ideal which they can express or aspire to, that does not bring them into flat contradiction with the Negro problem. The more they try to escape it, the more they land into hypocrisy, lying and double dealing; the more they become, what they least wish to become, the oppressors and despisers of human beings. Some of them, in larger and larger numbers, are bound to turn toward the truth and to recognize you as brothers and sisters, as fellow travelers toward the dawn.

There has always been in the South that intellectual elite who saw the Negro problem clearly. They have always lacked and some still lack the courage to stand up for what they know is right. Nevertheless they can be depended on in the long run to follow their own clear thinking and their own decent choice. Finally even the politicians must eventually recognize the trend in the world, in this country, and in the South. James Byrnes, that favorite son of this commonwealth, and Secretary of State of the United States, is today occupying an indefensible and impossible position; and if he survives in the memory of men, he must begin to help establish in his own South Carolina something of that democracy which he has been recently so loudly preaching to Russia. He is the end of a long series of men whose eternal damnation is the fact that they looked truth in the face and did not see it; John C. Calhoun, Wade Hampton, Ben Tillman are men whose names must ever be besmirched by the fact that they fought against freedom and democracy in a land which was founded upon democracy and freedom.

Eventually this class of men must yield to the writing in the stars. That great hypocrite, Jan Smuts, who today is talking of humanity and standing beside Byrnes for a United Nations, is at the same time oppressing the Black people of Africa to an extent which makes their two countries, South Africa and the American South, the most reactionary peoples on earth, peoples whose exploitation of the poor and helpless reaches the last degree of shame. They must in the long run yield to the forward march of civilization or die.

What Does the Fight Mean?

If now you young people, instead of running away from the battle here in Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, instead of seeking freedom and opportunity in Chicago and New York — which do spell opportunity — nevertheless grit your teeth and make up your minds to fight it out right here if it takes every day of your lives and the lives of your children’s children; if you do this, you must in meetings like this ask yourselves what does the fight mean? How can it be carried on? What are the best tools, arms, and methods? And where does it lead?

I should be the last to insist that the uplift of mankind never calls for force and death. There are times, as both you and I know, when

Tho’ love repine and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply,
‘Tis man’s perdition to be safe
When for truth he ought to die.

At the same time and even more clearly in a day like this, after the millions of mass murders that have been done in the world since 1914, we ought to be the last to believe that force is ever the final word. We cannot escape the clear fact that what is going to win in this world is reason if this ever becomes a reasonable world. The careful reasoning of the human mind backed by the facts of science is the one salvation of man. The world, if it resumes its march toward civilization, cannot ignore reason. This has been the tragedy of the South in the past; it is still its awful and unforgivable sin that it has set its face against reason and against the fact. It tried to build slavery upon freedom; it tried to build tyranny upon democracy; it tried to build mob violence on law and law on lynching, and in all that despicable endeavor, the state of South Carolina has led the South for a century. It began not the Civil War — not the War between the States — but the War to Preserve Slavery; it began mob violence and lynching and today it stands in the front rank of those defying the Supreme Court on disfranchisement.

Nevertheless reason can and will prevail; but of course it can only prevail with publicity — pitiless, blatant publicity. You have got to make the people of the United States and of the world know what is going on in the South. You have got to use every field of publicity to force the truth into their ears, and before their eyes. You have got to make it impossible for any human being to live in the South and not realize the barbarities that prevail here. You may be condemned for flamboyant methods; for calling a congress like this; for waving your grievances under the noses and in the faces of men.

That makes no difference; it is your duty to do it. It is your duty to do more of this sort of thing than you have done in the past. As a result of this you are going to be called upon for sacrifice. It is no easy thing for a young Black man or a young Black woman to live in the South today and to plan to continue to live here; to marry and raise children; to establish a home. They are in the midst of legal caste and customary insults; they are in continuous danger of mob violence; they are mistreated by the officers of the law and they have no hearing before the courts and the churches and public opinion commensurate with the attention which they ought to receive. But that sacrifice is only the beginning of battle; you must re-build this South.

