Radiation warning sign at Ambrosia Lake uranium mining area, New Mexico. Photo: Netherzone. Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 4.0

In New Mexico, resistance to Trump’s demand to resume uranium mining appears to be growing, from local protests against mines, mining-permit proposals and a processing mill in Utah, to statewide and congressional action.

Most recently, on September 4, New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard signed an executive order that bans all new uranium mining projects on the more than 13 million acres of state trust lands she oversees.

“New Mexicans have been overlooked by the uranium industry and the federal government for far too long,” Garcia Richard said, “and now the Trump administration is once again completely ignoring these communities and pushing for aggressive uranium development nationwide, despite the fact that there still remain thousands of sites that are abandoned and need to be remediated.”

U.S. Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján, along with U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, wrote Carson National Forest Supervisor James Duran in April to protest exploratory uranium drilling by a Canadian-based company within the forest near Canjilon. They urged the Forest Service to conduct a full environmental review before taking any further action. They also asked the Forest Service to suspend that review pending legislation they intended to introduce into Congress to protect the Chama watershed from further development. The April letter also emphasized the important role of the Chama River, which supports agriculture and provides drinking water to numerous towns across northern New Mexico.

“This watershed is not simply an environmental amenity. It is critical water infrastructure — as essential to the communities of northern New Mexico as any road, pipe, or reservoir,” the members of the state’s congressional delegation wrote. The water has “continuously sustained agricultural production and community identity for more than 400 years …Tribal nations have exercised cultural, ceremonial, and subsistence ties to this landscape since time immemorial.”

Garcia Richard has only four months left in her term and is running for lieutenant governor; however, Juan Sanchez III, the Democratic Party candidate running to be her successor, said he would continue the policy.

The proposal by the Vancouver uranium company Gamma Resources Ltd., also drew opposition from Rio Arriba County Commissioner Moises Morales, who lives near Canjilon, and Tirzio Lopez, who serves on the governmental Upper Chama Soil and Water Conservation District board and is on the board of the New Mexico Game Commission.

Garcia Richard summed up a widespread public opinion in New Mexico, saying, according to Source New Mexico, that “the long-lasting environmental and public health impacts of uranium contamination outweigh any potential revenues to state coffers uranium mining could provide.”

The congressional delegation concurred in its April letter to Duran, writing that New Mexico “bears a disproportionate and well-documented legacy of harm from uranium mining. Hundreds of abandoned uranium mines on and near tribal lands, particularly within the Navajo Nation, have contaminated water sources and resulted in elevated rates of kidney disease and cancer among affected communities.”

US Senators Heinrich and Luján. U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, and “all New Mexico Democrats,” the Abiquiu News reported on August 6, sponsored theChama Basin Watershed Protection Act. “If enacted, the act would prohibit all forms of uranium mining through much of Rio Arriba County , including in the Santa Fe and Carson National Forests.”

Garcia Richard’s executive order and the congressional delegation’s proposed act are symbolic at the moment because there are no proposals to mine uranium on land controlled by the New Mexico State Lands Commission and because Republicans control both houses of Congress, at least until Jan. 3, 2027. On the other hand, Richard’s order should prevent any uranium-mining proposals on state lands in the future; and the New Mexico delegation’s bill should flourish in a Democratic House of Representatives and succeed if Democrats take the Senate, too.

Less symbolic is the silence this weekend of front-running Democratic Party candidate for governor, former member of Congress and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, whose campaign issued a press release about the campaign’s first television ad. The ad emphasized the needs of working families and Haaland toured northern parts of the state with the same national Democratic Party message. Perhaps Haaland’s federal experience (she was a congresswoman before she went to Interior) has wrapped her in the mendacious aura of National Security, erasing from her memory the 3,141-acre Jackpile Mine, one of the largest open-pit uranium mines in the world, which adjoins the Laguna Pueblo. She is an enrolled member of the Laguna Tribe.  In Congress, she could be eloquent on the evils of the Jackpile, but as Interior Secretary her office referred local press to the Environmental Protection Agency for information.

Meanwhile, President Trump has proclaimed that he has renamed New Mexico “New America,” which he lacks authority to do. Outgoing Governor Michelle Luján Grisham, also a former Democratic Party member of Congress, took this opportunity to rebuke a president driving new uranium mining in her state and to praise her own leadership.

“Under Democratic leadership here in New Mexico, we’re providing families with free childcare and college, protecting access to health care and investing in housing,” she wrote on X last weekend. She said nothing about progress on a plan she proposed in 2024 with Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs to streamline decision-making regarding the cleanup of abandoned uranium mines.

 “New Mexico is committed to nimble decision-making while ensuring safe cleanup and disposal of these legacy wastes,” Grisham said.

Quietly, beyond nimble political rhetoric, real political resistance grows to the resumption of the terribly destructive mining of uranium on the Colorado Plateau. The evidence of this resistance and the political pressure it can create so far consists of the political events described above.  But the roughly agreed-upon reality is that there are something like 1,100 abandoned uranium mines and mill sites in New Mexico, about 500 of which are on or near the Navajo Reservation. Efforts have been made through the years since the industry dried up in the 1980s to deal with the radioactive waste lying outside these mines for children to play with, for people to use as building materials, and to deal with the contaminated water sickening sheep and human beings. And some remediation has occurred; some wastes have been buried and planted over or removed. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act helps victims, both miners and their families and downwind victims of nuclear testing.

But all of this is very expensive; there is never the money necessary, and the paperwork is daunting. In short, the bastards got away with polluting much of the Colorado Plateau with the worst kind of toxicity and left the federal government, their only customer at the time, to deal with the damage. Add to that the political squalor of National Security and the administration of Indian reservations. Now add Trump and his new friends, Canadian transnational mining companies, and old friends,  dim-witted racists who want nukes.

Yet, there are clear, strong people who live near the sources of contamination and disease; they see the damage and they actively defend the old, the young, and the unborn. The battle goes on, local residents fighting transnational uranium-mining corporations; in the middle are politicians and the national public anticipating increasing amounts of nuclear waste in years to come.

The post Under the Stars in Old New Mexico: the Growing Resistance to Uranium Mining appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Dietmar Rabich – CC BY-SA 4.0

I read this Substack column last week comparing the timing of subprime resets in 2006-08 to the payments that the AI companies will soon have to make for data centers as they open. (Sorry, I would credit the author, but I don’t know who Mr. or Ms. Groundbreaker is.) Most data centers are being constructed with contracts with the AI producers where they first start having to pay lease obligations when the data centers become operational.

Anyhow, I was first taken by the argument, which is essentially that the timing of the collapse of the housing bubble was an entirely predictable event, because we knew that the teaser rates on hundreds of billions of dollars in subprime loans were due to reset to much higher rates starting in 2006, with the volume rising in 2007 and 2008. Since millions of homeowners would be unable to pay the higher reset rate, their mortgages would soon go into delinquency and default. The column sees this as parallel to the trillions of dollars of lease obligations that the AI companies will have to start paying as more data centers start operating in 2027 and 2028.

That originally struck me as a neat parallel, but then I remembered a bit more of the housing bubble history. It’s true that millions of people with subprime mortgages hit a wall in 2007-08 when their teaser rates reset to much higher rates, but that was not a wall that first got erected in 2006.

There were hundreds of billions of subprime mortgages with teaser rates issued in 2004 and 2005. If someone had constructed this graph in either of those years, we would have seen a reset wall in 2005 or 2006. It’s true that the wall would have been somewhat smaller in those years. There were fewer subprime loans, and their value was less, since house prices rose rapidly in those years, but the graphs for both 2004 and 2005 would have still looked ominous. (The big jump in 2007 is an inevitable result of the timing. People who reset a mortgage in 2005 or 2006, prior to the construction of the chart, will not face another reset for at least two years.)

