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.

Lance Selfa

Trump cops a pasting in US election rebuke

“‘Palestine will free us all’—you know this slogan, right?” Michael Letwin, a co-founder of US solidarity group Labor for Palestine, was speaking with the enthusiasm of a recent convert, despite his decades of activism, over tea and coffee in Brooklyn’s Iris cafe last year. 
It was some time in May, and northerly gusts whipping off the East River still sent occasional chills through the city, even as summer threatened to burst through the spring. Letwin wasn’t making small talk about the weather, though; he wanted to stress a shift in New York’s political climate. As students in Palestine solidarity encampments across the city were being slandered and smashed by authorities, their defiance seemed only to grow. 
“The activists aren’t going through ‘stages’”, he said, referring to their political consciousness. “It’s more akin to something like ‘permanent revolution’—they are leaping over the old liberal progressive consensus and drawing much more radical, even revolutionary, conclusions.”
I was a little sceptical, having been in Hong Kong five years earlier, embedded in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM7N9XICfes">the siege of the Polytechnic</a>, when police faced seemingly endless volleys of Molotov cocktails, petrol bombs, bricks and arrows from the city’s massive student movement. Almost everywhere across the city bore scars of a dramatic mood shift mobilised ferociously against the government—graffiti, boarded-up banks and shops, excavated footpaths, smashed signal boxes and traffic lights. 
New York, by contrast, appeared totally unaffected as an urban space and broadly indifferent. You wouldn’t have known there was a movement unless you walked onto the campuses or stumbled into one of the demonstrations. Of course, I was comparing apples and oranges. Hong Kong’s rage manifested as a scream of physical confrontations everywhere, but without a noticeably commensurate lifting in the political level of the participants. 
At any rate, despite my unspoken misgivings, it wasn’t hard to get caught up in the excitement of the New York campuses, where spectacular things certainly were happening. And Letwin wasn’t the only person talking about a momentous political shift—anyone with a long history on the left, and particularly Jewish leftists, all were saying similar things: Gaza had precipitated a generational crisis within liberal Zionism, the effects of which would be far ranging.
It has been striking since then to watch the decline of the street-based Palestine solidarity movement in Israel’s key supporter. The resistance has been bigger in countries that matter far less than America: Australia, Italy, the UK, for example. Yet it’s clear now that Palestine didn’t disappear as an issue, and possibly played out in the New York mayoral election in ways that were not so evident from afar. John Ganz, a left-wing writer based in New York, <a href="https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/thoughts-on-a-victory">writes in his Unpopular Front newsletter</a>:
“Israel’s place in American politics was more the unquestioned status quo than ideological, even for many Jews ... Then there was Gaza. Suddenly, all those activists didn’t seem so crazy after all. Maybe they had a point—or two. And so Mamdani’s views [that Israel ought to be a democratic state with equal rights for Palestinians] rapidly go from being an eccentric force in American politics to a central one. It wasn’t so much that the election was a referendum on Palestine, Israel, or, even less, the Jews, as some race baiters want us to believe, but that Mamdani now sounded reasonable and attached to reality, while the people who were defending Israel tooth and nail and calling everyone else antisemites and terrorists now sounded like the wild-eyed ideologues.”
That is, Palestine as a signal of political sanity. Perhaps even more than this, Mamdani’s stance might have become a signal to people that he was genuinely different from other politicians in other ways. “When pressured to temper his criticisms of Israel, Mamdani has barely flinched”, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/the-mamdani-era-begins">Eric Lach writes in the New Yorker</a>. “These qualities convinced many young voters, in particular, that he might have what it takes to follow through on his promises.”
While bread and butter issues appear to be the singular driving force of the campaign, Palestine figures here not as a background foreign policy issue irrelevant to running a city, but as a bellwether for political character. It not only played a role as a moral question that helped drive the young volunteer mobilisation but as an indication of political spine and integrity that pushed up Mamdani’s vote. 
After all, someone who can withstand the unending and vicious barrage of the Zionist movement surely has a shot at tackling a rental crisis, delivering free child care and buses, and taking two cents on the dollar in tax from incomes above $1 million—none of which are likely to be as ferociously denounced as the call for equality in Palestine. 