There are enormous opportunities here for a new nation, a new economy, a new culture in a South really new and not a mere renewal of an old South of slavery, monopoly and race hate. There is a chance for a new cooperative agriculture on renewed land owned by the state with capital furnished by the state, mechanized and coordinated with city life. There is chance for strong, virile trade unions without race discrimination, with high wage, closed shop and decent conditions of work, to beat back and hold in check the swarm of landlords, monopolists and profiteers who are today sucking the blood out of this land. There is chance for cooperative industry, built on the cheap power of T.V.A. [Tennessee Valley Authority] and its future extensions. There is opportunity to organize and mechanize domestic service with decent hours, and high wage and dignified training.

“Behold the Land”

There is a vast field for consumers’ cooperation, building business on public service and not on private profit as the main-spring of industry. There is chance for a broad, sunny, healthy home life, shorn of the fear of mobs and liquor, and rescued from lying, stealing politicians, who build their deviltry on race prejudice.

Here in this South is the gateway to the colored millions of the West Indies, Central and South America. Here is the straight path to Africa, the Indies, China and the South Seas. Here is the path to the greater, freer, truer world. It would be shame and cowardice to surrender this glorious land and its opportunities for civilization and humanity to the thugs and lynchers, the mobs and profiteers, the monopolists and gamblers who today choke its soul and steal its resources. The oil and sulfur; the coal and iron; the cotton and corn; the lumber and cattle belong to you the workers, Black and white, and not to the thieves who hold them and use them to enslave you. They can be rescued and restored to the people if you have the guts to strive for the real right to vote, the right to real education, the right of happiness and health and the total abolition of the father of these scourges of mankind, poverty.

“Behold the beautiful land which the Lord thy God hath given thee.” Behold the land, the rich and resourceful land, from which for a hundred years its best elements have been running away, its youth and hope, Black and white, scurrying North because they are afraid of each other, and dare not face a future of equal, independent, upstanding human beings, in a real and not a sham democracy.

To rescue this land, in this way, calls for the Great Sacrifice; this is the thing that you are called upon to do because it is the right thing to do. Because you are embarked upon a great and holy crusade, the emancipation of mankind, Black and white; the upbuilding of democracy; the breaking down, particularly here in the South, of forces of evil represented by race prejudice in South Carolina; by lynching in Georgia; by disfranchisement in Mississippi; by ignorance in Louisiana and by all these and monopoly of wealth in the whole South.

There could be no more splendid vocation beckoning to the youth of the twentieth century, after the flat failures of white civilization, after the flamboyant establishment of an industrial system which creates poverty and the children of poverty which are ignorance and disease and crime; after the crazy boasting of a white culture that finally ended in wars which ruined civilization in the whole world; in the midst of allied peoples who have yelled about democracy and never practiced it either in the British Empire or in the American Commonwealth or in South Carolina. Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity and to walk toward a civilization which will be free and intelligent; which will be healthy and unafraid; and build in the world a culture led by Black folk and joined by peoples of all colors and all races — without poverty, ignorance and disease!

The Center for Political Education is holding a three-part study and discussion for labor leaders, organizers, and activists on how to transform the US labor movement into an antifascist fighting force.

The study will be a space to:

• Assess labor’s response to the current threat.

• Learn from and discuss the relevant history of labor in left-right dynamics in the US and globally.

• Strategize about how to overcome existing obstacles to labor and the trade union movement becoming an antifascist movement.

Faculty include Bill Fletcher Jr., a long-time racial justice, labor, and international activist, scholar, and author (and frequent contributor to the New Liberator); Tej Nagaraja, Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University’s ILR School; Saba Waheed, director of the UCLA Labor Center; and Justin Gilmore, who is on the editorial board of Bay Area Current and teaches political theory at California State Stanislaus.

For more information and to register: bit.ly/laborvfascism