In prior years, millions of people who had taken out subprime mortgages were able to refinance into new mortgages before the mortgage reset to a higher rate. That was no longer true when house prices stopped rising. This meant they were stuck facing the higher reset rate, which they were not able to pay.

There is a great scene in the movie The Big Short, where the Steve Carell character is talking with a stripper who owns five houses that she intends to flip. She is explaining how this makes sense. She has subprime loans with relatively low teaser rates, which she can afford to pay. When Carell asks her what happens when the loans reset to higher rates, she explains that she just refinances into a new subprime and gets the teaser rate again. He then asks her what happens if she can’t refinance, at which point she is jolted into reality.

I’m raising this point not to criticize the analysis, which is very useful, but to take issue with the idea that the collapse of the bubble is somehow locked in by the payoff schedule on the data centers being built. Undoubtedly the impending flood of lease payments from the AI producers will be a massive hurdle for them to overcome, but it’s worth thinking through this dynamic more closely.

Let’s assume that everyone reads the Groundbreaker analysis and agrees it is correct. The AI producers have committed themselves to payments that there is no way on earth that they can pay. Does the bubble continue to inflate until they have to start making good on their data center leases?

That seems unlikely. After the hyperscalers read Groundbreaker’s analysis they will know that they will never be repaid for the data centers they are paying hundreds of billions to construct. At best they will be able to get partial payment through renegotiating a contract with a company facing, or actually in, bankruptcy. This would almost certainly leave them with large losses on their massive investments.

Facing that prospect, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and the rest would almost certainly look to renegotiate their deals now, before they throw still more money down the toilet. Perhaps they would not be able to do this. OpenAI and Anthropic may be operating with the view that bankruptcy is inevitable, so all the risk lies with the hyperscalers, but the most profitable companies in the world presumably will not watch themselves slow walk into the abyss without putting up some sort of fight.

Anyhow, this gets into areas of law that I don’t know and contracts that I have not seen, but the point is that the belief in the huge profitability of AI, like the belief in ever-rising house prices, is what drives the bubbles. As long as those beliefs persist, the bubbles can continue to grow.

If people still think AI will be the most profitable thing the planet has ever seen, when the lease obligations come due, Sam Altman will still be able to go down to Wall Street and get hundreds of billions, or even trillions, for whatever garbage he puts on the table. When the people controlling the big bucks no longer accept his story, that’s when the music stops. There is no fixed schedule for the collapse.

And with that – here are the latest numbers on P/E ratios and market cap for the big AI companies:

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s AI Monitor blog.

The post The Timing of the AI Bubble Burst and the Subprime Collapse appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

“The weird stuff these guys say in their blogs or in their speeches is not just eccentric fluff. Because they have so much money, they can turn these weird ideas into policy and cause tremendous damage.” –

– Gil Duran, The Nerd Reich

“One way or another, the era of uncontested drift into plutocracy is over. U.S. socialism is back.”

– Democratic Left

“The Democrats are going to investigate you to no end.”

– James Carville

We are confronted by the widespread and possibly too deep destructiveness wrought and criminality committed by Donald J. Trump’s presidential blight. How he and his minions can be brought to justice and how we can at the same time engage steadfastly in repairing damages done are matters we cannot forsake. It would be more than foolish not to disclose the many violations of the Constitutional order committed by Trump. The Republic cannot rest on a foundation of corruption.

The present USA surround can be summed up as tottering due to the actions of one man, Donald J. Trump. Because his cabinet are no more than tools at hand to serve his whims, we can’t speak of a powerful coordinated regime. The US has a one man regime, a cratering man filled with delusions of grandeur, a mean spirited, ruthless, vindictive man filled with hate toward others. He makes Richard III look charitable; Caligula compassionate. All this said, his historical obit will surely mention he beat to the ground a 250-year-old electoral Republic. Let it not say he was not brought to justice.

More must be done this electoral season than shifting market orientation to worker-owned cooperatives, or, going big behind public ownership and not for profit health care, education, the military-industrial complex, fossil fuel energy, penal system, Big Pharma et al. We need to stop digging the hole Trump has put us in but before that we need to get out of the hole. Knocking each other’s brains out would suit Trump’s sadistic pleasure in making the lives of others miserable. “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”

Everyone who has come ten feet of the Oval Office should be subpoenaed and if warranted, indicted and prosecuted; Every Executive order signed by Trump should be rescinded; All agencies and departments demolished or cut back by Elon Musk’s illegal DOGE should be reinstated and restored; Trump and family should be sued to pay for damages to protected areas and habitats put at risk; Everything added to the White House and Washington DC should be removed, including what has been constructed or what is under construction; Each State should bring charges against Trump for damages to that State and its citizenry; International affiliations should be re-established; Tariffs abolished; The Supreme Court pardon should be tested in search of private grifting and official actions; We should release to international criminal courts everyone they want to put on trial; Mar a Lago should be tossed in search of what is illegally there.

We are now also confronted by illiberal and anti-democratic forces of AI and robotic tech and crypto bros and the hordes of money as speech they can launch. Perhaps the madcap plans of billionaires will be defused by a growing antipathy to an economics creating this threatening elite class of techno fascists. However, the power and intent of deranged billionaire tech money has already influenced our Congressional powers to regulate and control.

When asked what it was with the tech bros assuming they are the elite who should be running the country, Gil Durant, author of The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism, the War on Democracy, responded:

Well, I think it’s the derangement and psychosis that results from too much money. These people have gone totally insane. And now they are on a quest not only to seize all of American political power and establish a monopoly of political power that overthrows our democracy. . . We have a great outbreak of delusional thinking in Silicon Valley.

The vast amount of money, soon perhaps to be greatly increased as AI reaches a stable monetizing scale, available to buy the entire political order, both Democrats and Republicans, ultimately aims to break the system. Whereas Donald J. Trump has been and continues to be a one-man wrecking ball to a 250-year-old order, what the tech and crypto bros are intent on doing is deleting that whole order Trump has undermined from inside the Oval Office and substituting for it a cultish/fascist borderless AI regime of power. Trump has already shown that passions aroused can attract loyal followers everywhere reason and evidence have lost hold. What this means in terms of the tech mission to destroy and replace is that grassroot/popular resistance has been collapsed into pliability and, at best, befuddlement, which describes the American state of mind under Trump.

The Amodei brothers, founders of Anthropic, withheld release of Claude, a generative AI system, because it engages itself without human guidance while also breaking containment and accessing the internet. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are presently available, while the Federal Government and both political parties remain, as always, pondering GDP growth via tech, catching up with tech, and waiting, as with Facebook, to see what damage may be done, especially to electability. Truly, Pandora’s Box has been opened and is releasing what American society has lost the capacity to know how to comprehend or counter.

Alongside softening this resistance to craziness and nonsense, and the “Sovereign Individual” who, by being rich, should own the world, Trump has demonstrated that a Constitutional order grounding a Republic governed by elected representatives of the People is no more than what a labor contract was to Trump. In regard to interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court is itself tied up in Originalism, absolutely philosophically ridiculous in the views of both Gadamer and Habermas. Resting interpretation on original intent is precisely the approach a man of irrational proposition would love. In regard to legislation by elected representatives, Trump has employed a cult of followers in order to bend these representatives to his will. He has had enough MAGA Republicans to turn Congressional Primary elections his way. I write “has had.” The November elections may show us his cult power diminishing and fleeing.

What all this wreckage means in terms of meeting the attack of the Nerd Reich is that a willfully ignorant Outer Borough grifter who has rarely spoken a word of truth beat the Democratic order to a standstill. Imagine what delusions of grandeur billionaires can do with AI at the helm? Secondly, imagine how undisciplined and uninformed minds can turn from the MAGA electorate to an obedient cult by a steady dialogue with the AI, owned and operated by the Nerd Reich?