In this sense, “Palestine will free us all” suggests something akin to a revelation about the operations of capitalism and the nature of mainstream politics: Gaza shows that the rule of naked, brutal, unapologetic power is ubiquitous. The jettisoning of reason, the silencing of arguments and the resort to brute force are happening not only “over there”, but are mirrored in day-to-day establishment politics, and in the marginalisation of people speaking the truth in workplaces, campuses and the public sphere everywhere. 
Michael Letwin and others, then, might have been proven right, not only about New York’s spring being more than a seasonal change, but about how Palestine became central to even local politics, albeit in ways that many would not have predicted.

Ben Hillier

Did Palestine set New York free?

CHICAGO—More than 200,000 people turned out in downtown Chicago on 18 October to join the “No Kings” demonstration against the Trump regime. At one point, the march from the gathering spot through the Chicago Loop (downtown) stretched two and a half miles (4km).
The Chicago protest was part of a national effort, organised by a coalition of liberal groups, that brought as many as 7 million people—one in 50 Americans—into the street to protest Trump. Protests occurred everywhere, from the largest cities to small towns in conservative parts of the country.
Democratic politicians boosted the national effort, and the liberal MSNBC network promoted it. This was a departure from earlier national “No Kings” (in June) and “Hands Off” protests (in April), when leading Democrats kept their distance. But protesters in Chicago didn’t need prodding. The Trump administration’s attack on the city and its surrounding suburbs, beginning in September, was more than enough motivation for hundreds of thousands.
Trump ordered “Operation Midway Blitz”, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other militarised federal police forces descending on Chicago on 9 September. Trump’s racist crackdown on immigrants picked Chicago because it is a Democratic Party-dominated city, in a Democratic-dominated state, <a href="https://www.wbez.org/immigration/2025/09/12/chicago-immigrant-population-growth-trump-immigration-enforcement">where more than one in five residents was born outside the US</a>.
Since 9 September, Chicago has been on high alert. Each day, a battle with marauding federal agents unfolds. ICE, Border Patrol and other masked agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) drive through neighbourhoods in unmarked SUVs and arrest immigrants (and many citizens) going about their daily business.
Parents dropping off their kids at school. Construction and landscape workers on job sites. Day labourers looking for work at Home Depots and Menard’s (“big box” hardware stores where contractors pick up building supplies and hire casual labour). People attending church services. Individual tamaleros/as (people who make and sell tamales from street carts) or vendors at neighbourhood swap meets (a flea market for multiple vendors). Even, seemingly, random people walking down the street or waiting at bus stops. 
Since the Supreme Court essentially <a href="https://eji.org/news/supreme-court-allows-stops-based-on-race-to-continue/">legalised racial profiling</a> at the Trump administration’s request, federal agents are making warrantless arrests each day. Apparently, having brown skin or speaking Spanish are the main pretexts that ICE is using for its stops and arrests. This, of course, gives the lie to Trump and his apologists who claim that they are focusing on criminals and dangerous individuals. As of 8 October, ICE <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/operation-midway-blitz-arrests-ice-crackdown-chicago-data-other-states/">had reportedly arrested 1,500 people in its Operation Midway Blitz</a>. Even <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&amp;source=web&amp;rct=j&amp;url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3Dq5IR_piZRT0%23:~:text%3DICE%2520says%2520at%2520least%252013%2520people%2520with,32%2520Chicago%2520Live:%2520https://www.fox32chicago.com/live%2520FOX%252032%2520Chicago&amp;ved=2ahUKEwi655zU7L2QAxX_GzQIHc2GBOIQ1fkOegQIAxAG&amp;opi=89978449&amp;cd&amp;psig=AOvVaw3dWlwP95KgYMFAB2fbraW1&amp;ust=1761430116144000">ICE admits that only about 1 percent of them</a> have violent criminal records.
ICE agents have already killed one man, who they tried to arrest after he dropped his son off at school. ICE and its mouthpieces at the Department of Homeland Security—one node of the Trump Administration’s “Ministry of Truth”—accused Silverio Villegas González of trying to run into ICE agents with his vehicle. Subsequently, video, including body camera footage <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=&amp;ved=2ahUKEwihider7b2QAxVQFDQIHZjCG-wQFnoECBkQAQ&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fnews%2Fus-news%2Fice-fatal-shooting-chicago-bodycam-footage-villegas-gonzalez-rcna233484&amp;usg=AOvVaw3rb4QZ9R6IV_iIBYHQOA2V&amp;opi=89978449">from local police department officers</a>, exposed DHS’s story as a fabrication. 
