First, they came for the migrants. Then, they murdered Renee Good.
Bit by bit, for decades, repeated hysterias about migration have brought us here. Official politics has pushed what can acceptably done to the poor and oppressed further and further. 
It has had many justifications: stopping terrorism, preventing crime, protecting jobs, putting citizens first. These days, migration is supposedly why we can’t afford housing.
For decades, both sides raced to outdo each other on persecuting migrants: Republican and Democrat, Liberal and Labor in Australia. 
Donald Trump didn’t invent racism or border controls. He took the tools built by the mainstream parties of capitalism and pushed them to the extreme.
Racism is constantly used by the ruling class to lower the bar for how everyone in society is treated. Once an injustice becomes normalised against one section of society, it’s easier to extend it to others. 
In Australia, Islamophobia was used to justify repressive anti-terror laws after the 11 September attacks in 2001. These laws laid the basis for draconian powers to be used against unionised construction workers. 
The racist Northern Territory intervention introduced welfare quarantining debit-cards for Aboriginal communities, which was later rolled out to working-class communities in Western Sydney.
American society was told the crackdown against migrants was just about criminals who are supposedly in the country “illegally”. Then all of a sudden it wasn’t just the undocumented. “Safety” suddenly required greater surveillance powers, more restrictive laws, more weapons for the cops already killing Black people with impunity, and now armed right-wing thugs are running rampage in US cities. 
Renee Good was a US citizen. She was white. But she was working class. And she stood up for those she was supposed to hate, against her own rulers and their armed thugs. To the system, that was her greatest crime. 
In some way, racism has always been about fear. But it’s not about the fear we have of each other; it’s about the fear our rulers have of us.
Ordinary people have always been the spanner in the works for our rulers and their system’s rapacious and violent drive for profit. 
Workers have fought and pushed back against the greed and exploitation of our bosses, winning better conditions and pay. The struggles for women’s and LGBTI rights have won things our rulers were determined to deny us. Mass movements and revolutions have ended wars and brought down brutal regimes. 
Six years ago, that same solidarity Renee Good embodied became a raging storm when George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police just a few blocks away. 
The city rose up. Millions of people took to the streets across the US. Solidarity demonstrations swept the world. The sheer power of the movement even forced Democratic politicians, who had spent decades building these same racist systems, to cynically take a knee so they could co-opt the movement. The authorities were forced into taking action against Derek Chauvan, Floyd’s killer, to put the genie of mass struggle back in its box.
In the last two years, the torch of global anti-racist solidarity has been taken up by the Palestine movement. Millions have defied their governments attempts to deny and excuse a genocide. The general strikes by Italian workers in solidarity with Gaza have been unprecedented, in a country run by a far-right government after decades of intense Islamophobia.
We have seen past the racist dehumanisation of Palestinians in the face of growing repression and persecution. We have taken to the streets for 2.3 million people somewhere else in the world—people we have never met, and who the media and our governments have encouraged us to ignore, hate and fear.
What’s most dangerous of all is not any individual struggle, but the fact that opposition to injustice and oppression brings us together. It shows us who the real enemy is and who our allies are. It builds our confidence. 
Working-class people don’t spend our lives fixated on increasing profits by grinding other human beings into the dirt. We don’t have wealth or power in this society. We get through our days only by working together and taking care of each other. Collectivity and solidarity are part of who we are.
But the biggest reason our rulers fear us and our capacity for solidarity and the potential power it could unleash.
Black Lives Matter in 2020 gave confidence to the activists who went on to unionise in Amazon’s warehouses. Before that, the civil rights movement gave confidence to Black workers who brought their militancy to unions in the public sector and the auto industries. Standing up to racism doesn’t just improve the lives of people of colour, it builds the fighting capacity of the working class as a whole.
If together, US workers refused to work until immigration agents were driven out of their communities, the loss of profits would be unbearable for the corporations and governments who have collaborated with them. If workers everywhere shut everything down like they did in Italy, the entire global economy would be thrown into chaos. If workers took over the economy and collectively ran everything ourselves, the power of capitalism itself could be ended. 
Jeff Bezos couldn’t pack every Amazon package, Gina Rinehart couldn’t haul all that iron ore by herself. They need us. We don’t need them.
That is why every racist attack on one section of the working class is an attack on the working class as a whole. Without unity, neither white nor black or brown workers can use our collective power. We need each other.
Racism is not natural; it is manufactured. It is cultivated by those with wealth and power to hold down those of us who are denied any say over the world whose wealth we work to create. 
But despite the billions spent on weapons, borders and propaganda campaigns to try and get us to turn on each other, even in these darkest of times, they’ve never managed to completely stamp out our humanity.
The people of Minneapolis hurling snowballs to drive immigration agents out of their neighbourhoods, and the thousands now mobilising around the US, are the latest to take up the torch of solidarity in the face of racism. 
All power to them! Their fight is crucial to pushing back against the racist brutality of Trump and rebuilding the kind of working-class power and confidence we’re going to need in the years ahead—to fight racism, war and the system built on profit that oppresses us all.

Vinil Kumar

Racism is about oppressing the working class

Rage has erupted in the US after a yet-to-be-identified Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good on a snowy residential street in Minneapolis on Wednesday. <a href="https://x.com/micah_erfan/status/2009028538448433562?s=20">Videos circulating online</a> show clearly that Good was shot by the agent multiple times through her car windows as she was attempting to drive past him. 
The shooting took place just six blocks from where George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis Police in 2020—the event that saw the Black Lives Matter movement explode into riots and protests across the US and the world.
Witnesses say Good was acting as a legal observer during an ICE operation in the area. As such, she was one of thousands of ordinary Americans who have participated in <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/chicagos-fightback-against-trumps-deportation-machine">grassroots organising against ICE</a> raids in their communities.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem shamefully <a href="https://www.fox9.com/news/kristi-noem-calls-actions-leading-up-ice-shooting-terrorism-jan-2026">labelled Good a “domestic terrorist”</a> and claimed the ICE agent was acting in self-defence. Donald Trump subsequently made the administration’s line on the murder even more explicit. “The reason these incidents are happening”, he told reporters, “is because the radical left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our law enforcement officers and ICE agents”.
Evidently Trump sees things very differently when it comes to agents of the US state murdering protesters in American cities than he does when similar acts are carried out by countries he regards as enemies. In a post on the right-wing social media platform Truth Social last Friday he said “If Iran kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go”. If only his own citizens might enjoy the same kind of care! 
Shortly after the shooting, a crowd amassed and chased ICE from the scene, despite attempts by Minneapolis police to protect them. By the time the sun was setting, up to ten thousand people had gathered for a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTOoLJ_jJv3/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&amp;igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==">vigil</a>. An activist who spoke there said “We demand full accountability and justice for Renee. Don’t believe the lies. She was murdered in cold blood today. Don’t be confused by this administration”.
On Tuesday, the day before the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security <a href="https://apnews.com/article/immigration-enforcement-ice-noem-minnesota-somali-db661df6de1131a034da2bda4bb3d817">announced</a> its “largest immigration operation ever” in the Minneapolis area, with 2,000 ICE agents set to be deployed. The operation was a political move by the Trump administration to target Minnesota’s Somali community, which has been subjected to a <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/04/us/minneapolis-somali-community-fraud-allegations">racist beat-up</a> in recent weeks centring on right-wing conspiracy theories about fraud in Somali-run childcare centres.
The Trump administration has instigated a steep rise in the number of ICE arrests and detentions. As of 14 December, ICE held nearly 70,000 people in detention, a record high. Many of those were detained without trial in violent, armed sweeps of working-class and migrant communities.
Good’s murder, and the ICE-led reign of terror inflicted on migrant communities across the US since Trump took office a year ago, are symptomatic of the priorities of American capitalism in the current moment. The American ruling class, increasingly nervous about maintaining their domination over a world where China is on the rise, have lined up behind Trump and his project to aggressively reassert the strength of American imperialism through brute force. 
Abroad, this looks like enthusiastic support for the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s aggressive operations against the Iranian regime and its proxies across the Middle East. It means a foreign policy unconcerned with even the pretence of a “rules-based order” and more inclined to strategies like kidnapping foreign heads of state in the dark of night. 
At home, where the Trump administration is <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/699221/trump-approval-rating-drops-new-second-term-low.aspx">increasingly unpopular</a>, opposition must be intimidated or stamped out by force. Palestine activists have been brutalised and targeted for deportation, basic civil liberties have come under attack, and migrants have been scapegoated and locked-up in America’s rapidly expanding network of detention centres. 
Democrats have condemned the killing, with former candidate for vice president and current Minnesota governor Tim Walz promising to seek justice. But the Democrats are utterly incapable and unwilling to stand up to Trump beyond censorious words. 
At the same time as he was holding a press conference where he told ICE to “get the fuck out”, Minneapolis’ Democrat mayor Jacob Frey’s cops were protecting ICE agents from protestors at the scene of Good’s murder. Walz has put the Minnesota national guard on notice in case further demonstrations get out of hand—the same troops he mobilised to smash up Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. 
Hope for the type of movement that can put Trump and ICE back into their boxes lies squarely with ordinary Americans like Renee Nicole Good and the millions who are outraged by her murder. Tens of thousands have already mobilised in cities like Chicago and New York, with more mass protests planned for the coming days. In the words of a man who rushed to the scene of Good’s murder to <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DTOdd3hDPM1/">confront</a> ICE, “you can’t kill us all”.