Curtis Yarvin, a computer engineer, who accordingly sees the present political order as in need of a reboot and stands behind tech corporate monarchy and racial cleansing, doesn’t blame Trump for destructiveness but rather for losing his offensive momentum by deferring to elections and has not been successful in ending voting. He will certainly try this November. Yarvin wants the voice of the People replaced by the billionaire tech bros. For him and his growing number of followers Big Data Intelligence crushes the intelligence of the average citizen. I admit that Jordan Klepper’s Fingers the Pulse makes one wonder how deeply can voters sink into sheer ignorance. The centralized Party elite control of the Russian proletariat revolution is less menacing than techno-authoritarian control precisely because Marx sought to elevate and liberate humanity while Yarvin, the puppet master of Peter Thiel, who is the puppet master of J.D. Vance, rails against human equality, individual political participation and universal human rights.

Yarvin is a cyberspace dweller with the standard issues of that lot but his derangement issues are nothing compared to the billionaire hubris expanded to a transhuman meld with AI producing immortality that threatens a 250-year-old Republic in a way even Trump hasn’t. Yarvin is presently warning of Democratic Party retribution following the November Congressional elections and recommending flight. Thiel himself collects passports, although he’s focused on Argentina as warm to his insanity. If by some chance, Vance gets into the presidency, Thiel will be back in the country and Yarvin will be required reading for a Vance cabinet, alongside Ayn Rand.

The third selected confrontation the country faces is equally crucial. The Democratic Party can make no sense to itself or to voters until it reconciles the political and economic theories it follows and its stand on the present form of Capitalism. What the Democratic Party now faces in terms of its socialist surge represented by DSA must be openly addressed. How the Democratic Party shapes itself after November and what it chooses to do is, for the purpose of ending the present decline of the country nationally and internationally, cannot be deflected by worrying about what happens to the Republican Party post-Trump. President Ronald Reagan set a course that had been followed by that Party up to the presidencies of Donald J. Trump, who has not set a charted course for that Party to follow. Whether that Party goes in search of another Trump in order to hold onto the MAGA faction or whether it continues to be wagged by Trump enthroned in Mar a Lago means nothing if the Democratic Party is in power. However, the form of laissez-faire capitalism that Keynes described as inherently unstable, unjust, and prone to disastrous rise and fall of the economy remains virulently active even though its Republican Party front is out of power.

Haley Stephens lost the Michigan Senate Democratic primary to El-Sayed by less than 1 percentage point. What’s behind this slight differentiation? If we use Keynes as a gauge, as in a statement such as this: “[Laissez-faire capitalism] is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous—and it doesn’t deliver the goods” we find ourselves closer to DSA candidates than these two, although Stephens sees a healthy promise at the heart of capitalism while El-Sayed sees something darker there that requires an external corrective. DSA members see the dark Satanic mills of capitalism growing darker by the hour and therefore want to electorally transform the tenets of competitive growth of Capital with the empowerment of Labor electorally done. The role of the State in the DSA view is not to protect and foster the mission of Capital but to expand public ownership. Although the Cato institute and conservative voices identify this as State ownership, public ownership could also mean worker ownership which would reorient power arrangements in an electoral democracy. According to the Worker Cooperatives Benefit Guide, “By placing workers’ needs before investors’ profits, successful worker cooperatives democratize wealth rather than concentrating it.” In this way, the distribution of power in the State is dispersed and bends toward the needs of workers and not investors’ profits.

Political transformation arises then from structural economic changes, namely a movement from shareholder ownership to worker ownership, such worker cooperatives retaining the surplus capital of production available for worker investment in worker cooperatives. Democratic power emerges from this distribution of wealth across the many and not owned by the elite few. The “Invisible Hand of the Market” is replaced by the votes of the many.

From what we can make out some Democrats are market-oriented and use the name Liberal. Others see themselves as an arbitrage unit coming in after market-oriented collapses and bandaging and use the name Progressive. A Progressive Liberal comes to the defense of those denied equal justice, those under attack or marginalized by wrongful legislation, and those treated unfairly and discriminated against in regard to work, health, housing, food and education. All of this is not directly tied to the consequences of an economic system that plays on a Monopoly game board. The DSA has emerged to make this connection although it is focused on the benefits of moving from a market oriented approach without either documenting their own approach or the deficits of market orientation. To what degree DSA is anti-capitalist is not addressed using such terminology thus avoiding the angry polemics of any attack on the “free” enterprise and glories of private ownership, itself tied to personal freedom, that capitalism offers. While there is a great deal of America Hurrah of liberty and freedom attached to Capitalism’s Free Enterprise of Enlightened Competition, any brand of socialism has no Rally Round the Flag vigor. Just as this country does not look favorably on socialism, it is only confused and negative about abolishing enforcement, the Senate, granting voting rights to non-citizens and ending the use of fossil fuels. The DNC accordingly does not see winning elections as what happens when you go DSA.

We’ll see in November and afterward how these selected confrontations are faced Or not.

The post Confrontations: A Select 3 appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Office of U.S. President – Public Domain

President Xi Jinping’s forthcoming visit to the United States must be understood as more than an encounter between two heads of state, but it must be seen as an encounter between two possible futures.

In one future, the United States imposes a spiral of confrontation against China. Trade disputes harden into economic warfare, then economic warfare intensifies into technological blockades, technological blockades produce military encirclement, and finally military encirclement creates incidents, and incidents the danger of becoming an unimaginable war.

In the other future, the two countries accept that neither can destroy the other without destroying much of humanity. They recognise that coexistence is not an act of charity and collaboration is not a concession. Both are necessities.

That is the significance of President Xi’s decision to travel to the United States. China’s foreign ministry has described head-of-state diplomacy as having an ‘irreplaceable’ role in guiding relations between the two countries. The visit follows President Donald Trump’s trip to China in May and continuing negotiations over tariffs, trade, and investment. There are indications that President Xi will travel with a substantial delegation of Chinese business leaders. These facts suggest that Beijing wants to move the relationship away from permanent crisis and towards practical engagement.

But diplomacy between China and the United States cannot merely be a photo opportunity. Nor should it be understood as a negotiation in which one side must surrender to the other. It must be based on a sober recognition of reality. Or to be precise, four realities.

The first reality is that China cannot be contained. China is not a minor country whose development can be suffocated by sanctions. It has a population of more than 1.4 billion people, a vast industrial system, an increasingly sophisticated scientific community, and deep commercial relationships across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Whatever one thinks of China, it is absurd to imagine that it can simply be excluded from the world economy. The attempt to contain China has already produced an extraordinary catalogue of restrictions: tariffs, semiconductor controls, investment prohibitions, sanctions on Chinese companies, naval patrols along China’s coastline, and the construction of new military arrangements from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. Each of these measures is presented as defensive. Taken together, however, they form an architecture of confrontation. There is a dangerous illusion in Washington that pressure will force China to abandon its development. No Chinese government could accept such a demand. After the century of humiliation (from the Opium Wars to the Japanese invasion) the restoration of national sovereignty and the improvement of living standards are not negotiable matters for the Chinese people. The United States may slow certain aspects of China’s development, but it cannot persuade China to return to poverty.

The second reality is that economic separation is neither simple nor painless. The United States and China remain deeply connected through trade, investment, supply chains, scientific knowledge, and consumer markets. US farmers depend upon Chinese buyers. US companies depend upon Chinese manufacturing and upon Chinese consumers. China, meanwhile, benefits from access to US technology, agricultural products, and capital. Negotiators are now discussing reciprocal tariff reductions and new mechanisms for trade and investment. These are modest measures, but they acknowledge an important truth: economic warfare injures both countries. Tariffs are announced with nationalist speeches, but their costs appear quietly in grocery bills, factory closures, disrupted supply chains, and lost employment. Working people in the United States do not benefit when China is weakened. Their difficulties are rooted principally in decisions made by their own ruling class: decades of deindustrialisation, the power of finance, attacks on trade unions, the privatisation of public services, and the refusal to undertake serious social investment. China did not close the factories of the US Midwest. US corporations closed them in search of higher profits. The answer to inequality in either country is not economic nationalism by the United States.