Another Border Patrol agent shot Marimar Martínez five times while she was sitting in her car behind the agent’s vehicle in the Latino working-class neighbourhood of Brighton Park. Miraculously, she escaped life-threatening injury. But, again, video footage of the incident showed that the Border Patrol—which claimed Martínez had rammed the feds’ vehicle and threatened them with a weapon—<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/bodycam-footage-conflicts-with-dhs-account-chicago-womans-shooting-by-border-2025-10-08/">was lying about the confrontation</a>. It’s becoming conventional wisdom among many in Chicago—activists, journalists and many everyday folks—that DHS’s statements are lying cover stories that unravel within a few hours.
Perhaps the pinnacle (so far) of the ICE theatre of cruelty was the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/us/chicago-south-shores-border-patrol-raid.html">30 September early morning commando raid</a> on an apartment building in the city’s South Shore neighbourhood. ICE and other federal agents stormed the building, some of them rappelling down its five stories from helicopters hovering overhead. DHS was treating a dilapidated apartment housing poor African Americans and Venezuelan migrants as a militia stronghold in wartime Iraq. And DHS filmed the assault to provide the likes of Fox News and MAGA influencers with images of “heroic agents” taking on what they said was a den for Tren de Aragua gang members.
The ICE agents marched dozens of people, in handcuffs, out of the building. They included barefoot children and adults in various states of undress. Agents racially segregated the detainees (Black people in one group, Latinos in another) before processing them. They arrested 37 people, only one of whom ICE alleges in court has any connection to a gang. And when people returned to their apartments, they found them ransacked, with doors torn off their hinges.
Because of these terror tactics, the ICE processing centre in Broadview, a small suburban town to the west of Chicago, has become a flashpoint for face-offs between protesters and federal agents. In previous periods of immigrant rights activism, the Broadview facility was a focal point for often symbolic civil disobedience actions, including politicians and clergy. With Operation Midway Blitz, hundreds have turned out regularly to protest and resist.
In response, federal agents have brutalised and tear-gassed crowds of unarmed people. In <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=2ahUKEwixpoeH9r2QAxXvOjQIHWagJhwQtwJ6BAgHEAI&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D_SbX0UbBFaY&amp;usg=AOvVaw27ufvJe-2NjumY3kvNdQ2O&amp;opi=89978449">one incident that went viral</a>, an ICE agent standing on the roof of the building fired a pepper ball into the head of Reverend David Black, a Presbyterian pastor, who was making a moral appeal to the ICE agents. This was yet another example of DHS’s gratuitous violence, as anyone watching the video could see that Black posed no threat to—indeed wasn’t even near—the agent who inflicted severe injury on him.
These repressive actions, and similar ones in city and suburban neighbourhoods, against unarmed civilians have prompted a series of federal lawsuits from immigrant rights advocates and the media against these tactics. Federal Judge Sara Ellis has issued rulings barring federal agents from using tear gas and other violent measures against demonstrators and the press. <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/24/us/gregory-bovino-chicago-immigration-tear-gas-hnk">ICE has already flouted the judge’s orders</a>.
Yet the most important story in Chicago is one of resistance. Chicago was a centre of <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2016/03/28/immigrants-marching-out-of-the-shadows">mass protests for immigrant rights in the mid-2000s</a>. Although the movement subsided, it produced thousands of activists and dozens of immigrant rights organisations rooted in communities across the region. As Chicago-based socialist <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/resistance-breeds-solidarity-a-report-from-chicago/">Sharon Smith wrote about the thousands</a> who attended the Chicago “No Kings” event:
“The demonstrations drew large numbers of people who had never attended a protest before, but also many who have already joined one of the ‘Rapid Response Networks’ that have been organized by immigrants’ rights activists, neighborhood by neighborhood, across the city and suburbs.
“These neighborhood-based networks have been around as long as ICE, but they have mushroomed since Trump took office in January—to serve the many needs of the fearful migrant population. People volunteer to help distribute copies of ‘Know your rights’ brochures in immigrant communities. They set up phone and internet hotlines to notify the network of a suspected ICE sighting; once they have verified it, they then broadcast it to the entire neighborhood. They also hand out whistle kits to everyone in the neighborhood, along with the different types of signals to use when ICE has been spotted in the area versus when ICE is attacking someone in the immediate vicinity. Those driving cars beep their horns if they see ICE goons in the area.