Riley K

ICE murder sends shockwaves through the US

Suddenly, Greenland doesn’t seem so outlandish. Not since before the end of the Cold War has the United States so forcefully and directly intervened in the Western Hemisphere. Amassing an armada to blockade Venezuela before bombing the country and kidnapping its president. Threatening the president of Colombia with a similar fate. Suggesting action against Mexico as well, while intimating that it’s the end of days for the Cuban government—and indeed any government that doesn’t toe Washington’s line. The US government couldn’t be clearer about its intentions, which White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/05/politics/video/senior-white-house-aide-stephen-miller-says-us-military-threat-to-maintain-control-of-venezuela-digvid" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">outlined in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper yesterday</a>: 
“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world—the real world, Jake—that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time ... The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we’re going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”
The audacity is shocking, but this didn’t come out of nowhere. And it is certainly <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/the-long-and-bloody-legacy-of-the-us-in-latin-america">not unprecedented</a>. The first Trump administration made no secret of its desire to shore up what it, and almost every US government of the last 200 years, considers to be its property and primary “sphere of influence”. So in 2019, national security adviser John Bolton, <a href="https://ni.usembassy.gov/national-security-advisor-ambassador-john-r-bolton-delivers-remarks-at-bay-of-pigs-veterans-association-brigade-2506/">while announcing sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua</a>, declared: “Today, we proudly proclaim for all to hear: the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well”.
That policy, outlined in 1823 and later named after its originator, James Monroe, the country’s fifth president, was a warning to the European powers that the US would not tolerate them interfering in the region. It was a bold assertion by a pre-industrial state that had only recently gained independence: we claim an exclusive right to oversee the Western Hemisphere.
Eighty years later, <a href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/roosevelt-corollary#transcript">the so-called Roosevelt Corollary</a>, named after Theodore Roosevelt, expanded the Monroe Doctrine. The president addressed the Congress in 1904, declaring that the United States would not only oppose European influence, but directly intervene into the affairs of regional states:
“Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”
This was a precedent setting doctrine for more than a century of overt and covert interventions into the Caribbean and Central and South America. Now, the White House is asserting the “Trump Corollary”, outlined in the latest <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf">national security strategy</a>, issued in November. The document lists the “restoration of American power and priorities” as one of five “core, vital
national interests”:
“[T]he United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets.”
So much for all the ink spilled by foreign policy commentators about Trump’s purported “isolationism” and reluctance to deploy US power. The national security strategy at times reads like a white supremacist manifesto. Understandably, much of the commentary related to it has focused on its warnings about the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” in Europe and its attacks on European governments for facilitating decades of non-European people’s migration into the continent.
Yet, for all its departures from convention, the core goal of this administration is consistent with all other US governments: retaining US geopolitical pre-eminence. Indeed, ever since the <a href="https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss1987.pdf">first formal strategy document</a> issued by the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan in 1987, US governments have used the language of mobilising or employing “all facets of national power” to maintain US dominance of the world. This motif appeared in the grand strategy documents of presidents <a href="history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss1997.pdf">Bill Clinton</a> and <a href="history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss2002.pdf">George W. Bush</a>, Barack Obama’s <a href="obamawhitehouse.archives.govhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/national_security_strategy.pdf">2010 national security strategy</a>, Trump’s <a href="trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf">2017 national security strategy</a> and <a href="dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf">2018 national defence strategy</a>, and Joe Biden’s 2022 <a href="whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf">national security</a>, <a href="media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/2022-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY-NPR-MDR.PDF">national defence</a> and <a href="jcs.mil/Portals/36/NMS%202022%20_%20Signed.pdf">national military</a> strategies.
Key differences today are, first, that there is a belated recognition in Washington that a war against China in Asia is probably unwinnable; and, second, that the growth of Chinese industrial power and economic sophistication have been severely underestimated. Indeed, Trump’s and Biden’s attempts to use the tariff weapon have resulted only in Beijing increasing it’s industrial output and positive trade balance with the world, while precipitating a series of Chinese high-tech breakthroughs considered almost unthinkable just a decade ago. 
The “Trump Corollary” is therefore refining US imperialism’s approach. China is now South America’s main trading partner; Beijing has invested billions of dollars in nearly two dozen seaports and the broader continental logistics network, firmly integrating several supply chains into its economic orbit. Plus there are increasing financial and military links. So US strategists are initiating what they consider a rearguard action to shore up their region as an exclusive US domain.
Last year, Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/16/panamas-president-alleges-us-threatening-to-revoke-visas-over-china-ties" target="_blank" title="alleged" rel="noreferrer noopener">alleged</a> that the US embassy threatened to revoke visas of Panamanian officials because of China’s close ties to the country. And after the US bailed out Argentina, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters that President Javier Milei was “committed to getting China out” of the country. Now, the “Corollary” is in full view: a full-throated strategy not only of political interference, but of economic imperialism:
“We must re-secure our own independent and reliable access to the goods we need to defend ourselves and preserve our way of life. This will require expanding American access to critical minerals and materials … [And] establishing or expanding access in strategically important locations…
“Non-Hemispheric competitors have made major inroads into our Hemisphere, both to disadvantage us economically in the present, and in ways that may harm us strategically in the future. Allowing these incursions without serious pushback is another great American strategic mistake of recent decades. 
“Successfully protecting our Hemisphere also requires closer collaboration between the U.S. Government and the American private sector. All our embassies must be aware of major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts. Every U.S. Government official that interacts with these countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.”
All countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, then, have been put on notice that a new era of US imperialist meddling has begun. It’s here that Greenland again comes into focus, both as a resource rich territory—with significant deposits of rare earth elements, other minerals and metals, and offshore oil and gas—and as an island of military value. 
In the interview with CNN’s Tapper, Miller, the White House aide, reiterated that the position of the Trump administration, going back to the president’s first term, is that Greenland should become part of the US and that there is no basis for Denmark’s territorial claim. Indeed, the formal position of the US government is that Greenland is a required territory for NATO’s operations in the arctic. Because the US is the only NATO signatory capable of projecting power in that area, Miller concluded, “obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States”.
There’s a precedent. During an April 1941 White House conference, Denmark’s ambassador to the US, Henrik de Kauffmann, told reporters: “Greenland [belongs] to the American continent”. The New York Times concurred, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1940/04/11/archives/greenland-raises-hemisphere-issue-monroe-doctrine-to-be-applied-if.html">noting</a>
that the island “lies well within the Western Hemisphere on all standard maps”. A short time later, President Franklin Roosevelt <a href="https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/excerpts-from-the-press-conference-42">declared</a>: “We are applying to Denmark what might be called a carrying out of the Monroe Doctrine ... and we are protecting Greenland against any other European nation”.
This was all occasioned by Germany’s occupation of Denmark, beginning the previous year. Roosevelt turned Greenland into a US protectorate, establishing military bases and taking control of its minerals, using the territory as a base of operations when it later entered the Second World War.
So again, the “Trump Corollary” isn’t as radical a departure as many suggest. But it is nevertheless a major escalation. We have become accustomed to referring to postwar periods: the post-Second World War era, the post-Vietnam era, the post-Cold War era. But we have potentially entered a new and dangerous prewar era of intense superpower jockeying in which bloc politics returns to the fore.

Ben Hillier

The Trump doctrine: a new prewar era?