The third reality is that humanity faces problems that cannot be solved by either country acting alone. The climate catastrophe does not carry a passport. Carbon emitted in one country heats the atmosphere everywhere. The United States possesses immense scientific and financial resources, while China has developed enormous productive capacity in solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, public transport, and renewable-energy infrastructure. Collaboration between them could accelerate a worldwide energy transition. Confrontation will delay it precisely when delay has become intolerable. The same is true of public health. The COVID-19 pandemic showed us the human cost of secrecy, competition, and vaccine nationalism. Artificial intelligence creates another urgent area for cooperation. These technologies cannot be governed adequately by rival military doctrines or private corporations seeking maximum profit. The two countries must develop common safeguards against autonomous weapons, destabilising cyberattacks, mass surveillance, and the use of artificial intelligence to intensify social inequality.

Finally, the fourth reality is the question of war. China and the United States are nuclear-armed powers. Any direct military conflict between them would have consequences beyond calculation. This is why Taiwan must not be transformed into the trigger for a catastrophic confrontation. The one-China framework and the existing diplomatic understandings must not be hollowed out by provocations, arms sales, or gestures designed for domestic political theatre.

Peace requires restraint from both sides, but restraint cannot mean that the United States surrounds China with military bases and warships and then demands that China alone remain calm. Security cannot be achieved through the permanent insecurity of another country. There will, of course, be disagreements. Collaboration does not require agreement on every political question. Nor does coexistence require silence about differences. But disagreement must be conducted through diplomacy, international law, and the institutions of the United Nations, not through sanctions, threats, and military exercises.

The countries of the Global South have a particular interest in the success of this visit. They do not want to be instructed to choose between China and the United States. They do not want their ports, minerals, telecommunications systems, and political institutions turned into battlefields in a new cold war. They want access to finance, technology, medicine, and markets without political subordination. They want development, not recruitment into rival military camps. Xi Jinping’s visit therefore carries a responsibility that extends far beyond Washington and Beijing. The world does not need an agreement merely to divide markets between Chinese and US corporations. It needs a commitment to reduce the danger of war, dismantle unilateral coercive measures, restore normal economic relations, cooperate on climate and public health, and strengthen the principles of the United Nations Charter.

The importance of the visit lies not in ceremony but in possibility. It offers both countries an opportunity to step back from the cliff. The United States must abandon the fantasy that it can preserve its primacy by preventing China’s development. China, for its part, has repeatedly said that it does not seek to replace the United States as a hegemonic power. That principle must become the basis of a durable relationship: no containment, no domination, no war.

There is an old habit among powerful states of treating compromise as weakness. In the nuclear age, the opposite is true. It takes no courage to order another warship into contested waters. It takes political courage to recognise that one’s adversary also has legitimate interests, that coexistence requires reciprocity, and that the survival of humanity is more important than the vanity of supremacy.

This visit should therefore carry a simple message from Washington to the world: collaboration is not surrender, diplomacy is not weakness, and peace is not an abstraction.

Confrontation offers neither country a future.

Collaboration offers the world a chance.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

The post Collaboration, Not Confrontation: Xi Jinping’s Visit to the United States appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, by Abraham Ortelius, Typus Orbis Terrarum, 1572

Last week, on 4th September, the United Nations General Assembly adopted an African proposal for a new world map, which shows countries’ true size relative to one another. It aims to correct the view of the world shaped by the widely used world map based on the Mercator Projection, created by Gerardus Mercator, a 16th-century Flemish cartographer. The problem with the Mercator Map is well known; for example, it shows the island of Greenland as the same size as the African continent, even though Africa is 14 times the size of Greenland! Simply put, Mercator maps greatly exaggerate the global north—the US and Europe—while shrinking Africa and most of Asia. Nor does it treat the rest of the Southern Hemisphere kindly. South America, nearly three times the size of Europe, looks comparable to it on a typical Mercator map.

Though there is no geographical reason the Southern Hemisphere should be smaller than the Northern Hemisphere, mapmakers made it significantly smaller because it had very little landmass beyond 40 degrees and was therefore cropped out. This meant that on most Mercator maps, because Western mapmakers cropped out much of the Southern Hemisphere, the equator was significantly displaced downward. The double whammy of squeezing the equatorial areas, where much of Africa lies, and shifting the equator down made the global north, particularly Europe and North America, seem much larger than they actually are. Typically, on most Mercator maps, the Northern Hemisphere looks twice the size of the Southern Hemisphere, though the two hemispheres are identical in size.

Any map, whether Mercator or any other projection, has the problem that you can be true to either size or shape, but not both. The problem is a fundamental one of projecting a three-dimensional surface to a two-dimensional piece of paper. There is no way of doing this without distortions. Only a globe can truly represent the three-dimensional earth faithfully. But then what do we do when we want to reproduce geographical details for our readers in books or articles?

The blatant distortions of the Mercator projection and its Eurocentric approach gave rise to several alternatives, particularly among broad-left or progressive cartographers. Others, particularly in the US and Europe have opposed it, arguing that size does not matter and that they were comfortable being shown much bigger than they actually are. But many dissented and tried to work out alternate projections. The Gall-Peterson projection, which was backed by the German social democratic government of Willy Brandt, is one such projection. The Hobo Dyer projection, which is in the global commons, meaning anybody can use it without paying royalties, is another one. Finally, the United Nations has ended the map wars, with a resounding victory for the motion moved by the African nations for using equal area maps. The voting was 164 in favour of the motion with the US casting the only nay vote.

The objective of Mercator map was for ships navigating in open seas, where we can no longer navigate recognising various topological features, rivers, hills, villages, towns, etc. On the open ocean, if we identify where we are on a Mercator map and the destination we want to reach, we can travel in a straight line, as shown on the map. It conserves direction, meaning if we plot a course on a Mercator map, we can set our course by it. That is why ocean-going countries used Mercator projections for navigation when they had few instruments beyond the compass and the sextant to determine where they were relative to their destination.

It is important to note that the direction shown on the map is not the shortest path between where you start from and your destination. The shortest path on two points on the surface of the globe is the arc of the great circle from where you are to your destination. A straight line on a 2-dimensional map may look like the shortest distance, but it is not as it does not account for the Earth’s curvature. Simply put, the price we pay for converting a curved surface to a flat 2-dimensional one is that we distort the shape of the surface. We stretch certain areas and shrink others. On a flat earth, the shortest distance would be what your compass shows, but not on a sphere.

Earlier, ships used stars and the midday sun to estimate where they were and where they needed to go. Setting a course to your destination using a Mercator map and a compass was much easier than trying to guess where you were on an empty ocean with no landmarks and constantly changing course for a shorter route. The constant line on the map was called the rhumb line, and following it greatly helped the ocean farers. Mercator maps were popular in Europe, particularly in Western Europe, because, apart from the Arabs, they were the major ocean-going nations.

While the Arabs focused on trade, particularly in the Indian Ocean, Western Europeans focused not only on fishing but, in the off-season, on piracy, raiding and looting other nations. The Vikings, major romantic figures in Hollywood, were particularly brutal, combining loot with slave trade. Of course, like all pirates, once you become powerful, you can convert that ocean power into conquest. The northern men, or Norsemen, conquered France and later England, and are known to us as Normans. Not very different from the Dutch and the British East India Companies, starting with trade and piracy and later establishing colonial empires.