“Many migrants are too afraid to leave their homes to go grocery shopping, or to bring their children to school, so the network assigns volunteers to individual families to go and buy groceries, accompany their kids, and help with the other basic necessities of life.”
The activism in neighbourhoods around the city is yet another example of the fact that thousands of working people are willing to stand against the authoritarianism coming from the Trump administration in ways that elites at institutions like universities, corporations and the Democratic Party have not. 
For many liberals, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, a billionaire scion of the family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain, is something of an exception to this elite capitulation. Pritzker has denounced Trump and his “lackey” Stephen Miller, the white supremacist White House domestic adviser who is thought to be the main architect of the anti-immigrant assault. Pritzker has warned federal agents of consequences if they violate Illinoisans’ civil rights.
But Pritzker’s image is mostly based on talk, rather than action. In fact, Pritzker has ordered the Illinois State Police to set up a “free speech zone” at some distance from the Broadview facility’s driveway. The state police themselves have already beaten and arrested protesters in multiple confrontations there. In other words, while Pritzker touts his support for peaceful protests against ICE, his police force is performing crowd control for ICE—allowing it to maraud throughout the Chicago area. The Democrats’ commitment to uphold the status quo renders them accomplices to Trump, rather than serious opponents.
At the time of writing, the Supreme Court is reviewing <a href="https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&amp;&amp;p=c9b1f1883d48acc275630ae224deb6ca6d8e6f5a734fd2ae86e3df47d3f34176JmltdHM9MTc2MTI2NDAwMA&amp;ptn=3&amp;ver=2&amp;hsh=4&amp;fclid=10f13388-b905-653b-2029-26d3b8816423&amp;psq=trump+appeal+to+supreme+court+illinois+national+guard&amp;u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubnByLm9yZy8yMDI1LzEwLzE3L254LXMxLTU1NzgyNjYvdHJ1bXAtc3VwcmVtZS1jb3VydC1uYXRpb25hbC1ndWFyZC1pbGxpbm9pcw">the Trump administration’s emergency appeal</a> of a district court ruling barring the federal deployment of the National Guard to Illinois. <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/posse-comitatus-act-explained">Under a 150-year-old law</a>, the federal government is barred from using the military for domestic law enforcement. But Trump’s order to deploy the National Guard in Illinois, following a similar deployment in Los Angeles earlier this year, is intended to usurp that authority. 
By law, Illinois’ claim that Trump’s order is illegal should be a clear-cut case. But the Supreme Court has been one of chief enablers of Trump’s effort to crown himself king. So, we shouldn’t expect that the court will stand in his way. A National Guard deployment into the streets of Chicago would mark another dangerous escalation. It would require the resistance to broaden and deepen.

Chicago rises against Trump’s deportation regime

Pass the sick bucket! You might have predicted that Anthony Albanese’s first White House meeting with Donald Trump would be bad, but it exceeded the worst expectations. 
What made the whole thing so dreadful?
Was it Albanese fawning over Trump and congratulating him for “the extraordinary achievement” of a ceasefire deal in Gaza, even as Israel continues to kill dozens of Palestinians daily with US-made weapons?
Was it Albanese hailing the countries’ military record, claiming the two had “stood side by side for freedom and democracy”? Did that include Vietnam, Anthony? Iraq? Afghanistan? Did that record include Australian and US backing for dictators across the Asia Pacific even as they murdered their citizens? Or their support for Israel as it wages its genocidal war in Gaza? 
Or was the biggest problem Albanese spitting in the faces of the 7 million Americans who had taken to the streets three days earlier in the “No Kings” protests against the right-wing authoritarian Trump regime?
It’s hard to pick which one of these is most offensive.
But that’s not how the national media saw things. 
There, it was celebration all around. The mainstream media praised Albanese to the skies for his achievements where other world leaders had failed. The prime minister had got into the good graces of the president and brought home the bacon. Trump had even called Albanese “a great prime minister”. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Michael Koziol called Albanese’s trip “a raging success”. Opposition leader Sussan Ley initially tried to make ground by demanding Albanese sack Australian ambassador Kevin Rudd for disrespecting Trump, but within 24 hours she too was forced to join in the establishment’s hurrahs.
But what was it that they were celebrating? Nothing other than Albanese walking into the White House and coming out with an agreed plan to take the world closer to war.