President Trump’s intervention in Venezuela is just the latest move in a long and bloody history of US imperialism in Latin America. As US leaders prepare to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary this year, there is little to celebrate for the region south of its border, which Yale University academic Greg Grandin has aptly labelled the “workshop” of the US empire. 
When the thirteen former British colonies on the North American east coast formed the United States in the late eighteenth century, the dominant power on the American continent was the Spanish empire. But it was an empire in decay and, by the early 1820s, a series of independence wars ended over three centuries of Spanish rule in most of Latin America (as well as Portuguese rule in Brazil). The defeat of the Spanish, however, only intensified imperialist competition in the region as other European powers saw opportunities on the resource-rich continent. The US entered the contest with its Monroe Doctrine: a declaration of US hegemony in the region, ruling it off limits to the European powers. Through a series of treaties it was fairly successful in stopping any direct recolonisation of the area.
The threat of European imperialism was one of the main factors guiding US actions in the region in the early nineteenth century. The other was slavery. From the time of independence, the US southern states had maintained slavery in the face of a northern abolitionist movement by incorporating new slave states into the union. This gave rise to a strong movement in the South pushing for expansion into Mexico and Central America. The strategy bore fruit with the Mexican–American war of the late 1840s, US victory ending with the incorporation of the land roughly from Texas to California—more than half of Mexico’s territory. The US emerged from the war as a true continental power, its borders now stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
After the defeat of the southern confederacy in the 1860s, US imperialism in Latin America took on a different form. Territorial expansion was no longer its primary objective. With slave labour abolished, the forces of industrial capitalism were unleashed. Vast plains to the west, enthusiastic investors, and millions of former slaves and impoverished white workers provided the three essential ingredients for capitalist development: land, labour, and capital. The result was that the US in the second half of the nineteenth century experienced rapid capitalist development. Within a few decades, it became the world’s largest industrial and agricultural producer.
But underneath the growth hid a dangerous contradiction. The productive capacity of the US economy grew so large that by the end of the century the domestic market could no longer absorb its output. Rapid growth, consequently, was accompanied by a series of deep recessions due to severe falls in prices as supply so quickly outpaced demand. The expansion of the post-civil war period, therefore, was also a period of extreme crisis for the US ruling class. Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge, in an 1898 speech, acknowledged the problem: 
“American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours ... Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? ... The power that rules the Pacific ... is the power that rules the world. And, with the Philippines, that power is and will forever be the American Republic.”
This is the background to the Spanish–American war of the late 1890s. The US could never reach its true imperial potential while the European powers denied it access to certain markets and held colonies. The defeat of the last remnants of the Spanish empire, which still held important Caribbean islands such as Cuba and Pacific islands like the Philippines, was the pre-condition for the US entering a new period of imperialism in the early twentieth century. As one lawyer, Brooks Adams, wrote: “This war is the first gun in the battle for the ownership of the world”.
Victory in the war in 1898 established Cuba as nominally independent but an effective US colony. The only reason it did not become the 51st state was because the US sugar industry opposed the additional competition that would have come from Cuban sugar being sold tariff-free in the US market. The Philippines, however, was the real prize. The US occupied the country until the end of the second world war, crushing several independence movements.
With dominance secured in both the Atlantic and Pacific, a central priority became the construction of a canal linking the two oceans, allowing US firms privileged access to a key global trade route. The only problem was that the proposed site lay in Panama, which at the time was a province of Colombia rather than an independent state. When Colombia rejected a proposal to lease the territory, the US threatened military action and backed a separatist movement. A treaty was then swiftly concluded with a small group of Panamanian elites, granting US control over the canal in exchange for diplomatic recognition. This period, beginning with the Spanish–American war, opened a period of even more aggressive US imperialism. The supposedly peace-loving liberal President Woodrow Wilson expressed the sentiment in 1907: 
“Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.” 
Wilson’s words quickly became true. As Sydney Lens writes in his book The Forging of the American Empire: 
“By 1913 ... the United States had gained control of the tin industry in Bolivia, copper in Chile and Peru, and meat packing in Argentina and Paraguay. Its economic role was still distinctly secondary to Britain in that part of the world, but the American star was rising. J.P. Morgan and W.R. Grace operated the Chilean-Andean railroad, and American firms were making inroads into river transportation in Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, and Peru. John Bull [England] was already outpaced for the trade of Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela, and being pressed in Peru and Ecuador ... By making the Caribbean an “American lake” the United States guaranteed its dominance over the banana industry of Panama and Guatemala, the coffee industry of Haiti and El Salvador, the sugar industry of the Dominican Republic.”
And when economic means failed, military force was always available. In 1915, the US invaded Haiti because it would not cede control of its customs houses, resulting in a nineteen-year occupation. A year later, it invaded the Dominican Republic. A 1922 report from the US Congress, while the occupation was ongoing, admitted that “homes were burned; natives were killed; tortures and cruelties committed; and ‘Butcher’ Weyler’s horrible concentration camps were established”.
But for the US rulers, nothing would be allowed to stand in the way of the country’s rise. In the twenty years after the Spanish–American war, US manufacturing output increased six-fold. The two world wars further accelerated this trajectory. As the Cold War began and the European powers lost the last remnants of their empires, US control over Latin America was stronger than it had ever been.
Despite US hegemony, however, Latin America was one of the regions in which Soviet influence reached furthest. Through local communist parties, Russia established itself in some countries within the working class and the left. In other cases, such as Cuba and Nicaragua, pro-Moscow groups took state power. In the post-war period, therefore, the battle to maintain Latin America under US domination against Soviet influence became the lens through which foreign policy planners viewed the region. As US diplomat and the great theoriser of Soviet containment, George Kennan, said in 1948: “We have half the world’s wealth, but only 6 percent of its population. Our real task is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity”.
That “pattern of relationships” in Latin America took the form of direct US military interventions (including biological and chemical weapons attacks, and forced starvation through the poisoning of crops), backing military coups, sponsoring right-wing death squads, and plunging entire countries into years-long civil wars. 
In 1944, a popular revolution in Guatemala overthrew a dictatorship and led to the election of a reformist government. But after ten years and subsequent democratic elections in which Jacobo Arbenz was elected, the US had had enough. This was particularly the case when the interests of the US United Fruit Company were threatened. Arbenz initiated a mild agrarian reform program, expropriated only unused land and offering compensation to the owners. The land reform program, consequently, had virtually zero impact on the United Fruit Company. Nonetheless, in 1954, the US orchestrated a coup to overthrow Arbenz. The military and paramilitary units unleashed horrendous violence upon the civilian population, murdering, raping and torturing thousands.
The Arbenz government was what US scholar Noam Chomsky calls “the threat of a good example”: any government or movement that, even in modest fashion, tries to improve the lives of ordinary people, is a threat to US interests because it offers the example of an alternative. This idea took on increased importance for the US after the Cuban revolution in 1959. When the forces led by Fidel Castro overthrew a US-backed dictator 90 miles from Florida, it set off major alarm bells for US foreign policy planners. Two years later, when those same rebels declared themselves to be communists and allied themselves with the Soviet Union, the US decided to make an example of Cuba. A strict trade embargo was placed on the island and, in 1961, the CIA trained a group of right-wing mercenaries to invade and overthrow the government. Although it failed, a clear message had been sent to the entire continent: this was the price of defiance.
The problem for the US, however, was that the Cuban revolution inspired the Latin American left. In nearly every country, guerilla groups formed with the goal of repeating some variation of the Cuban revolution. This combined with the radical period of the 1960s and 1970s, in which a series of urban mass movements developed across the continent. In some cases, the movements toppled governments, both democratic and dictatorship. In response, the US unleashed its infamous death squads in Central America and backed military regimes in South America, such as Chile.
Nicaragua was a prime example. Its case goes back to the early 1930s, when President Roosevelt, under the “good neighbour” policy, supported a military coup that brought Anastasio Somoza to power. He and his two sons established a family dynasty that ruled for 43 years. Nicaragua suffered a particularly violent fate because it was the only other country after Cuba in which a left-wing guerilla group actually won state power. The Sandinista National Liberation Front, financially and politically backed by Castro, won mass support among the peasantry and working class and played the leading role in the revolutionary overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. 
When the Sandinistas took power, they gave land to the peasantry, expanded healthcare and education, and lifted a big group of the population out of poverty. As a result, Washington decided that Nicaraguans had to be punished. It was another case of the “threat of a good example”. When President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the US became uncompromisingly committed to the violent overthrow of the Sandinista government. The CIA trained opposition paramilitaries and by early 1982 had launched airstrikes in the country. Despite the Sandinistas holding and winning elections in 1984, they lost in 1990. After a decade of civil war and more than 30,000 lives lost, they voluntarily gave up power to a US-backed candidate.
The early decades of the 21st century in Latin America gave rise to the so-called pink tide. Across the continent, left-wing, reforming leaders won elections on the promise of wealth redistribution to the poor and the working class. Many governments achieved significant improvements in quality of life for millions of people, largely thanks to China’s vast demand for Latin America’s resources. But the economics of this model were undercut around 2011 as China’s growth began to slow, leading many left governments, like the Workers’ Party in Brazil, to implement austerity. While some were prepared to challenge US economic control in the region, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who partially nationalised the oil industry, they were all bound to the logic of capitalism and the necessary alliances with imperial powers that stems from it. As such, the independence from the US that some of them won was replaced by reliance on China.
Remembering the bloody history of the United States in Latin America is essential in light of Washington’s latest criminality in Venezuela, home to the world’s largest known oil reserves. With China rapidly catching the US economically and militarily, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza having laid bare the sham of international law, there is little need for Trump to cloak US imperialism in the language of “democracy” and “liberty”. The might makes right imperialism of the early twentieth century is returning.