Not surprisingly, the ocean-going kingdoms of Western Europe, for whom war and fishing for food and hunting seals, walrus, etc., for blubber and skins were major sources of wealth, focused much more on seafaring and shipbuilding. This meant ships built for the rougher Atlantic Ocean had certain advances that Arab and Indian ships did not, though the compass, astrolabe, astronomical maps, and other nautical instruments all came from Asia.

Western European ships had deck-mounted cannons, which allowed them to fire ‘broadside,’ meaning multiple cannons firing simultaneously, unlike the front- and rear-mounted cannons. That is one of the major reasons a handful of West European countries could use the oceans to first capture the ocean trade and later build their colonial empires. Unlike fixed forts, ships acted as floating ones, giving Europeans mobility in naval wars that static ground fortifications lacked.

As Needham’s monumental work on Chinese science and technology shows, many nautical advances in shipbuilding and navigation came from China. Seven voyages by Zheng He’s ships in the 15th century (1405-1443), which travelled from China, Southeast Asia, India, and down the Arab coast to Africa, showed that the Chinese had built huge ships and a powerful navy. At that time, they were well ahead of Europe and the Arabs, in both shipbuilding and warships. Internal differences between the landed aristocracy and the naval commanders led to the navy’s destruction and a ban on building any oceangoing ships.

Although India supplied the timber necessary for shipbuilding to the Arabs, and once had a powerful navy, it ceded the oceangoing trade to Arab merchants. Neither China, India, nor the Arabs saw the navy as militarily important. As one Mughal Emperor said, Oceans are for traders, not us, the warriors. Caste divisions in India also led, at one point, to barring upper castes from undertaking ocean voyages. Crossing Kala Pani, always forbidden by the Brahmins, was not strictly followed. India saw major maritime expansion in the Buddhist period, not by war but through trade and proselytising Buddhist monks. After the revival of Hinduism in the South, the taboo against upper-caste travel across oceans was enforced more strictly, leaving the oceans to traders and mercenaries. For example, the major fleets of the Indian kings, whether the King of Calicut, also known as Samundri or Zamorin, or Shivaji, relied on mercenary naval commanders and ships, many commanded by the Arabs.

As history shows, maps, ocean trade, and war are intimately connected. Ocean voyages and naval wars make maps strategically important. It is not simply where each country’s borders lie that is important, but also how it strategically views the world. We can see this currently playing out in Bab-al-Mandeb and the Persian Gulf. A quick look at a map would have convinced US leaders that Iran has a clear strategic edge in the Strait of Hormuz, just as the Houthis do in the Red Sea and the passage to the Suez Canal. Neglecting the oceans repeats the mistakes Asia made in a different age, mistakes from which it has learnt. We need to bear this in mind today as well.

The post Map Wars: The Victory of Equal Earth Over an Unequal One appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Ministerio Bienes Nacionales – CC BY 2.0

With far-right president  José Antonio Kast presiding over Chile since March 2026, the country has seen a dramatic shift since the days of Gabriel Boric. Kast has taken a harder security approach to the Mapuche struggle in southern Chile, where Indigenous communities continue to contest State control over ancestral territories in Wallmapu. The conflict concerns land and extractive industries and competing notions of territorial sovereignty. The Coordinadora Arauco-Malleco (CAM), an autonomist and revolutionary Mapuche organization, has been at the forefront of some of the most militant forms of resistance.

In this interview, exclusive for Foreign Policy In Focus, scholar and author Ethan Madarieta looks at the long history of Mapuche dispossession and the incorporation of land into Chile and Argentina. Madarieta argues that describing the struggle simply as a “land conflict” hides the actual differences in how Mapuche institutions understand the body and political authority. Further, he discusses Mapuche resistance and what peace and reconciliation might look like beyond the transfer of land parcels.

Daniel Falcone: Could you briefly describe your work and provide some contextual background on the Mapuche?

Ethan Madarieta: My work starts from a deep engagement with the Mapuche language, Mapudungun, and its conceptual orders. My study largely focuses on the Mapuche peoples of Ngulumapu, or what is today named Chile, although any political understanding of the Mapuche Nation cannot be siloed within the borders of the nation states of Chile and Argentina. It should be noted that the Mapuche are a heterogenous Nation of peoples locally emergent, which is to say, the Mapuche are the Huilliche, the Pikunche, Pehuenche, Lafkenche, Wenteche, Nagche, and so on, each of a specific co-constitutive relation with the characteristics of a territory, or ad mapu / azmapu. The Mapuche Nation is a political unity that consolidated through Spanish incursion and occupation. Indeed, from 1641 to 1862, the Mapuche were “officially recognized as a nation with the concomitant rights to sovereignty and independence,” although they were still considered to be vassals of the Spanish Crown.

Bernardo O’Higgins, Chile’s Supreme Director that led the fight for independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, acknowledged Mapuche territorial independence south of the Biobío River, using the language of Mapuche “sovereignty” from prior Spanish treaties. In 1862 Coronel Cornelio Saavedra convinced the Chilean National Congress to embark upon the massive genocidal campaigns known as the Pacificación de la Araucanía (Pacification of Araucanía) in Chile.

These campaigns led to the forcible occupation and incorporation of the Mapuche lands south of the Biobío River into the Chilean national territory. They were largely concurrent with the Argentine government’s Conquista del Desierto (Conquest of the Desert), the genocidal clearing and dispossession of the Mapuche territories across Argentina. These projects of elimination, some immediate and some attritional, though shifting and adapting in medium, have continued to this day.

Daniel Falcone: José Antonio Kast has taken a much harder “security-oriented” approach to the Mapuche conflict. What do you think the international media most often gets wrong about what is happening in Wallmapu?

Ethan Madarieta: The Kast regime’s “security-oriented” approach is an intensification of the previous government’s encroachment on Mapuche territories. The recent security reform proposals in the Agenda contra el Crimen Organizado y el Terrorismo, for example, is another instance of Chile’s project of surveillance and its ability to suspend civil liberties throughout its border territory. Its ability to declare a state of emergency in specific geographical areas for up to 240 days, even if not directly targeting the Mapuche, will likely also be used to increase surveillance across Mapuche territories.

A major problem, as I understand it, is that the view and labeling of “the Mapuche conflict” fundamentally misunderstands the Mapuche, mapu (the land and everything, all matter, the universe), and Wallmapu (the Mapuche territories that extend across South central Chile and Argentina from the Pacific to the Atlantic), and their relation. Because of this fundamental misunderstanding, Kast and all governmental regimes of the Chilean state misapprehend what is at the center of this so-called conflict.

The Chilean state, currently represented by the Kast regime, and much of the international media understand this as a conflict between a sovereign nation state and an Indigenous people who are a demographic minority, whose struggle today is different than that “lost” during the “colonial period.” This conceptual framing assumes the permanence and right of the Chilean and Argentine states to exist and thus the demand for resolution to the “conflict” whereby the Mapuche abide by the conceptual and political orders of these states.

By this logic, the fact and assertion of Mapuche territorial presence is taken as the root of the conflict itself, Mapuche resistance as acts of terrorism. This stance implies that if the Mapuche were to agree, as Pinochet notoriously stated, that “Today there are no Mapuche, because we are all Chileans,” there would be no conflict. What I argue is that this is not a conflict but an antagonism. Any “resolution” necessitates the destruction of one of the positions.

To me, this destruction is precisely the goal of settler states globally, through genocidal campaigns and the insidious projects of elimination such as epistemicide (the destruction of knowledge of ways of being and doing), linguicide (the destruction of language and its intrinsic knowledge, political, and social order), territorial occupation, surveillance, and exploitation, forced citizenship, and incorporation into the nation state. These are settler colonial apparatuses intent on the outright elimination and transformation of the Mapuche into a demographic (read ethnic and racial) minority population, that is, into Chileans. Today the Mapuche continue the struggle began in 1641.