Albanese and the Australian ruling class, and the capitalist media that fight for their interests, wanted two things out of this meeting: to get Trump to openly support the delivery of AUKUS nuclear submarines to Australia, and to confirm US involvement in mining and processing Australia’s extensive deposits of rare earths and critical minerals. They got both. 
China’s emergence as a rival hegemon in the Asia-Pacific threatens US domination and, by extension, Australian power. Dealing with the threat from China is now central to American imperialist concerns. But the US is also involved elsewhere, from the Middle East and Latin America to Ukraine and the Baltic states. The Australian government wants the US to prioritise the Asia Pacific to ensure China is prevented from controlling the region. Their job, therefore, is to tie America down in the region and to reinforce in the eyes of successive US presidents Australia’s value as an ally.
This is what the AUKUS pact is about, to convince the US (and Britain) to sell nuclear attack submarines to Australia with delivery to start in 2032 and, eventually, to build some in Australia. Their only purpose is to project Australian power into the South China Sea, the most likely arena for a clash with China, and to integrate Australia into US war plans. 
The cost of the submarines is already estimated at $368 billion, and given the whole history of military procurement, we can anticipate the final figure will be much higher. In the meantime, the Albanese government is paying $3 billion to US shipyards and $20 billion to build port facilities in WA to service the US nuclear submarine fleet. The cost to humanity if the submarines are deployed in a war with China will be incalculable.
Before this week’s meeting, Trump had, from the perspective of Australia’s ruling class, been disconcertingly silent about AUKUS. What’s more, he had sponsored a review of the whole program, to report by the end of this year. So, when Trump told the joint press conference that it was “full steam ahead” with the AUKUS program, there were whoops of joy from Australia’s defence and security establishment. They can keep banging the war drums. Tick one for Albanese.
Then there was the issue of rare earths and critical minerals which are an essential component in the production of a wide range of products, civilian and military. Over the past two or three decades, the Chinese government has invested huge amounts of money in securing for Beijing a virtual monopoly in processing these minerals. Two weeks ago, as part of the escalating tensions with Washington, China announced export controls, confirming US fears that China could cripple America’s military preparations. 
Enter the Albanese government. Over the past five months, Canberra has been working with Washington to expand the extraction and processing of Australia’s rare earth deposits as an alternative source of supply for the Pentagon. 
This week’s meeting saw Albanese and Trump sign off on an agreement to invest in or subsidise up to $8.5 billion into the industry to get things moving. This comes on top of $2 billion of public money paid or committed to two mines in the NT and WA, one of which is backed by Trump’s second favourite Australian, Gina Rinehart. The industry will be guaranteed a minimum price level to ensure the mine owners rake in profits. According to the White House, the agreement will achieve “critical mineral and energy dominance”, with Australia and the US having first pick of the minerals and control over exports, allowing Canberra and Washington to reward friends and punish enemies. Tick two for Albanese.
That the nation’s politicians with few exceptions, foreign and military policy strategists, military chiefs of staff and newspaper editors can all cheer Albanese on for a splendid job in Washington tells us a lot about their priorities. They are cheering for an escalation of war planning in our region, for the diversion of funds from social services, education, health and welfare to military build-up, and for a more repressive environment that comes with such developments. And all in the hands of our Labor government, which is demonstrating once again its devotion to the interests of the ruling class.

Tom Bramble

Albanese visits Washington in the service of imperialism and war

The cabinet secretary in charge of public health is an anti-vax crackpot implementing billions in cuts for medical research. The defence secretary is a third-rate TV host who, when he’s not receiving Botox injections, <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/hegseth-boasts-i-know-exactly-what-i-m-doing-after-stunning-war-plan-leak">must publicly insist</a>: “I know exactly what I’m doing”. 
The administration includes people who openly say that women should be in the home, not the workplace; some even think <a href="https://19thnews.org/2025/08/pete-hegseth-doug-wilson-women-voting/">the Nineteenth Amendment,</a> which guaranteed women the right to vote, was a mistake. Energy policy doubles down on fossil fuels and nuclear power, while abandoning successful renewable energy investments. Tariffs are raising consumer prices and hampering domestic firms, while impoverishing swathes of the farm economy.
It all appears to be a leap into irrationalism. Why would the US government destroy the country’s research capability, sabotage its economy, and put crackpots and incompetents in charge of some of its most essential functions? Why does the Trump administration appear to want to turn back the clock to the 1950s, if not the nineteenth century? And why would leading corporate, government and university leaders support all of this?