Tom Sullivan

The long and bloody legacy of the US in Latin America

The US has launched airstrikes against Venezuela, kidnapped its president, Nicolas Maduro, and is attempting a regime change—although at this point the government still stands. The order for this naked display of gangster imperialism came from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida club for the one percent, where just days earlier he auctioned a portrait of Jesus for US$2.75 million and said his new year’s resolution was “peace on Earth”. 
There can be no peace with the Washington regime enforcing order. On every continent, military bases, CIA stations and multinational companies are engaged in a global war to continue or expand US domination. Extortion and terrorism are the norm for this rogue state. But this latest act is so brazen, so arrogant, that it beggars belief. This is the lawlessness of a criminal syndicate; the act of a mob-boss state.
Regime change in Venezuela has been a long-held goal of US foreign policy planners since the left-wing Hugo Chavez won the presidency in 1999 and initiated a program of wealth redistribution towards the poor and the working class. The country’s oil wealth underpinned the new president’s program. With the world’s largest known reserves, Chavez partially nationalised the sector. He and his successor Maduro increasingly turned to China as Washington turned the screws, including signing deals to sell oil at below world market prices.
Trump’s actions must be understood in the context of intensifying imperialist tensions between the United States and China. For Washington, the world’s largest oil reserves in a region it considers its “backyard” being sold at cut-price rates to its principal geopolitical rival was scandalous. This was part of the motivation for the US-backed coup attempt in 2002, when Chavez was detained for two days but ultimately failed. It also inspired the first Trump administration’s recognition of little-known politician Juan Guaido as the country’s “true” president. Guaido unsuccessfully called for the military to oust Maduro in a coup and publicly supported a US invasion.
While oil is important in US calculations, Maduro’s ouster is part of a broader attempt to shore up the Western hemisphere under US domination. Many governments have been overthrown in this region purely for not toeing the US line and displaying some concern for their own citizens’ wellbeing. Also, the region is home to crucial natural resources and has gradually been slipping out of US control. Such a brazen move to oust the leader of a country that has forged closer ties to China and Russia sends a clear message about what the US is prepared to do to maintain its hegemony.
Why now? Regional dynamics are important. The first decade and a half of the 21st century was dubbed the “pink tide”, as left-wing or left-leaning governments came to power across the continent. These leaders often used Chinese demand for their natural resources to lift millions of people out of poverty. But this model began to break down around 2011 when Chinese economic growth began to slow. Many of pink tide leaders turned to austerity and authoritarianism. 
Over the last decade, the political pendulum in the region has tipped back to the right. But it was not the same right as before the pink tide. Today, it is a hardened and radicalised right, inspired by Trump. Such governments are in power in Argentina, El Salvador, Bolivia and just won elections in Chile. 
Crucially, there is also a government-in-waiting in Venezuela. Since Chavez’s first election victory, Venezuela’s far right have openly supported US intervention. Now, they have finally got their wish. At the time of writing, it’s unclear how much, if any, of the US’s actions were coordinated with Venezuela’s far-right leaders and dissident military officers. 
Should they end up in power, however, the plan is clear. Their most prominent leader, Maria Corina Machado, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, recently summed it up: “We will bring rule of law. We will open markets. We will have security for foreign investment and a transparent massive privatisation program that is waiting for you.”
That’s the “peace on Earth” that Trump, and apparently the Nobel committee, desire: a fire sale of public assets to predatory US companies, and a government pliant to Western corporate and geopolitical interests.
Many questions remain unanswered. The role of the Venezuelan military looms large. Its top echelons are deeply integrated into the Venezuelan capitalist class, running important sections of the economy. Along with Venezuela’s large military budget, this has underpinned their loyalty to the government for many years. It is unclear how the leading generals will respond to Maduro’s ouster, but voluntarily handing over their control of the world’s largest oil reserves seems unlikely.
There are more questions. Will the opposition unite around a clear program and person? It’s impossible to know, but the more moderate sections are not unanimous in supporting US intervention. How much of this is driven by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose political career has been animated by an almost manic desire for regime change in Venezuela and Cuba? 
What political impact will this have domestically in the US and on Trump’s MAGA movement? The legacies of Iraq and Afghanistan left a section of Trump’s base strongly opposed to regime change operations. It is notable that the few statements by Trump and Rubio have framed the actions as a “law enforcement” operation to bring a “criminal” drug trafficker to justice. 
Most important of all, how does the Venezuelan population respond? Having turned the country into a corrupt, authoritarian state stalked by poverty weakened the strong support Chavez enjoyed, but the Venezuelan population also has a long history of opposing US imperialism. Many understand that Washington’s crippling sanctions regime has been a key source of economic misery in the country. They know that Washington will only plunder them further.
Whatever the answers to these questions may be, the ouster of Maduro marks a step towards greater, and more naked, imperialist aggression. After Israel’s genocide in Gaza, there now appears little need for even the pretence of international law. Might makes right is the guiding ethos of US imperialism. There will be no peace until the empire falls.