Daniel Falcone: In Land’s Language: On Mapuche Memory, Translation, and the Territorial Aporia (Northwestern University Press, 2026), you argue that the conflict isn’t simply about “land,” but about the profoundly different ways of understanding body and territory. Can you explain these distinctions politically?

Ethan Madarieta: Translation is never equation. Politically, it often functions as a mode of conceptual, material, and legal substitution. The Mapuche, some readers will know, are “people of the land.” Mapu can be translated as “land” and che as “person.” The two, land and person, are inseparable; the che is modified by mapu. But what this means requires understanding this inseparability from a Mapuche locus and thus asking what “mapu” and “che” mean, not their translation (land or tierra, person or persona). You’ll notice I am using the singular, person, rather than the common translation of “people.” This is because “che” is singular and means person while “pu che” means people. One is developed into che through actions and knowledge, knowledge that emerges from millennia of being in and with a specific territory cultivated by specific structures of social and ecological relation. This che is thus, yes, a person, but it is also the quality of the position or role of a person, what it means to be a human being.

The che in Mapuche is this quality developed in relation to mapu. But mapu is not just land or earth, it is all matter, the universe, everything. For the sake of time, I will refer the reader to my book for a more detailed answer and close by saying that these distinctions in translation are political distinctions because of the fundamental epistemological mistranslation of the primary subjects of Mapuche politics: land and body.

The state’s “person,” meanwhile, is the citizen, perhaps the “human” of universal human rights, and the “land” is property, resource, potential capital, national territory, and so on. So, this antagonism I am talking about is not about, at least not solely about, “land” and the “rights” (conferred by the state) of “people.” It is, in brief, about the quality of being a human through the cultivation of the understanding of one’s roles in relation to the universe and responsibility to maintain balance and thus, a future.

Daniel Falcone: You write about Mapuche resistance not simply as opposition to the Chilean state but as a creation of an alternative way of life. What would Mapuche peace and reconciliation look like beyond transferring land parcels.

Ethan Madarieta: I am wary of framing Mapuche ways of knowing and doing as an “alternative way of life.” Mapuche peoples who live according to their philosophies and political orders are living a Mapuche way of life. It is not an alternative, but an ontological condition. What I describe in the book are the myriad ways that Mapuche inhabit space and practice relation that defy their territorial sequestration and occupation, their minoritization and incorporation into a Chilean national identity and its historical genealogy.

I argue that what you’ve called the “transferring [of] land parcels” by the state is still an act of coerced contingency on the existence of the state. The fundamental question for such “transfer” or “return” of land is: what is being returned and to whom? The state can only “transfer” or “return” land as a delimited and legal property, as a territorial object to a minoritized population. This is much different than the reconstitution of Wallmapu by the Mapuche untethered to a semiotic or material/legal contingency upon the state. This is and has been happening in the establishment of autonomous territories and communities that refuse settler occupation and extractive capital while practicing Mapuche religion, medicine, knowledge, and political and social orders according to the form of the land in which these autonomy movements are emerging. While my personal political view on “peace and reconciliation” is clear in my textual and historical interpretations in the book, I cannot and will not speak for the Mapuche.

What I will say is 1) the Mapuche are not homogenous as a people or in their political views and 2) I do not believe a “reconciliation” that affirms the sovereignty of the Chilean and Argentine states while denying an equal and non-contingent Mapuche sovereignty across their territories—if one is to accept the political genealogy of such a concept—is the inevitable end or desired goal.

Daniel Falcone: So, this conflict is very difficult to resolve, correct?

Ethan Madarieta: I do not believe this is a conflict that can be resolved without the complete dissolution of sovereign states and global capitalism as the world’s central system for political and social order. I thus do not believe it is a conflict but an antagonism. I cannot name that “order” the world should then take but that it will require the centering of an ethics emergent from Indigenous knowledges—developed across millennia and thus cognizant of changes across millennia—about ecological balance and sustainability.

As Coordinadora Arauco-Malleco (CAM) co-founder José Huenchunao writes, “We are fighting to recover a common territory, where non-Mapuche families who understand and share our principles and ideals will also be able to continue living. Those who want to share our way of life and values will always be respected in our territory, they will have their space, they just must understand and internalize the codes of our culture so as not to cause a rupture in the social fabric of Mapuche life.”

This first appeared on FPIF.

The post The Mapuche Struggle in the New Far-Right Chilean Government appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In an oft-quoted line of Ernest Hemingway’s from The Sun Also Rises, a character laconically describes how he went broke: “Gradually at first, then suddenly.”

We have a unique historical perspectve today.  For the next year, that framework remarkably captures the rise and fall of the American experiment, like this:

1. July 1776 – July 2026 – 250 years = 100% of the USA (“US History”);

2. September 2001 – September 2026 – 25 years = 10% of A (“Bush/Cheney Global War on Terror”);

3. January 2025 – July 2027 – 2.5 years = 1% of A (“Trump Neofascist Regime Change”) – More the subject of journalism and political action than history, this contemporary cadence of degraded human rights, pedagogy and democratic life writ large will be our present for the time being.  And everything is on the table.  Everything.

I want to consider the rise and fall of American democracy and public education “gradually, then suddenly” over these three periods, as they’ve stumbled and We the People sometimes fought back effectively, to try and clearly understand the heavy consequences of these last days of the enslaving US republic, which’ll hopefully mark new beginnings in liberation, justice, abolition & transformative change

US History, 1776-2026

The original sins of the nation were:

1) enslaving african human beings to steal their labor, in a republic based on equality of all; and

2) killing and ethnic cleansing indigenous peoples to steal their lands, in a democratic republic based on rule of law.

100% of US history has turned on our attempts to resolve, evade, repeat, hide, rationalize, fight or conquer these fundamental contradictions.  At first the genocidal powers of manifest destiny, racist exploitation and private corporate greed built up their national edifice on these cracked foundations.  The gradual failures of our democratic governments and schools were temporarily obscured by the dynamic settler-colonial expansion phases of national growth that led to civil war.

That bloody lurch into the modern world of the 19th century seemed to settle our constitutional perversions for a while.  But even after the republic and its enlightenment pretensions were jarred by military and imperial earthquakes in 1861, then again in 1917 and 1941, genocidal powers gained strength and reach.  The three post-civil war constitutional amendments formally abolished slavery, expanded human rights-based freedom nationally and granted votes to Black men, but they weren’t enforced.  World Wars made the Jim Crow USA a global industrial commercial and military power, then a hegemonic super power parasitically feeding a bloated and ravenous Military Industrial Complex.

In the 20th century the basic constitutional deal was fought not via sectional civil war, but in the industrial labor process reformed by the New Deal, and the century-late recognition of civil and human rights for People of Color.  The multiracial Congress of Industrial Organizations led the way when global capitalism was at its low ebb in the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Then in the glory years of the Civil Rights movement struggles ignited by Brown vs Board of Education (1953), the Montgomery bus boycott (1955) and the lynching of Emmmet Till (1956), through the powerful and transforming Civil Rights, Voting Rights and Welfare Rights movements of the 1960s, liberal ideas characteristic (and serviceable for the power) of USA the Super Power gradually replaced frontier ‘justice’, white supremacy and patriarchal domination in our schools and communities, at least on the level of lip service.

But the last two decades of that century gave rise to neoliberal global capitalism, an enhanced system of corporate domination, soft white supremacy and self-serving identity politics.  By September 11, 2001, the genocidal legacy of the enslaving republic and imperial killing power’s full spectrum dominance ushered in the next phase of our history, making New Jim Crow America greatly genocidal again from Vietnam to Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, the Strait of Hormuz and points beyond.