It's difficult to address these questions with one overarching explanation—unless it’s simply that all these factors historically have been associated with right-wing and authoritarian governments. In The Reactionary Mind, political philosopher Corey Robin defines modern-day conservatism as “that unlikely alliance of the libertarian, with his vision of the employer’s untrammelled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father’s rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth”.
The corollary is the political right’s defence of traditional social and economic hierarchies. In the Trump government, echoes of this defence of “tradition” can be found in support for policies that push women out of the workforce and encourage them to have more babies, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/04/25/nx-s1-5371718/pronatalist-birth-rate-musk-natal-conference">to take one example</a>. These “neo-natal” ideas are closely connected to other reactionary ideas such as white supremacy and transphobia.
In some cases, Trumpist tropes are easy to explain. The fossil fuel industry is a traditional Republican constituency, and the government is heavily invested in economic and political alliances with petrostates, especially the Gulf monarchies. So it’s no surprise that the administration is stuffed with climate change deniers and is hostile to renewable energy. It appears not to care about the climate crisis’s impact on humans, nor, even from its narrow imperial mindset, 21st-century supremacy in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/business/china-electric-grid.html">solar power</a> and <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/autos-chinas-electric-vehicle-juggernaut-is-reshaping-the-car-market.html">electric vehicles</a> being forfeited to the Chinese state.
Another reason for the seeming self-destructive irrationality of the Trump administration is that its 2024 electoral coalition, and the government it created, is something of a Frankenstein’s monster of disparate right-wing elements. Analysts have described this shotgun marriage in different ways. <a href="https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-three-headed-chimera-of-trumpian-destruction">To liberal Josh Marshall</a>, the “three-headed chimera of Trumpian destruction” is an amalgam of MAGA loyalists, Christian nationalists and “Tech bro” authoritarians. <a href="https://tempestmag.org/2025/02/trump-seizes-power-in-d-c/">To socialist Ashley Smith</a>, the Trump regime is a combination of “three factions with totally different political programs—traditional conservatives, neoliberal tech bosses and MAGA nationalists”.
Smith is closer to the structural components of the Trump regime, while Marshall is more concerned with its ideological composition. But both emphasise, correctly, the unstable nature of the forces undergirding Trump’s government. These disparate elements are mostly pulling in the same direction because the administration is on the offensive against “enemies” that they share: immigrants, “wokeness”, federal workers and the like. But there are underlying tensions between these groups. And a political payoff to one could undermine another. We’ve already seen a foreshadowing of this in <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/1/16/bannon-vs-musk-how-trumps-u-turn-on-h-1b-visas-has-split-maga">the fight between MAGA nationalists and tech oligarchs</a> over the question of visas for highly skilled migrant workers.
Between 2020 and 2024, Trump expanded his electoral coalition with newly minted constituencies such as RFK Jr’s anti-vax followers. The MAGA right brought these forces inside the Trump tent. To maintain their loyalty, the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services and the nation’s public health agencies was handed to Kennedy and other prominent opponents of vaccines and COVID-era policies. Trump knows nothing about health or science, as his ramblings about drinking bleach or linking common painkillers to autism, show. 
But even as his administration’s policies have caused upheaval in the public health infrastructure, Trump has stood by Kennedy. Surely one might think that business and the tech oligarchs would oppose such anti-science thinking. 
We should remember that the likes of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/25/climate-science-deniers-downplaying-coronavirus-pandemic">Koch network and the fossil-fuel industry</a>—in league with “<a href="https://jacobin.com/2018/10/donald-trump-lumpen-capitalist-class-elections">lumpencapitalist</a>” <a href="https://counterhate.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/210324-The-Disinformation-Dozen.pdf">supplement peddlers</a> (the online snake oil hawkers of the 21st century)—financed much of the opposition to COVID public health measures. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, which focused on individuals’ health and diet choices, <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/make-america-healthy-again-aims-to-make-public-health-your-responsibility/">aligns with neoliberalism’s “blame the victim” approach to cutting social spending</a>. Why should the government spend money on health care for those who make poor lifestyle choices, this Social Darwinist approach asks. 