US gangster regime kidnaps Venezuelan president

Zohran Mamdani has revealed at astonishing speed that he is no leader of the left, no barrier to Trumpism, and certainly no champion of the working class. 
Before even being sworn in as mayor of New York City, he has already signalled to the capitalist class that he is safe and eager to play by their rules. Wall Street, the real estate industry, and business elites have all been courted. He kept Jessica Tisch—the hard-right police chief appointed by former mayor Eric Adams—and pledged to maintain NYPD numbers. He and fellow Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)-aligned congressional representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez refused to support a DSA challenger to Democratic establishment kingpin Hakeem Jeffries. And now, the crowning humiliation: Mamdani sat down with US President Donald Trump to find areas where they could “work together”.
This at a moment when Trump’s agenda grows more vicious by the day: the mass sackings, the Gestapo-like rounding up of immigrants, the love-in with the butcher of Gaza, the attacks on trans and women’s rights, the undermining of science and public health, the scrapping of environmental protections—the list goes on. And this at a moment when working-class people across the country are protesting Trump in record numbers—marching in the streets and putting their bodies on the line to stop Trump’s ICE brown-shirts kidnapping their neighbours and workmates. 
Mamdani was supposed to be the political expression of this resistance. He was supposed to be a voice for those in Trump’s crosshairs: “Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas”. as he promised in his victory speech. He pledged to “respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves”. But what Mamdani’s given us is a smiling photo-op with the world’s most tyrannical and dangerous ruling-class figure. God help us if anyone thinks this is socialism. 
“I am looking forward to delivering for New Yorkers in partnership with the president”, Mamdani said about the city’s most notorious parasite billionaire. The meeting was “productive” in addressing the cost-of-living crisis, Mamdani said, referring to the figure responsible for slashing funding for public education, food assistance and healthcare. Mamdani nodded and smiled, and nodded and smiled some more, as Trump dropped in references to all of his actual policies: deporting immigrants, increased policing, more hand-outs to property developers. 
The line being spun by Mamdani’s team and supporters is that this abject display of bootlicking constitutes a strategic masterstroke that has put Trump on the backfoot. This <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1355682693329968&amp;set=a.201905705374345">statement</a>
from Occupy Democrats after the meeting was typical: “This was a masterclass on Mamdani’s part. He walked into the MAGA White House, conducted negotiations for the betterment of New Yorkers, and came out looking strong and respected. Meanwhile, Trump looked spineless and weak”. Yet Mamdani achieved not a single concession, not a single win. 
What Mamdani did achieve was a setback in the fight against Trump and his agenda. He succeeded in signalling to his supporters that Trump is not our enemy to oppose and challenge at every opportunity. At a time when Trump’s “populism” is being undermined by his Gatsby parties at Mar-a-Lago at the same time as food aid programs for the poorest Americans are being suspended, Mamdani helped him revive some of his “forgotten people” credibility. 
If Mamdani’s approach was masterful, then officials like Michelle Wu—the mayor of Boston who has refused to meet with Trump in protest at his anti-immigrant policies, among other things—must be woefully inept. What seems like principle, it turns out, is just bad political advice. 
In fact, we should be congratulating every head of state and every politician currently crawling after Trump—including the contemptible Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong—for their strategic genius. Every Democrat who has voted with Trump and capitulated to him should be lauded for their political acumen. Speaking truth to power is out; the age of fawning has arrived. 
The left should have no time for any of this. The only principled response to Trump is resistance. Yes, Trump controls the purse strings, but the powerful always do—that’s what makes them powerful. Our response can’t be appeasement so that we can fund free buses. Our response should be: let Trump cut off funding and make himself the enemy of free buses—then we’ll fight him some more.
There is plenty of evidence that there is a basis for such a fight. The recent No Kings rallies saw record turnouts, and all across the country, people have been mobilised to defend themselves against the terror inflicted by ICE raids. Millions are choosing resistance, not appeasement and sucking up. At the very least, a self-proclaimed socialist should follow this lead. 
Genuine socialist politics is, at a bare minimum, about answering the power of the capitalist class, and its ability to sabotage and blackmail, with workers’ collective power. We use the weapons of our
side—strikes, protests, walkouts—not theirs—schmoozing, sucking up, favour trading. We are not always strong enough to win the battles but by mobilising collectively on the streets and in our workplaces, and by refusing to capitulate, we demonstrate the way forward, gain experience and learn more about the sort of struggles that will be needed to win. 
The response to the Trump-Mamdani meeting has been just as instructive as the meeting itself. Right-wing, pro-Trump media celebrated Trump’s dominance and Mamdani’s acquiescence. The Washington Post opened its <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/11/21/zohran-mamdani-donald-trump-oval-office/">editorial</a>
with the quip: “What are a few deportation threats among friends?” Many Democrat-aligned outlets responded with respect and approval for the mayor-elect’s display of civility, which they believe won him the upper hand over Trump. Mara Gay in the New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/opinion/zohran-mamdani-trump-meeting-white-house.html">described</a>
Mamdani’s performance as: “a vivid display of political shrewdness and pragmatism”.
The most unconvincing political interpretation came from the DSA—the organisation to which Mamdani belongs. Riffing off a Fox News statement that the meeting had been a “Showdown with Socialism”, the DSA posted on social media in response: “Socialism won!” It then put out a video snippet of the meeting with the caption: “Mamdani called Trump a fascist to his face”. Mamdani did no such thing. Trump saved him from having to answer the fascist question, thereby turning it to Trump’s advantage and making Mamdani look weak. This ludicrous claim was nothing but a desperate attempt to salvage left credibility from a disastrous political submission. Talk about fake news.
DSA-aligned Jacobin has published numerous defences of Mamdani in a similar vein. One <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/11/trump-mamdani-oval-office-meeting">piece</a>
goes as far as to argue that because Trump once pledged to lower prices, Mamdani has enticed him to deliver. Another <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/11/mamdani-democratic-socialism-trump-conservatives">piece</a>
by Ben Burgis credits Mamdani’s obsequious behaviour for rescuing the reputation of socialists after Congress’s anti-socialist resolution. As if it is a win for the left that Mamdani has so emphatically proven he is no hardline socialist or oppositionist. 
In the same piece, Burgis also argues that democratic socialists of Mamdani’s ilk “want to empower workers and communities through social ownership and democratic control of society’s productive resources”. That this has nothing to do with Mamdani’s outlook does not appear to bother Burgis. And founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara has chimed in with a <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/11/socialism-mamdani-dsa-organizing-leadership">long think piece</a> about everything that socialism is in the near and the long term, without even a fleeting consideration that maybe it doesn’t involve standing around smiling alongside a fascist in the White House. 
The approach from Jacobin and the DSA is to justify the inexcusable on the one hand while giving left cover on the other. <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/whatever-happened-to-the-squad">Once again</a>, their aim is not to further working-class struggles but to defend their elected elites. For Sunkara “having patience and being supportive” of Mamdani is the highest priority. Power and relevance matters more than working-class power.
This whole unsavoury episode raises broader questions about what the left should be fighting for. We know there is an audience for left-wing politics and solutions; polling shows it, the vote for Mamdani shows it. At the same time, people’s horizons are low, after years of neoliberalism, after defeats of the left and the general acceptance of liberalism. The fact that there has been no obvious backlash against Mamdani’s capitulation from his supporters tragically confirms this. 
But even before this capitulation, the fact that Mamdani was seen as a socialist in any sense reflects how drained of meaning the term has become, especially in the US. He is committed to working within the Democratic Party and there is nothing radical about his program of rent freezes, free public transport, and universal childcare. These are supportable measures, but they also fit within the parameters of capitalism. 
The crisis of capitalism requires much more radical solutions than this. We can’t pretend otherwise to avoid embarrassing progressive politicians. And we shouldn’t play down their limitations or be afraid to point them out when necessary. 
We need uncompromising resistance to the far right, and to capitalism. We need to understand that capitalism won’t be changed from on high by politicians committed to working within its structures, especially not those who capitulate at the first hurdle. As has always been the case, workers need to use their own power to win concessions, and to build up a democratic alternative to capitalism worthy of the name socialism. 
For years, the dominant sections of the US left have insisted that Bernie Sanders, AOC, and now Mamdani represent stepping stones toward socialism. Criticism was dismissed as sectarian. We were told the left needed patience, tact, and strategic flexibility. A decade on from Sanders, the “democratic socialist” current within the Democrats has produced no independent organisation, no class-rooted movement, no major struggles and no radical ideological current. Sanders reaffirmed his loyalty to the party of capital and empire. AOC voted to fund ICE and backed funding the Israeli war machine—and has been rewarded with a stable career in the liberal establishment. And now Mamdani, hailed as the next great hope, immediately dissolves into liberal conciliation before even taking office.
We have also been told repeatedly by reformists and liberals that the electoral successes of figures like this can help build movements by raising expectations. But so far, that hasn’t happened. More often, people get dragged to the right justifying the manoeuvres of progressive politicians, or they become demoralised by the sell-outs, or just drift into passivity. 
On the far left, a version of this same argument is that when expectations are raised and then dashed (by betrayals and capitulations of reformist leaders), it is an opportunity for masses of people to learn important political lessons and break to the radical left. Sometimes this happens, but only when the far left and the workers’ movement are organised, have real weight in society and are politically confident. Without that, these disappointments often breed cynicism or push people back towards hopeless liberalism. . 
Moments like the Mamdani election might be opportunities for the revolutionary left to engage with newly politicised people. But the biggest danger is not “sectarian isolation”, it’s the opposite. The danger is that the genuine socialist left buys into the hype, lowers its standards and becomes a cheer squad for politicians whose main project is managing capitalism, not transforming it.
If the left wants to defeat Trumpism and the capitalist system that produces it, we must confidently reject the strategies that led Mamdani into Trump’s office in the first place. We must not buy into illusions in reformist or liberal saviours, but remain committed to building grass-roots workers’ power as the first priority. And we must be committed to rebuilding a socialist movement rooted not in personalities or parliamentary manoeuvres, but in the independent power of the working class.