Bush/Cheney Global War on Terror, 2001-2026

At this writing in September 2026 we are still processing the amazing ways that racist foolishness in the Trump era laid utterly bare the abuses of the endless wars for oil and world domination in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and elsewhere.  Briefly, our democratic institutions in this recent 10% period have been coopted, subverted and weaponized in order to destroy our republic and replace it by technofascist billionaires’ authoritarian power. Responding to the most egregiously effective terrorist crimes ever, the hastily reorganized Homeland (formerly National) Security State arose and embarked on deadly imperial adventures and systematc human rights abuses.

From Ground Zero in New York to today’s insane and stupid proto-world wars of aggression and genocide, in Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen and US-allied Middle East autocracies, US empire’s ill-conceived, militarist and racist war on terror stumbled and fell at Donald Trump’s feet.  Toxic, anti-democratic and legally dubious rationales for unilateral assassination, torture, proto-fascist schooling, human and civil rights rollbacks and renewed culture wars over immigration, LGBTQ rights, abortion, and the basic scope of the new freedoms supposedly guaranteed by the post-civil war constitutiuonal amendments wobbled, cracked open and toppled.  The failures of the democratic republic and its public education systems began to more rapidly and visibly weaken under sustained, well-funded attacks by right wing forces, including a militantly corrupt supreme court targeted for takeover and constitutional coup by networks of billionaires.

In 2025 the deterioration of our rights and educational opportunities accelerated beyond even those anti-terrorist excesses.  A two-years long campaign to institutionalize the white supremacist, anti-constitutional breakthrough to power by Trump and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, led by fascist evil clowns Stephen Miller, Russel Vought and Elon Musk, continues today, even the under the futile and bloody flag of illegal and unconstitutional war, self-harming tariffs and a new Juan Crow assault on low wage labor  markets.

Trump Neofascist Regime Change, 2025-2027

And so we find ourselves today in the extraordinarily hot 1% phase of our history.  For more than a full year their neofascist coup leapt rapidly from strength to strength.  A year from now they’ll be either defending against impeachment by some new Democratic legislative majority, or making a desperate lame duck lunge for total power.  Social and political change this rapid is violent, disorienting, surreal and deadly.

Prominent business, educational, cultural and political elites groveled shamelessly for a new emperor’s favors.  The new, six-vote dominated Handmaids Tale supreme court that deprived women of reproductive autonomy continues to enable the unitary executive neofascist theory of power, in place of the People’s constitution.  The Epstein files scandal, the inevitable disasters stemming from staffing government with incompetent sycophants, and the continuing, accelerating contradictions dating back over 250 years have just begun to take their political toll on the fascist Gleichschaltung directed from Washington and Mar-a-Lago.

The 2026 midterm congressional elections will either challenge or strengthen the coup, depending on the outcomes in at most a few dozen congressional districts and a handful of states in the senate.  The political consequences of this election mean that constitutional liberty or fascist violation balance on a knife edge.  It is what William Burroughs called  “NAKED Lunch—a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”  And when everything is on the table.

Opportunities, Abolition, Liberation

In a time of simultaneous fascist coup, world war and climate catastrophe, it can be hard to discern a way forward.  At the same time, if the gradual, then rapid collapse of our political and educational systems is as advanced as it appears to me, some general consequences logically follow.  For example:

+ What more do we have to lose at this point by coddling capitalism and not fighting back?  Abolition of dominator schools, prisons, quasi-legal political doctrines like qualified immunity and original intent that undermine self-government and equal justice under conditions of democracy, might be ripe for dumping with good, hard collective political shoves;

+ This is war.  Time to stop whining about polarization, kick some fascist ass and build a new world where we really don’t negotiate with terrorists; and

+ Unlike the Obama administration faced with its predecessor’s manifest crimes of torture, spying, and war, we must look both forward to our new world based on authentic human values of justice, equality and freedom for all, and simultaneously back over our 1%, 25% and 100% histories from this year’s illuminating perspective.  This means, to me, we should build our independent, revolutionary politics around campaigns to both: 1) (in the 100% frame)  Renew the original, broad human (not corporate) freedom-based regime enacted, but never fully enforced, by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments; and 2) (in the 25% frame) Repeal and overturn the recent decisions of the Robert supreme court that have revived the old genocidal powers under new rationalizations.

A detailed legal/political draft of these proposals is here:

Section 1; Citizenship

The original intentions of the provisions of the 14th Amendment are reaffirmed and extended to all natural persons, but not to corporate entities.  Corporate entities may exercise powers granted them under the laws of a state, if applicable; but this Article does not extend any rights of due process of law, equal protection of the laws, or the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States to any corporate entity.  In case any State law, constitution, custom or practice extends any right to due process of law, equal protection of the laws, or privileges and immunities of any state or of the United States, to any corporate entity, no court established under this Constitution may enforce, follow or apply any such state law conferring any such constitutional corporate personhood status.

All natural persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No law, government act, custom or policy may abridge the universal human rights, privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor deprive any person within its jurisdiction of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny equal protection of the laws to all persons.  This Article protects all natural persons, regardless of any race, sex, class, nationality or other identity- or group-based classifications.  The enforceable universal human and civil rights of natural persons recognized in this Article extend, without any exception, to all natural persons within the legal jurisdiction of the United States.

Section 2; Insurrectionists barred from office

No person shall be eligible to hold any elective office of the United States, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.  But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section 3; Jurisdiction and powers of federal courts

This Constitution grants no immunity or qualified immunity for any wrongful conduct in the official capacity of any executive, legislative or judicial official.

Equal protection of the laws for the reproductive autonomy and freedom of women shall at a minimum include the right to terminate pregnancy at any time before viability of a fetus, or at any time when in the exercise of medical science and bodily autonomy the woman determines that continuing the pregnancy unreasonably endangers the life or health of either woman or fetus;

Partisan Gerrymandering is the unfair and partisan design of electoral districts to favor one party over another. Extreme partisan gerrymandering amounts to rigging elections.  Claims of unconstitutional or otherwise illegal partisan gerrymandering do not present political questions or otherwise lie beyond the jurisdiction of the federal courts.  Federal courts shall have the power to require electoral redistricting in states for the purpose of supporting the democratic rights of voters and prohibiting unfair partisan advantage in all elections.

Federal courts shall have no jurisdiction to overrule, repeal, subject to judicial review, narrowly interpret or otherwise undermine congressional statutes protecting the rights to vote of all American citizens, regardless of party, creed, race, sex, class, nationality or other identity- or group-based classifications.  Where any eligible voter can be correctly identified, no requirement of any particular identification, in the form of official government documents or any other technical requirement for identification, may authorize the denial or abridgement of such voters’ fundamental right to vote.

Federal courts shall have no jurisdiction to overrule, repeal, subject to judicial review, narrowly interpret or otherwise undermine congressional statutes limiting the amounts of money that can be spent on any elections or otherwise regulating elections.  All federal officials are under affirmative duties to respect the outcomes of elections conducted pursuant to law, and the breach of any such duty may in proper cases be insurrection or rebellion, or giving aid or comfort to the enemies of the United States or of any State.

Federal courts shall have no jurisdiction to overrule, repeal, subject to judicial review, narrowly interpret or otherwise undermine congressional statutes protecting the universal human rights, privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, or of any persons within the legal jurisdiction of the United States.

Section 4; Congressional powers

The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this Article and the 14th Amendment, including but not limited to: further restrictions on the jurisdiction of the federal courts established under Article III; term limits for jurists; limitations on corporate personhood; procedures and standards for establishing violations of any provisions of this Article; providing financial and material support for health, including but not limited to reproductive health, and to education, cultural and other social resources and opportunities reasonably necessary to exercise, protect and defend the rights granted under the 14th Amendment and this Article; and other necessary legislative powers and directives to guide the courts. In no case shall any federal court have any jurisdiction, power or authority to reduce the scope of any legal or constitutional right of natural persons.