Finally, the tech oligarchs think that artificial intelligence (AI), on which they are spending hundreds of billions, will be able to replace biomedical researchers, administer social programs and usurp skilled health care personnel. They plan to profit from all of these “innovations”. So, from one perspective, the US destroying its biomedical research enterprise makes no sense. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/business/larry-ellison-oracle-philanthropy.html">But to tech billionaires</a> who plan to use AI to remake that enterprise, it makes perfect sense.
A large proportion of Trump’s mass support—the core of the one-third or so of the electorate that is the “ride or die” MAGA base—holds religious ideas that are <a href="https://prri.org/research/one-leader-under-god-the-connection-between-authoritarianism-and-christian-nationalism-in-america/">highly authoritarian and anti-modern</a>. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm">Leon Trotsky’s observation</a> about Germany in the early 1930s comes to mind: 
“A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms ... Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters.”
These are not simply people susceptible to believing the various conspiracy theories promoted by Trump and MAGA influencers; They are an audience for various “culture war” issues the right uses to build support. While the US government has long supported Israel, the Trump administration’s embrace of the Israeli far right coincides with the increased influence in the Republican Party of Christian Zionist organisations, <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/christian-zionism-evangelicals-israel-trump-foreign-policy/">which cite Biblical prophecy in support of the Jewish state</a>.
And then there is the biggest wildcard, and source of chaos, in the administration: Trump himself. The president has longstanding ideological commitments that he refuses to drop, regardless of whether they make much sense economically or politically. Championing a tariff-driven, mercantilist economic policy is at the top of this list. 
Beyond a handful of commitments—mostly revolving around ways to boost his own power and to line his pockets—Trump is completely mercurial. Perhaps this is part of his self-promotion as a “strongman”, but it can also produce a situation in which, among his minions, “the knives are out for everyone”, <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/knives-everyone-author-michael-wolff-021305186.html">as Trump biographer Michael Wolff said earlier this month</a>.
That so much of what Trump and his administration does makes no rational sense doesn’t make them any less dangerous. And liberals who think that the 2026 midterm election or the end of Trump’s term will bring everyone “back to their senses” are deluding themselves.
US imperial decline, societal rot, and corrupt impunity at the highest reaches have paved the way for the confederacy of dunces and malefactors that have taken over the US government. The people who helped pave that path aren’t going to lead us out of it.

How did a bunch of crackpots get in charge of the USA?

A wave of censorship and political intimidation is sweeping the United States. Led by key figures in the Trump administration, including the president, the country’s vast far-right movement is pressuring employers to sack or silence left-wing workers and to purge outspoken political progressives from state and state-funded institutions. One of the latest casualties in this war on the left is a history professor in Texas, Tom Alter, who was fired last month for speaking, in his own time, at a socialist conference. 
A judge has since <a href="https://www.puntorojomag.org/2025/09/27/judge-rules-for-tom-alter-as-battle-against-university-continues">ordered the university to reinstate Alter</a>, but management has indicated that it will continue investigating him. The following is the original statement and call for solidarity released by his organisation, <a href="https://socialisthorizon.org/">Socialist Horizon</a>.
--------------------
Defend free speech! No to fascists! Reinstate Professor Tom Alter Now! 
Beloved tenured history professor and Socialist Horizon member Tom Alter was summarily fired on 10 September by Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse for expressing his views in a virtual conference unrelated to the university. This action cannot stand. Socialist Horizon calls on people everywhere to join us and demand that Professor Alter be reinstated to his tenured position.
President Damphousse fired Dr Tom Alter based solely on a video published online by an extreme right-wing provocateur who infiltrated and secretly video-recorded segments of a virtual socialist conference with the intention of publishing information to slander and attack conference participants. In videos posted on their website, this person declares that they are a proud fascist who tries to monetise exposure of the left as an “anti-communist cult leader”. This grifter publicly exhorts followers to embrace fascist ideology and take action, is an antisemite that states that Jewish people “chose to die in the Holocaust”, is a self-declared racist and xenophobe, a homophobe and a transphobe that spews hate speech throughout their platform that is solely designed to inflame and incite.
After the fascist’s “exposure video” reached President Damphousse, he summarily fired Dr Alter, a tenured professor, without questioning or investigating the content, without considering its authenticity or validity, without any form of due process, and violating existing state law and campus policy, which requires a formal due process procedure.
What did Alter talk about that triggered fascists, and that Damphousse considers so unacceptable? 