Sarah Garnham

Mamdani, that meeting and why the left needs to wake up

The administration of US President Donald Trump launched a new wave of raids, arrests and harassment of immigrant communities in Chicago at the beginning of September. The ongoing attack, dubbed Operation Midway Blitz, follows the pattern of previous escalations in Los Angeles and Washington, DC: a campaign of shock and awe unleashed alongside de facto impunity for a range of abuses by agents from the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agencies. 
At the same time, community resistance to the attacks has grown into one of the main fronts against Trump’s agenda, as people find creative and inspiring ways to protect their neighbours and fight back. Chicago resident and member of the Tempest Collective brian bean has been part of rapid response networks to obstruct the federal operations in the city. They spoke to Brendan Stanton over Zoom on 13 November about the impact of Trump’s escalation operation and the resistance to it. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
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What has been the day-to-day experience in Chicago during this blitz?
In many neighbourhoods, there are continual encounters with these agents. It is ICE, Border Patrol and DHS driving around, raiding workplaces and grabbing people off the streets. There is a nearly constant presence of guys in SUVs masked up, with flak jackets and weapons, on the hunt. There have been military-style raids, like at the apartments on the South Side. They basically<a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/03/us/chicago-apartment-ice-raid"> raided an entire apartment complex</a>, took out kids and zip-tied them and had them standing on the side of the road.
More routine raids happen at workplaces and houses all the time. Last week, two agents<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/05/chicago-ice-agents-detain-daycare-worker">
went into a daycare centre</a>, grabbed a worker and smashed her against the glass door. They brutally arrested her while the children watched on. There is disproportionate targeting of Latinx neighbourhoods and more diverse neighbourhoods with a higher density of immigrants, like where I live. You’re certainly not seeing the same raids in the fancy high-rises downtown.
But at the same time, there has been activity in neighbourhoods that has been a bit surprising. ICE agents have been rolling through regularly in some more affluent areas and targeting people there as well, like where the daycare centre raid happened. While there’s a disproportionate focus on Brown, Black and immigrant neighbourhoods, the breadth of the scale of the attacks means they seep into other places as well.
During raids, people stand up to confront agents and stand up for their neighbours, and the agents routinely respond with tear gas on residential streets, even outside an elementary school and a Halloween parade. Suburbs have also become a site of struggle, specifically in Broadview at the <a href="https://english.elpais.com/usa/2025-11-06/two-trials-in-chicago-reveal-the-brutality-inside-and-outside-the-broadview-migrant-detention-center.html">ICE detention facility</a>, where the kidnapped people are taken. There has been an almost daily street fight in front of this prison. At a minimum, people stand as witnesses against the kidnappings. At a maximum, they’re trying to stop the kidnappings with civil disobedience.
When protesters sit down to block the ICE vans, agents and the state police in military-style armour attack them with pepper bullets, copious tear gas and all sorts of other riot weapons. The immigration regime has created a constant presence of militarised terror to confront resistance at this centre.
Who is leading these raids?
Border Patrol is at the forefront of these attacks, and they are more paramilitary than ICE agents, who are usually in plain clothes, although with masks and flak jackets. Operations use several agencies, with Border Patrol at the head coordinating with DHS, ICE, the FBI and even the ATF—the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Gregory Bovino is the leader of the operation. He’s the same intensely right-wing commander in Border Patrol who directed the Los Angeles escalation, and he’s been intent on<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/07/trump-border-patrol-gregory-bovino/683617/">
making it a spectacle</a>. Bovino has a film crew follow him around, making <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/11/06/watch-how-government-propaganda-techniques-portray-chicago-as-a-city-at-war-with-the-feds">videos</a>
depicting these Border Patrol and ICE agents as some sort of war heroes. His team produces segments with dramatic music as the agents brutally arrest people and suppress protests.
A few weeks into his operation, there was a moment outside Broadview when protesters were not being particularly antagonistic—just standing on the side of the road. All of a sudden, Border Patrol agents came out in heavy military gear with Bovino at the head—the only person without a helmet on. Three guys with cameras surrounded him, before he gestured in this dramatic way, and the agents just charged at the demonstrators. They pushed people back and arrested a couple of people who were not really doing anything, just to make a movie, like an advertisement, for the operation.
You can see how it’s also a political escalation, targeted at “blue” cities with Democratic Party leadership and any semblance of progressive politics. The videos are designed to create the fiction of a war between supposedly brave federal agents and dangerous, faceless “antifa” protesters. It’s about promoting a narrative that these cities are unmanageable bastions of riotous activity that require the strong man Trump to regulate them.
What is the relationship between federal agents and local police?
Chicago is a sanctuary city and a sanctuary state, and so, by law, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) is not supposed to assist with immigration enforcement—nor stop it. On the ground, it appears that the police are taking a hands-off approach and not aiding the raids themselves. That being said, when ICE agents are met with protests, they claim things are out of control, and they call in the CPD to do crowd control.
For instance, last week, Border Patrol agent Charles Exum<a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/5-shots-7-holes-border-patrol-supervisor-appeared/story?id=127249645">
shot a woman</a>, Marimar Martinez, and even bragged about it. (He texted friends: “I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys.”). A couple of months before, Border Patrol<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/immigrant-shot-dead-chicago-ice-villegas-gonzalez-family-answers-rcna231952">
shot and killed</a> Silverio Vallega Gonzalez, and provided dubious information about the circumstances of his death. These tragedies triggered immediate protests, and Border Patrol then called in the Chicago Police to do crowd control, or what we call suppressing the protest.
Additionally, at the Broadview facility, [Illinois Governor] J.B. Pritzker consistently deploys state police to protect ICE and the Border Patrol operations. At daily protests against the kidnapping of community members, protesters are<a href="https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/12/protesters-keep-getting-arrested-at-broadview-by-state-police-despite-promise-to-protect-free-speech/">
confronted by State Police</a> with four-foot-long wooden batons, who mete out violence and random arrests. Pritzker is a Democratic governor positioning himself to run in the next presidential election. Many liberals would say he has put himself forward as a face of resistance and spoken very strongly against Trump and against the ICE escalation in Chicago. But, in reality, he’s a billionaire who runs the state as a billionaire would. His big words and a legal fight against Trump come at the same time his state police are at Broadview beating and arresting protesters, trying to suppress the movement, every day.
What has resistance against the attacks looked like?
There have been large demonstrations like the No Kings march and semi-regular protests against ICE downtown. However, the more exciting and hopeful form of resistance has been a<a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/ice-trump-chicago-immigrants-rapid-response">
flowering of community rapid response networks</a>. Most areas of the city have self-organised groups of neighbours coordinating to respond to immigration enforcement activity—and these networks are massive. In my neighbourhood, for instance, the rapid-response Signal group actually reached its membership limit. I’ve never seen that before.
People in these networks patrol areas with vulnerable people, watch for suspicious activity and quickly share information about where agents are. They blow whistles and yell at agents, sometimes even physically confronting them to prevent them from kidnapping people off the streets.
Neighbours are getting bold and creative. Some found immigration agents using alleyways to get around; they blocked their movement with dumpsters. People just get in their faces and yell “fascists” over and over again, disrupting their ability to carry out operations. In my neighbourhood, someone on a bicycle confronted a truck full of ICE officers with what he called “an angry mob” behind him—and ran them off the street. In every neighbourhood in the city, people are coming out of their houses in bathrobes to stand in front of ICE cars to stop them. And this has happened in other places, too. 
Who is organising all this resistance?
The wide range of networks are organised differently, many by local community members, though some grew from existing grassroots networks. I know of at least one started by a left-wing alderperson [city councillor]. The citywide coordination feels a little bit lacking. These neighbourhoods have people communicating, connecting and fighting at a local level, but there doesn’t seem to be a sense of how that connects up to the bigger fight. It is an organisational challenge and also a product of the moment in which there’s such a surge of immigration enforcement activity that people are responding to.
Whistles are becoming ubiquitous<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-plastic-whistles-are-becoming-an-anti-ice-resistance-tool-chicago-2025-10-23/">
symbols of resistance</a>. People will wear them as a sign to say, “I’m here to protect and defend my neighbours”. So, when ICE shows up, people start blowing these whistles, and instead of running away from them, other people usually run towards the agents. People are showing a change in consciousness and increased confidence in what they can do collectively.
During the first major attacks in my neighbourhood, ICE grabbed a street vendor, and 300 people protested in response. On a random street corner—not where protests normally occur—hundreds of people defiantly chanted, “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here!” High schoolers had a<a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/little-village-lawndale-high-school-walkout-protest-operation-midway-blitz/">
massive walkout</a> after there was ICE activity near their school in Little Village. Two days after the childcare worker was kidnapped,<a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2025/11/11/ice_arrest_of_chicago_daycare_teacher">
hundreds were demonstrating</a> in front of the daycare centre. Yesterday, I unexpectedly ran into a protest at a Target store in response to a raid there.
The city is full of continual small manifestations of support for immigrant communities and resistance to ICE. More people are unafraid and are willing to stand up to them.
Has there been a backlash to the protests from right-wing groups?
Not of any notable frequency. The massive amount of support for people mobilising against the ICE escalation has meant any attempts by right-wing or pro-MAGA people have not been noticeable—aside from the police and immigration agents, of course.
That fact is interesting because a couple of years ago, [Texas Governor] Greg Abbott<a href="https://news.wttw.com/2024/07/23/after-texas-gov-abbott-vows-keep-sending-buses-migrants-chicago-officials-brace-surge">
grabbed busloads</a> of desperate people, including many Venezuelans, at the border in Texas and dropped them off in the middle of Chicago. This was part of an attempt to provoke a political crisis in blue [Democratic Party-run] cities, and it fostered tense divisions even within the immigrant community. Some migrants were saying that these people broke the law and did not deserve support. Right-wing media amplified these messages, intent on stoking divisions between these communities and between Black and Brown Chicago more broadly.
All of that was pushed onto the back burner by the enormity of the ICE attack and the dramatically increased sense of solidarity in the fight against it. In neighbourhoods that had these simmering tensions, people are now organising and mobilising to defend their neighbours.
The attacks target Democratic Party-run cities. And more of Trump’s recent rhetoric has been about attacking what he calls “the radical left”. Is this anti-left tilt coming out in attacks on the ground?
The reach of the activity in Chicago is so broad that it does not seem like a specific attack on any left organisation right now. The general activity is so broad and slapdash that it does not really feel like an attack on the left, but rather an attempt to create a general atmosphere of terror. At the same time, they did target and grab notable left-winger<a href="https://chicagomaroon.com/48606/news/university-of-chicago-professor-arrested-at-anti-ice-protest/">
Eman Abdelhadi</a> at a protest after an online campaign against her by the right.
Overall, it’s like the Trump administration is showing the brute force of the federal state to show domination and to intimidate in a very Trumpian way. They are trying to force the people of Chicago, even Mayor Brandon Johnson, to do exactly what they want or face dire consequences. You see it with the sabre-rattling about the National Guard, which eventually came, but they still haven’t been deployed from their suburban base.
The method Trump is taking is to throw a bunch of completely wild things at the wall—some stick, others don’t, but then he just moves on to the next thing. So, people are off balance due to the constant changes from this autocratic leader, and it’s a challenge to organise as things change rapidly. We are seeing a far more focused fight back against ICE in Chicago.
Mayor Brandon Johnson recently called for a general strike. As cynical as that may have been, have organised workers been part of the resistance?
He’s reflecting the resistance already occurring. The notion of a general strike is an initiative of<a href="https://maydaystrong.org/"> May Day Strong</a>, a coalition of community organisations and labour unions. It aims to build a labour resistance against Trump that can hopefully culminate in a general strike. It’s hard to know if it will get there. We have a long way to go in the United States for that to be possible, but I think for anyone within the labour movement to have that as an aspiration—not just giving press conferences and legal injunctions—is really important. I think Brandon Johnson saying that helps more people know about it, but he will not be the person to make it happen.
I will say that the schools have established themselves as safe places for immigrant families pretty much across the board, and educators have basically said that ICE will not be allowed in schools. There were a couple of minor instances in which ICE attempted to enter schools, and the Chicago Teachers Union helped initiate a quick response that forced ICE to leave. Since then, keeping schools off limits to ICE has had everything to do with CTU and the politics of struggle that they have carried out.
Where do you think the movement against ICE and the broader movement against Trump is going?
I think people feel a sense of power from the breadth and the depth of the resistance against ICE. You feel that walking around the street and the solidarity that you have with your neighbours. But it is also very obvious that the contours of the struggle are entirely defensive—everyone is focused on how to immediately resist these attempts to kidnap people. So there hasn’t seemed to be much on how to move past this and to really mount an opposition to the Trump administration. 
There’s a certain weakness of the far left, and we need to figure out how to organise a broader fight using the potential that we see in the resistance to ICE. People are not just showing anger, but a willingness to stand up and confront these paramilitary goons. It is really inspiring, but we need to figure out how to translate that into organising for a broader systemic change. Clarifying for people how ICE is an important part of the federal system, and the Democrats give no answers on how to stop them. In fact, the Democrats under Vice President Harris were<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/what-we-learned-from-the-democratic-national-convention">
trying to run to the right</a> of Trump on the question of immigration.
It’s an open question about how to build resistance against Trump. People are mad about the cost of living and inflation. People are mad about the continual degradation of democracy. I think what people do about that is the question and challenge; the paths of resistance still need to be laid. The May Day Strong effort is one attempt to say that resistance means building a broader coalition to oppose Trump’s broader agenda. The resistance against ICE may translate into more durable and resilient organisations that can go on the offensive, but that is just a possibility at the moment.

