The Brooklyn Rail

With disasters of multiple sorts unfurling daily, how not to enjoy the overturning of New York City’s political apple cart by Zohran Mamdani? This was the biggest upset in American politics since Donald Trump’s first victory in 2016, and it’s a lot more fun.

On September 8, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security announced Operation Midway Blitz, a “major enforcement surge” targeting what officials described as “criminal illegal aliens.” Within two weeks, hundreds of our neighbors had been kidnapped and detained.

In the days leading up to the Argentinian elections of October 26, Prime Minister Javier Milei’s fate seemed sealed. Among the reasons were the economy’s stagnation in the last two quarters; the government’s defeats in Parliament; complaints about corruption; the link with drug trafficking; (earlier) the $LIBRA scam; and the growing social discontent due to the fall in workers’ incomes and pensions.

“Populism” is a vague and nearly meaningless concept. What is real is the fact that the economic and social crisis—the social consequences of the liberal measures taken, the destruction of the old welfare state, the growing gap between wealth and poverty in society—has created a strong polarization of political life. 

Radical thought has lost one of its most corrosive voices. Gianfranco Sanguinetti, legendary member of the Situationist International (SI) and implacable critic of the society of the spectacle, died in Prague on October 3, at the age of seventy-seven.

In 2009, I lived for three months in the Tadamon neighborhood, in the suburbs of Damascus. In this suburb, regime control was less visible—a “periphery,” as sociologists call it, always careful to stay on the right side of the line. In 2011, gatherings began to form. 

What a puzzling picture the new fascism presents, a fascism of lawyers rather than paramilitaries. The lawyers’ specialty: finding loopholes and contradictions within the tens of thousands of administrative regulations that emanate from government agencies. A field day for critics of democratic bureaucracy!

Much has been written about the “gig economy” over the last decade. As more and more workers find themselves unwilling members of “the precariat,” Guy Standing’s prophetic 2011 term for the “dangerous class” of disempowered workers that has exploded in post-industrial economies rings truer than ever.

Outside my apartment building, a large box truck idles its engine uninterrupted for hours and hours, waiting to offload hundreds of smiling parcels. I suppose breathing in carcinogenic particulate matter is but one price you and I pay for the convenience of e-commerce.

The German assault on the Jews has remained “the” Holocaust. Hence the particular power of the example given by the Israel Defense Forces as they proceed methodically to the total destruction of Gaza and Palestinian-occupied areas of the West Bank.

In an illuminating account of a recent Department of Homeland Security job fair, Yanis Varoufuckice relates an encounter with a gaggle of fresh Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recruits looking for a promising new gig in the deportation economy.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the decisions made across the world to shut down normal economic and social life to contain its spread were real enough. But the idea that the global recession of 2020 could be blamed on the virus also obscured other important realities.

There is a saying in Turkish politics: “This is Turkey, anything can happen.” Deployed at the coffee shop or amidst glasses of anise-infused rakı to cope with tragedy or farcical politics, this state-of-acceptance is less zen and more resignation.

These stories are excerpted from a longer work, We Wanted to Change Everything, an account of the author’s years as an activist and member of the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) from the early 1970s to 1983. 1976 was the year when STO shifted its focus away from the factories, because we perceived a lull—a temporary pause—in the sort of workplace struggles that had defined our early years, such as the national Independent Truckers Strike and the Farah garment workers strike in El Paso. None of us realized that we were on the cusp of the massive deindustrialization that would move those industries away for good and cut the heart from a project based on workers “united, disciplined, and organized by the mechanism of capitalist labor.” (Karl Marx) We turned our attention to providing support to national liberation, especially the Puerto Rican independence movement, then engaged in militant and effervescent struggles in Chicago, which appeared to offer more promise. That is another story.

The core argument of We Have Never Been Woke takes this contradiction as its entry point: namely, the appropriation of egalitarian social justice rhetoric by elites to serve their own ends. What’s more, not only do these elites view themselves as sincere champions of social justice causes (i.e., “true believers”), many go so far as to portray themselves as erstwhile victims of the prevailing order—no different than the marginalized communities they support. Victimhood, especially as it relates to trauma, plays a particularly important role in the mystification of social relations and the status obsession of elites.

I was supposed to fly to Vancouver the day of Trump’s military parade in Washington, but after he warned that any protesters in D.C. would “be met with very big force,” leaving for Canada suddenly felt like a dodge. It was only my vacation, after all, but it was his birthday. I have become so used to Trump imposing on my leisure time that what was one more Saturday? And I was eager to see what “No Kings Day” had in store for the nation’s capital. If the demonstrators really were to be “met with very big force,” I thought I should meet it with them—for love of country, I’m tempted to say, though it wasn’t quite that.