The statement issued by Damphousse to terminate Dr Alter unambiguously affirms that he fired Alter for what he said at that conference, stating no other reason, and accusing Alter of “inciting violence”. But his speech, a transcript of which can be viewed <a href="https://universitystar.com/32736/news/texas-state-terminates-history-professor-over-comments-made-at-conference/">here</a>, in no way calls for violence. 
Alter spoke against this cruel and unjust system and argued in favour of replacing it with socialism, and he advocated organising politically to achieve this. Alter’s political views <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/694835/image-capitalism-slips.aspx">reflect</a> those of nearly half of the total US population. Almost half now oppose capitalism and 40 percet favour socialism over capitalism. Alter’s views are far from subversive; they reflect the mainstream. It is a just cause that more and more people are joining, one people believe to be worth fighting for, and represents a change in thinking that is scaring the bigots, fascists and capitalists. 
It is in fact the fascist infiltrator who incites violence against oppressed people, and in this case, directly against Alter. It is Alter’s employer, Texas State University, that inflicted violence: stripping Alter of his job, refusing him any due process, casting him and his family into the uncertainty of unemployment and making them a target for the extreme right, while slamming the door shut on his free speech and academic freedom. Alter’s First Amendment right to speak, guaranteed by the Constitution, has been violated, as has his academic freedom—a protected right developed by his national faculty union, the American Association of University Professors.
The fact that a marginal fascist streamer with a dangerous and extremist ideology can pressure the president of a prestigious public university system to illegally fire a tenured professor for his opinions is alarming. Most concerning, if we do not stop this, it will set a precedent that will embolden the most dangerous bigots, right-wing extremists and fascists who will continue to target people across the country. If they can influence and direct the president of the Texas State University system so easily—who else will they go after?
We call on President Damphousse to stop this flagrant attack on constitutionally-protected free speech, to undo this wrongful termination, and to immediately reinstate Dr Tom Alter to his teaching position. 
The termination of Dr Alter is a serious attack that upends his livelihood, his professional and academic career, and sets a very dangerous precedent. President Damphousse’s actions appear to be in accordance with the far-right politics of Texas politicians Greg Abbot and Ted Cruz, as well as being in line with that of Donald Trump, who has used the office of the presidency to wage war on his political opponents. 
Damphousse’s actions align with Trump and the far-right forces trying to impose and enforce an authoritarian regime that wants to silence critics, crush political dissent, and attack anyone they perceive to be oppositional to their project. Even more threatening, Damphousse’s actions strengthen the power and influence of fascists and enable the most violent and reactionary groups to also attack and take action against anyone they deem to be part of the left. 
It is Trump who inflicts violence against millions through his authoritarian political attacks that target people of Colour, women, transpeople, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, impoverished and unhoused people, and the working class as a whole. It is the far right and the fascists who are building movements to harm innocent and vulnerable people. It is this capitalist system that Alter spoke against that inflicts mass violence, condemning billions to hunger, poverty and war, while a handful accumulates ever-growing obscene amounts of wealth that is stolen from the rest of us.
Alter is being attacked because he is telling a truth that many people in the United States believe today: that capitalism is ruining their lives and that socialism is a better system. If Dr Tom Alter can be fired for expressing his personal beliefs and principles, then people everywhere are in danger. If he can be fired for expressing a point of view at a conference, away from his work and in his daily private life, then none of us are safe. 
His case must draw support from people of all sectors of society: workers, teachers, nurses, students—anyone and everyone who upholds the value of free speech. As the great anti-slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said, “The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected”.
We call on everyone to join us in building the broadest possible solidarity campaign to win this decisive battle.
The attacks on Dr Tom Alter and socialist politics will not intimidate Socialist Horizon. We will defend our comrade and we will continue fighting for the very cause he is being attacked for: justice, freedom and equality. We will also continue building the organisation that it will take to win it.
Dr Tom Alter is not only a beloved faculty member at Texas State but also an advisor to several student organisations. He is the author of a celebrated history of socialism in the American South, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press). He is also the father of two children. Socialist Horizon demands that Texas State University immediately restore Tom Alter’s position as associate professor of history. 
Socialist Horizon also calls on all organisations and individuals that defend the basic democratic right to free speech and reject fascism and authoritarianism, and all socialists in particular, to join this fight. This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defence of free speech and against fascism.
Follow the <a href="https://socialisthorizon.org">Socialist Horizon website</a> for campaign updates.

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