Brendan Stanton

Chicago’s fightback against Trump’s deportation machine

Ryan Stanton

The rise and fall of the US Congress of Industrial Organizations

“Improbable” doesn’t quite capture the political significance of Zohran Mamdani becoming mayor-elect of New York City. The left is not supposed to win capitalist elections, at least not big ones like this. And not in America, where corporate power’s grip on politics is more vice-like than anywhere else on Earth. 
Yet, while his victories this year might appear to be something out of the blue—and at odds with the triumphant moment the right is having, which is reshaping the US and much of Europe—this moment has been building for some time. A decade ago, we wrote in these pages of the insurgent US presidential primary campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who, like Mamdani, was running on a democratic socialist platform:
“Something is happening in the United States. The political landscape is being transformed, though just how widely, deeply or permanently is still unclear ... It seems improbable that [Sanders] will defeat the machine of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ... But even if he ultimately fails, you get the sense that a genie has been let out of a bottle. The genie is not Sanders himself ... but the sentiment that he has tapped ...
“Anger with the economic and political system has found a left-wing electoral expression, which is unlike anything seen in the US in generations. Whether it can be cohered into a movement to rebuild the left is another question. But there definitely is hope that it might.”
Ultimately, the Sanders insurgency was unsuccessful. In the following years, the senator went on to betray the aspirations that he stoked, and the revolutionary left imploded just as it might have seized the moment to build something independent of the Democratic Party. These are cautionary tales for the Mamdani moment. 
Nevertheless, the broad shift in consciousness has continued. It was evident at the end of 2015 and became clearer as the presidential primaries unfolded the following year. The political establishments of both the Democrats and the Republicans were facing significant blowback from their left and right bases, respectively. 
Since then, the political polarisation in the United States and elsewhere has intensified, although it has been expressed somewhat asymmetrically; at least in the electoral sphere, the far right has made most of the running. That’s reflected in its leaders’ surnames gaining worldwide recognition: Trump, Meloni, Modi, Farage, Le Pen, Wilders, Milei. 
Everywhere, far-right organisations have been bankrolled by billionaires and masses of smaller capitalists while receiving free and positive publicity from sections of the reactionary corporate media. They have built a base among the personnel of the repressive arms of the state, such as the police and the military, and more broadly among the population by dishonestly selling their reactionary pro-capitalist programs as some form of “people power”.
New York has now kicked back. Young working-class people have reacted to the consolidation of Trumpism, to ongoing economic hardship, to the new holocaust in Gaza, to the victimisation of undocumented migrants and the Gestapo-like raids being carried out across the country, and to the capitalist establishment’s complicity in it all. 
A member of the Democratic Socialists is about to take the reins of global finance’s most important city. A Palestine solidarity activist who rejects the idea of a Jewish state has succeeded in the heart of liberal Zionism. A 34-year-old who said that billionaires shouldn’t exist has won the metropolis that is home to the most billionaires on the planet. 
However, the main thing is that Mamdani’s victory came on the back of more than 100,000 volunteers and the city’s largest voter turnout in over half a century. This astonishing mobilisation reflects a very positive shift in political consciousness. 
Most of the mainstream commentary, naturally, focuses on Mamdani himself—his political talents, his campaigning acumen and his identity. From the left, numerous criticisms can and should be made of his increasing embrace of the establishment that he purports to oppose. Some of these were foreshadowed in <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/fairytale-of-new-york">the Red Flag editorial</a> following his victory in the primaries. Lance Selfa, writing from Chicago, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/trump-cops-a-pasting-in-us-election-rebuke">outlines the subsequent developments</a>.
Nevertheless, this is a moment to grasp—New York has electrified people across the globe because they can see an alternative to the status quo in a world that is totally stacked against us. Increasingly over the last decade or so, that alternative has been given a name: “socialism”. This sea change in sensibilities is astounding. From a ridiculed word, it has again become the menace of the political right and the hope of millions.
That is something to be built on.

