Against the Current

I Love Boosters Written and directed Boots Riley Distributed by NEON I LOVE I Love Boosters. Even more zany than Boots Riley’s first feature, Sorry to Bother You (2018), it is likewise a delightful, surreal excoriation of capitalism and a celebration of the importance of community and worker organizing. That a leftist movie by an… Continue reading The Zany Comedy of I Love Boosters

August 24, 1983: Ken Lawrence speaking at an anti-Klan demonstration. ANTI-FASCISM HAS been essential to my political outlook since 1959, when at age 16 I read the 1943 best-selling book Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America by John Roy Carlson, the pen name of Arthur Derounian. In the early 1980s,… Continue reading Fighting Fascism in the Trump Era

Beginning as a satirial response to the elite designation of students as cockroaches, the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) is able to mobilize thousands of youth. [Massive protests erupted again in India — only months after student mobilizations forced the resignation of the Education Minister — this time over the Modi government Election Commission’s cancellation of… Continue reading Indian State Wages War on Citizens

From Buczacz to Palestine: An Historian’s Journey Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine First-Person Histories in Times of Crisis By Omer Bartov Bloomsbury Academic, 2023 and 2025. 204 pages + notes, bibliography and index, $26.56 paperback. Omer Bartov, an historian who places himself and his family into the narrative. DRIVING TOWARD HIS mother’s hometown of Buczacz… Continue reading From Buczacz to Palestine: An Historian’s Journey

Baldwin, MI – 4 July 2025 – Activists rally against the North Lake Processing Center, reopened as the largest immigrant detention center in the Midwest. The rural facility is owned by the GEO Group and holds over 1500 immigrants detained by ICE. Photo: Jim West This interview by Suzi Weissman was broadcast on Jacobin Radio… Continue reading America’s Detention Nightmare

Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbarium: Radical Ecology and the Global Plantation Edited by Claudia Horn New York: OR Books, 2026, 256 pages, $30 paper. AS THE HOLIDAY season approaches, we have been gifted with a beautiful and inspiring volume, to be savored and shared, thanks to the unique and revolutionary sensibilities of Rosa Luxemburg and the truly… Continue reading Rosa Luxemburg’s Radical Ecology

Marseille students — many as young as 13 or 14 — march for the quality education they deserve. Photo: Wendy Thompson THE MOBILIZATIONS BEGAN in working-class neighborhoods, where secondary school students face a lack of resources. The decrepit state of the schools and the understaffing of teachers, and other school personnel, limit their ability to… Continue reading France’s Student Eruption

Israel: What Went Wrong? By Omer Bartov Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2026. 256 pages, $28 hardcover. ISRAEL’S DECLARATION OF Independence (1948) promised to uphold “the full social and political rights of all of its citizens without distinction of race, creed, or sex.” Initially seen as a democracy and because it arose from the ashes of… Continue reading From Movement to State Ideology

Heat: A History Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet by On Barak University of California Press, 2025, 338 pages, $29.95 paperback. IN THE SUMMER of 2026, some of the worst heat waves to hit the northern hemisphere have provoked hundreds of deadly wildfires in the western United States, Canada and Europe. The… Continue reading Global Heating on the Ground

Dolores Huerta speaking at an impeachment rally for Richard Nixon, April 17, 1974. Photo: Bill Andrews, Daily Worker DOLORES HUERTA, A cofounder and coleader with César Chávez of the United Farm Workers union, became a national icon as the embodiment of Mexican Americans’ struggle for workers’ rights and civil rights, and as a female labor… Continue reading Dolores Huerta: 1930-2026, Complex Life and Legacy

THE FLOWERS WERE the main thing,” one 24-year old Yemeni-born nonprofit worker told me when I asked what images stayed with her from Minnesota’s winter protests. “There was a lot of artwork, like so much visual art, but I feel like the flowers were the main thing that captured my attention.” Frost on the 64… Continue reading Different Soil, Similar Weather & Familiar Seeds: Serbia to Minnesota

Comedian Lenny Bruce used to say “Chicago is so corrupt it’s thrilling.” Chicago residents oppose police brutality and corruption. On the 3rd anniversary that Laquan McDonald was gunned down by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, community members organized a day of remembrance. The CPD, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and IL attorney general Anita Alvarez had… Continue reading Historic Settlement vs. Chicago Police Department

*THIS MATERIAL (INFORMATION) WAS PRODUCED AND/OR DISTRIBUTED BY FOREIGN AGENT KAGARLITSKY, BORIS YULIEVICH, OR CONCERNS THE ACTIVITIES OF FOREIGN AGENT KAGARLITSKY, BORIS YULIEVICH. 18+ From the beginning, police violently attacked French student demonstrators, who responded by hiding their faces. Photo: Dan La Botz THE STRONGEST IMPRESSION from the latest French protests for me is not… Continue reading On the Protests in France

Ken Lawrence is a longtime anti-racist and anti-fascist activist. In the 1970s he produced a slide program about the Buchenwald concentration camp in Nazi Germany, and assembled a collection titled “The Nazi Scourge: Postal Evidence of the Holocaust and the Ruination of Europe,” which he narrated and exhibited across North America and in Europe for… Continue reading Ken Lawrence

While the federal government seeks to intimidate activists, demonstrations continue. Photo: Randy Furst IN LATE SEPTEMBER, flurries of email and text messages reported that Texas state police were surrounding the homes of people in Austin and San Marcos who had participated in a protest vigil the previous Sunday, following the violent arrest and ICE shooting… Continue reading Confronting Rampant Repression

[This article was written in advance of the November 2026 elections, but the print edition will reach Against the Current readers after the election in our November-December issue. — The ATC editors] MUCH OF THIS article will focus on the Democratic Socialists of America and an analysis of DSA’s electoral perspectives and results going into… Continue reading The Rise of Democratic Socialists: Democratic Discontent

THE JOURNALIST AND editor Peter Beinart was invited to engage in a dialogue at the University of Michigan on October 19, 2026, on “Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and American Democracy.” The purpose was to “explore the intersection of law, humanity, morality, racism and bigotry and how we can use this knowledge to oppose the rise of fascism… Continue reading Introducing Peter Beinart

The Sant Marti banner reads, in Catalan, “We’ll stop the housing business.” This is a play off a central slogan of the housing rights movement: “Housing is a right, not a business.” Photo: Kit Adam Wainer MONDAY, OCTOBER 12 I attended my neighborhood meeting for planning the general strike in the Spanish state on November… Continue reading A Month to Prepare for the General Strike

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have a long friendship as seen in their meeting on June 28, 2019. Photo: Kremlin.ru CC 4.0 WHAT WAS EVIDENT to many observers from the onset of Donald Trump’s second presidency is now out in the open: Trump and Vladimir Putin are allies in Russia’s war to amputate and subjugate… Continue reading The Trump-Putin Axis