Late on the night of June 14, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass sent out a triumphant post on X that summed up the volatile situation in the city, at least from her vantage point.

Appeasement and accommodation, while regrettable within the academic community because of the retreat from sacrosanct ideas such as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, nonetheless set the stage for developments that followed the national elections at the end of last year. Martin Niemöller’s self-confession about his support for the German fascists during the 1930s captures nicely the corner into which the higher education community had boxed itself: "When they came for me, there was no one left who could protest."

For five months now, following the collapse of a train station canopy in Belgrade, Serbs have been protesting against corruption and therefore against the government. On Saturday, March 15, more than 300,000 people took to the streets of Belgrade. This article explores the form of organization adopted by the movement: “plenums”—local, horizontal, autonomous, and self-organized assemblies. It has been translated from the French publication in lundimatin, March 21, 2025.

On April 18, the student blockade of RTS (Radio Television of Serbia, state owned public radio and TV broadcaster), had already been ongoing for five days. On the street before the TV headquarters, people milled about happily, talking and enjoying the sunshine. In the leafy streets surrounding, people sipped coffees, and cats slept on top of Yugos. It was Good Friday, so the Orthodox church around the corner was packed.

Among the 1921 Speech, the Grundprinzipien, and the revolution they emerged from, Bernes finds the essence of his new book, The Future of Revolution. In it he answers at length the question, what ideas are both novel and enduring in the history of communist struggle since Marx? Responding in various registers and investigating up to the present, he names a single overarching one, the workers’ councils.

While we look in today’s ephemeral and fragmented struggles for the signs of a new force of opposition to capitalism, now a destructive global system, it is stimulating to discover the interest that certain people have in the new ideas that emerged from that defeat, emphasizing that “what is new is only the workers’ council, the soviet, born in 1905 in Russia from the fires of the mass strike.”

The Future of Revolution is a brave and daring book with an original angle. It is not a publication to be expected at the current moment, with its increasingly reactionary political and social relations. This is a time of prohibitions. Politicians often no longer try to convince citizens, preferring to impose their will on people. A book about the future of revolution therefore is unexpected but a pleasant surprise. In discussing it, I will focus on what in my view are some of the most important issues it raises, because I cannot touch on all of them.

Writers of lofty books on communist revolution are lucky enough if they are merely wrong. I can therefore only welcome these three worthy responses, kindly hosted by Field Notes, for the opportunity they allow me to clarify what I have left dim.

Donald Trump may not be exactly a genius (not to mention stable), but he has accomplished something historically significant in the few months since he has returned to the presidency. He is “creatively disrupting” present-day institutions—political, economic, and ideological—to make way for a fantasized return to a glorious past of robber-baron exuberance and frankly imperialist resource-grabbing.

In Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, aided by Marx’s analysis of capitalism (and with a nod to Freud’s insights into psychopathology) have succeeded in making some sense of the present era, when the human-caused disruption of the Earth’s climate system is on a path leading to a largely uninhabitable planet—Hothouse Earth.

In the first part of this interview, Emilio Minassian spoke about the integration of Israel/Palestine into global capitalism and the social composition of Palestine. Part two deals with the implications of this social composition for the proletarian and national liberation struggles.

Javier Milei, president of Argentina, is at the center of a storm for promoting the $LIBRA memecoin. Let’s briefly review the facts: On Friday, February 14, $LIBRA was created with a website that as the only information supplied a contact email. At the time of its launch, 82% of the tokens were controlled by just five digital wallets.

Much could be inferred based on the experience of Trump’s first presidency, the ideology reflected in Trump’s campaign (and in Project 2025), and early indications of who his nominees for top government health-related positions might be. But the first few weeks after Trump’s inauguration, marked by multiple presidential executive orders and the actions of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), added a sinister dimension and have created much confusion, chaos, and fear in the public health community about how bad things really could be.

Insisting that “there is such a thing as social class in Palestine” might seem out of place when Gazans have been drowning under bombs for more than a year. No doubt I would refrain from doing this, or I’d do it in another way, had I been hanging about in Gaza and not in the West Bank. But I don’t insist on class in order to downplay the current massacre, but to combat the idea of a radical otherness, of an exteriority, of what is currently happening in relation to capitalist social relations, here as there.

In Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market (London: Verso, 2024), Adam Hanieh—Professor of Political Economy and Global Development at the University of Exeter—sets out to demystify the substance itself through a densely packed yet highly readable history of our interaction with oil at every step from its extraction to its consumption.

In his widely discussed book Spezialoperation und Frieden: Die russische Linke gegen den Krieg [Special Operation and Peace: The Russian Left against the War], Ewgeniy Kasakow documents voices from Russia in opposition to the current war—some of them supporting Ukraine’s “national defense,” some not.