Editors

The Mamdani moment

There isn’t much to explain about the result of the off-year US elections on 4 November. In virtually every election held in every district and every state, Democrats improved on their performance in last year’s presidential election. And in many places, they exceeded their most optimistic predictions.
“No Kings” went to the polls.
In New Jersey, expectations of a close election melted before Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill’s 13-percentage-point victory. In New York City, Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani won a majority of votes in a four-way race for mayor amidst the highest turnout in the city’s mayoral election since 1969.
The Democratic sweep wasn’t confined only to liberal strongholds like New York City or California. Mississippi Democrats managed to break the Republican super-majority in the state Senate. Two Georgia Democrats won election to the state’s public utility commission, marking the first time in twenty years that Democrats won a statewide race for state office. 
<a href="https://www.citizensvoice.com/2025/11/04/democrats-regain-majority-on-luzerne-county-council-flip-4-seats/">Democrats turfed out local officials in conservative areas like Luzerne County, Pennsylvania</a>, considered a bellwether county for a Trumpist future. The right-wing city council member who promoted the Trump-amplified lie that Venezuelan gangs had taken over apartment buildings in <a href="https://sentinelcolorado.com/orecent-headlines/aurora-vote-2025-election-night-results/">Aurora, Colorado, received a well-deserved ejection from her seat</a>.
The explanation for the rout is simple. Voters wanted to voice opposition to Trump, and to support Democratic pledges to improve affordability. That was the winning message for Democratic candidates, whether the messenger was a self-described moderate or a social democrat.
According to opinion polls, President Trump is more unpopular now than Joe Biden was when Democratic Party mandarins forced him out of the 2024 presidential race. Clearly, millions went to the polls to vote against Trump. Second, Trump’s 2024 promises to lower prices on necessities have not been fulfilled. Trump’s policies, such as his across-the-board tariffs and cuts to health-care subsidies, are raising prices.
The <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/economic-anger-once-again-punishes-the-party-in-power">economic and political headwinds</a> that pushed against Kamala Harris and the Democrats a year ago are now blowing against Trump and the Republicans. <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/its-the-economy-stupid/">In 2024, it was “the economy, stupid”</a> and in 2025, it still is. Only now, Trump and the GOP are the target for voters’ frustrations—as Harris and Democrats were in 2024.
In 2024, voters who took a chance on Trump could tell themselves that he would, as he said, “bring down prices on day one” and that his deportation plan would focus on “violent criminals”. Since January, however, they have seen that Trump’s policies have served corrupt oligarchs and that federal goons are abducting day labourers and childcare workers off the streets. For these reasons, <a href="https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/seven-data-driven-takeaways-from">2024 Republican gains with young voters and with Latinos have evaporated</a>.
Even GOP “culture wars” couldn’t save it. The Republican candidate for Virginia’s governorship spent millions on anti-trans ads. She lost by 14 points.
In California, more than 8 million voters turned out to endorse Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to redraw the state’s congressional maps to provide Democrats the opportunity to win five additional seats in Congress in the 2026 midterm election. Newsom touted this measure as “fighting fire with fire” against the governments of Texas and other Republican-led states who are trying to gerrymander their congressional maps to insulate Republicans from a building wave to throw them out of office.
Liberals are cheering the overwhelming victory (by a margin of almost 2-to-1) of the Newsom-backed Proposition 50. To them, Newsom deserves credit because his partisan ruthlessness broke the usual mould of Democratic Party fecklessness against Trump and the GOP. But from a socialist point of view, a manoeuvre to elect more Democrats shouldn’t be a cause for celebration.
<a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/lessons-of-election-2024/">The Democrats remain a capitalist party whose dedication to the status quo laid the groundwork for the horrors that Trump is enacting today</a>. In 2024, Kamala Harris touted her “tough on the border” credentials and defended the Biden administration’s abetting of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. A generation of Democratic Party support for the neoliberal policy agenda that destroyed labour unions and immiserated millions opened the way for Trump.
Even today, after their landslide victories, the “centrist” Democratic governors-elect in New Jersey and Virginia won’t commit to basic policies to support working people. Mikie Sherrill, governor-elect in New Jersey, has yet to say whether she will extend the state’s law preventing its <a href="https://boltsmag.org/immigration-and-new-jersey-governor-election/">law enforcement from collaborating with federal immigration authorities</a>. Abigail Spanberger, Virginia’s governor-elect, has already said she won’t support repealing the state’s <a href="https://www.virginiascope.com/spanberger-splits-the-middle-on-right-to-work-opposes-full-repeal/">anti-union “right to work” law</a>.
Electing more Democrats doesn’t guarantee support for democracy or for working people, any more than decades of Democratic super-majorities in California have produced affordable housing or <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-16/single-payer-healthcare-meets-its-fate-again-in-the-face-of-californias-massive-budget-deficit">single-payer health care</a>. For all their election campaign rhetoric about “standing with working people”, the Democrats have no plan, nor vision, that can combat Trumpism’s appeal to cynicism for politicians who talk a good game but don’t do anything to improve ordinary people’s lives.
In this political wasteland, Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old mayor-elect of New York City, stands out as something different and fresh. It’s not just that he cited socialist hero Eugene Debs in <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/11/zohran-mamdani-election-victory-speech">his victory speech</a>. Or that he ran a clever social media-driven campaign that embraced New York’s immigrant diversity. Or that he dared Donald Trump: “To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us”. It’s that he captured the hopes of millions who expect him to stand up for them against the billionaire oligarchs.
Mamdani’s relentless focus on affordability in one of the US’s least affordable cities inspired tens of thousands of volunteers to canvass for him, and more than 1 million to turn out for him against the decrepit Democratic Party establishment that couldn’t stop him. 
Mamdani focused his campaign on a simple set of promises, including pledges to freeze rents, make bus rides free and open city-owned grocery stores. Mamdani’s message resonated widely especially among younger and immigrant voters in New York.
What can we expect from his administration? JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called Mamdani a “Marxist” “pushing the same ideological mush that means nothing in the real world”. In fact, Mamdani’s transition team relies on professionals who have worked in the last three New York City administrations.
Despite all the ridiculous rhetoric branding him as a dangerous radical, Mamdani’s proposals are modest. Mamdani and his supporters in the DSA openly embrace the early <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-mayor-socialism-nyc-strategy/">1900s model of “sewer socialism”</a>. This moniker originated as a put-down of Socialist Party city officials who eschewed radical politics in favour of humdrum provision of city services. 
But the reformers who implemented it—especially in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the bastion of some of the most conservative Socialists—chose to embrace “sewer socialism”. To them, “socialism” meant running “clean” (not corrupt) governments that delivered public services. This type of city administration is clearly preferable to corrupt cronyism, but it’s hardly the stuff of the transition to socialism.
Moreover, Mamdani endorsed policies, like loosening regulations on small businesses and land use, that dovetail with <a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/06/04/2025/at-welcomefest-centrist-democrats-pick-a-fight-with-the-left">so-called “abundance” agenda that is all the rage with “centrist” neoliberal Democrats</a>. Last September—before he announced his run for mayor—he met with Kathy Wylde, a leader of the city’s business elite. Wylde told the Wall Street Journal
that “[Mamdani] said, ‘Look, I’m not in favour of government taking over your business ... He made clear that he’s not anticapitalist in that sense”.
Two of his proposals—appointing members of the city’s Rent Stabilization Board committed to his pledge to freeze rents and fare-free buses—are within his power to implement as mayor. In fact, the previous liberal Democratic Mayor Bill deBlasio implemented similar rent-stabilisation policies. His plan for city-owned groceries is a pilot project aimed at providing one store in each borough as a “proof of concept”. In a city of more than 8 million, this is hardly a threat to the retail grocery sector.
His more ambitious proposals, such as universal pre-kindergarten education, will require approval from New York state for the taxes to fund them. But here’s where Mamdani’s agenda will run up against other forces in the Democratic Party determined to coopt him or to break him.
In his runs for office, Mamdani has always run as a Democrat. This may provide DSA-backed candidates with a more ready-made electorate, but it also makes them captive inside a capitalist party. Not wanting to be ostracised from people who hold influence over their agenda or their advancement leads candidates to make concessions to the mainstream that undercut their independence or even their ability to deliver for their supporters. This process helps to turn <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/07/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-is-just-a-regular-old-democrat-now.html">nominal socialists into “regular old Democrats”</a>. 
We’ve already seen that process taking shape with Mamdani. <a href="https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/zohrans-historic-win-16-takeaways">Social democrat Eric Blanc may</a> consider Mamdani’s rejection of “defunding the police” (a goal that Blanc called “performative ultraleftism”) as a brilliant stroke to avoid having to answer multiple “gotchas” from reporters and pro-cop trolls. But it’s not going to help him deal with the NYPD, a resource-sucking army that will declare war on him the minute he tries to take any action to curtail its abuses.
In a meeting with executives in the Partnership for New York, the city’s de facto chamber of commerce, Mamdani said he was open to retaining the current police commissioner<a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/mamdani-clarifies-globalize-the-intifada-stance-in-meeting-with-business-elites-">, Jessica Tisch (daughter of Leow’s billionaire CEO James Tisch)</a>. At the same meeting, he also pledged to discourage activists from using the slogan “globalise the intifada”, a phrase which has been the pretence for multiple attacks on him, <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/zohran-mamdani-adl-antisemitism-intifada-bogus-scandal-nyc">even though he has said repeatedly that he doesn’t use it</a>.
What will hold Mamdani to fulfil his promises to working-class supporters, especially when he faces opposition from Wall Street, the police or establishment political forces? His supporters look to the army of canvassers his campaign mobilised. <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-victory-hope-nyc-election">As Liza Featherstone put it</a>, “the mass movement that elected him must be prepared to help him succeed, as the ruling class (especially the real estate industry), the Trump administration, and the police make every effort to make his mayoralty a failure”.
While this is theoretically possible, it has almost never happened. There are too many differences between the mechanics of an electoral campaign and a social movement needed to win reforms. Marxists have long contended that elections are the “lowest form” of politics, not requiring the type of political commitment or mobilisation that a true social movement entails.
There’s also the compromised position that someone like Mamdani, as chief executive officer of a city and boss of hundreds of thousands of city workers, will face. First, he will have to staff an administration, undoubtedly pulling many grassroots activists into the government. That means many who could be pressuring the government from the “outside” will be on the “inside”, defending the mayor’s agenda instead.
Will the nominal boss of the NYPD use his office to mobilise protests when the police brutalise or murder someone on his watch? Will the CEO and employer of teachers and other city workers support them if they strike against austerity? Will his administration arrest and prosecute Trump’s immigration goons for civil rights abuses? To ask these questions is to be clear-eyed about developments that will put Mamdani’s brand of “municipal socialism” to the test.

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