COMMENTARY

The U.S. Constitution is a flawed document.  At the nation’s founding it granted only limited rights to a property-owning minority of men, and perpetuated the enslaving of blacks who were deemed chattel property, not people.  Those unjust power relations led to a Civil War (1860-1865) between the enslaving and industrializing regions of the country.

After the multi-racial army of the “free” soil and labor north defeated the enslavement-based south, the (in effect) newly re-founded, multiracial United States of America amended the Constitution 3 times.  These events fundamentally altered our democracy, the relationships between Americans, and powers of our federal, state and local governments.  The 13th Amendment (1865) acknowledged the dignity and rights of people who had been liberated, and outlawed enslavement or “involuntary servitude” (except for prisoners).  The 15th Amendment (1873) guaranteed rights to vote for African American men.

The longer and broader 14th Amendment (1872) was a first attempt at “perfecting the republic”.  By defining citizenship as covering all people born on this land or naturalized here, the original intentions of the 14th Amendments sponsors in Congress were clear: All would be granted full rights and equal protection under the law.  But the Supreme Court soon extended the 14th Amendments’ rights to corporations, and a series of court decisions severely limited – as a practical matter in many cases flatly overruled – the protection of people (while advancing corporate power).

Subsequent decisions – many of them in recent years – even further weakened the 14th Amendment, and few of its original purposes have been fulfilled.  It was not until a century after the Civil War that black people were again given any significant legal protections for basic rights.  The modern Civil Rights movement forced Congress to affirm basic rights through the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Today those victories are also under fierce attack by powerful special interests.  This proposed Constitutional Amendment is intended to undo these historic wrongs, and implement the just, multiracial democracy envisioned by the framers of the 14th Amendment.

This Article is specifically intended to overrule the following cases:

Trump v USA (2024)

Trump v Anderson (2024)

Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022)

Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021)

Rucho v Common Cause (2019)

Shelby County v Holder (2013)

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010)

Crawford v. Marion County Election Board (2008)

Slaughterhouse Cases (1873)

The current Roberts Court, with the arrival of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito in 2005, has undermined our democracy, choosing in every important case to reach results undermining popular sovereignty, equal voting rights and government accountability. This proposed Constitutional Amendment is intended to undo the damage and protect the original purposes and intentions of the 14th Amendment from the courts.

The Roberts Court has issued decisions systematically dismantling federal voting rights protections and campaign finance laws, while enabling states to restrict the franchise and distort electoral outcomes. The pace of this upheaval has accelerated since 2017 with the additions of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney-Barrett nominated by President Trump.  The Roberts Court’s new supermajority has demonstrated a ready willingness to overturn precedent and discard long recognized constitutional rights.

The Roberts Court’s decisions have contributed to recent declines in the quality and fairness of American representative democracy. Its voting rights decisions gutted the most powerful provisions of the Voting Rights Act, hamstringing Congress’s efforts to deliver on the promise of the Fifteenth Amendment. These decisions have made it easier for states to enact restrictive voting laws and draw electoral maps that dilute votes based on race and political party, but harder or impossible for voters to challenge in court. The Court has transformed the myth of voter fraud into a free pass to enact burdensome and discriminatory voting rules, while narrowing the acceptable justifications to rein in the distorting influence of money in elections.

Most recently the Roberts Court has seemed to render decisions that owe more to the extra-textual political theory of the “unitary executive”, and its supposedly necessary power to meet the nation’s challenges, than to the Constitution.  Women’s rights to control their bodies and terminate unwanted pregnancy have been overruled, supposedly because precedent was “wrongly decided”, but actually because the composition of the Court changed in 2017 with the addition of the 3 justices nominated by President Trump.  Importantly, the Roberts Court’s rationales for these decisions lack any coherent or principled constitutional basis and through-line. The decisions cannot be explained, for example, by a principled commitment to judicial restraint.  That could explain the Court’s uniform deference to legislatures when they assert a need for discriminatory or burdensome voting rules to combat the myth of voter fraud. But it cannot explain the Court’s refusal to afford the same deference when legislatures see a need to regulate money in politics to combat corruption. Nor can these decisions be explained by a devotion to text.   And certainly these decisions cannot be explained by an abiding respect for precedent; many of them overrule key precedents without adequate justification.

The lack of a unifying theory for the Roberts Court’s anti-democracy jurisprudence leaves room to query whether the Court is guided in this realm not by some coherent judicial philosophy but by other, improper motivations. Some have, for example, pointed to the consistent partisan make-up of the winners of these decisions, an indication that the outcomes may simply reflect loyalty of the Justices to the party or ideology of the President who appointed them.  Another theory is that members of the current super majority are simply averse to an egalitarian, participatory democracy in which every eligible citizen votes.  Further questions have been raised about the lack of any binding ethics rules on the Court.  All these questions are troubling and call for vigorous action; thus this proposed Constitutional Amendment. But beyond any individual issue, the losing parties in every one of the Court’s decisions discussed here are clearly American voters, particularly voters of color and those from marginalized backgrounds.

Since January 6, 2021, these longstanding constitutional conflicts have taken on new urgency, as the administrations of President Trump (2017-2021 and 1/20/25-present) attempt one unconstitutional (and now anti-constitutional) power grab after another.  From first-term denials of equal protection and due process to immigrants and Muslims within the legal jurisdiction of the United States; through subsequent, completely unsupported and frankly autocratic declarations, like elimination of 14th Amendment birthright citizenship for unfavored groups; on and on to unilateral, unconstitutional usurpation of Congressional powers over spending, independent agencies and legislation.  To the radical extent of overtly threatening courts (with foreseeable consequences of physical and deadly violence against judges and their staffs), merely for performing their constitutional role of saying what the law is.

Having been allowed to run again by the Roberts Court’s non-textualist and non-originalist misreading of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment (the insurrection clause, restated verbatim as Section 2 here), and granted presumptive, broad immunity found nowhere in the Constitution by a Supreme Court super majority that has apparently lost its constitutional bearings, the Trump administration is aggressively exploiting the historic gaps and limitations in the 14th Amendment, compared to its original intentions, as discussed in detail here, rapidly elevating what has often been called a “constitutional crisis” into a literal, full-blown coup.  This is our contemporary constitutional reality, not hyperbole.  If we have learned anything since the American Civil War and January 6, 2021, it should be the need to protect the 14th Amendment from the courts.  The question now is: What is to be done?  The proposed Constitutional Amendment returns to the source of these policy conflicts and human rights violations in the unresolved issues after the Civil War.  It charters a better way forward for the United States of America in the 21st century and beyond.

Such “revolutionary reforms” rooted in peoples’ movements – like the great Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century are – the only real solution to these challenges.  Better lawyering by advocates for democracy is not the solution. This Court acts politically and with determination to undermine democracy, even when its stated reasons for doing so are made out of whole cloth and utterly unpersuasive. When one branch of the federal government has gone this far astray, the only solution is a firm application of the “checks and balances” the framers designed to prevent such abuses of power. Indeed, the Court’s consistent undermining of American democracy is a quintessential example of both why our Constitution leaves no single actor or institution immune from correction, and why it should be amended.

Congress must step up. It has the constitutional authority to correct many—though not all—of the Court’s most egregious anti-democratic rulings. Congress has authority over the size, jurisdiction, and other particulars of how the Supreme Court and the federal court system is structured. The framers also gave Congress the power to check the Court in other ways, such as changing the number of justices and setting term limits. But to the extent the Court continues to refuse to acknowledge and respect the other branches and the people, this proposed Constitutional Amendment will return the United States of America to the Gettysburg Address government of the people, by the people and for the people, and the Reconstruction Amendments that were intended to institutionalize that hard-fought democratic victory.

 Apocalyptic and revolutionary education entails a sustained, systematic course of self-discovery.  In active, practically useful engagement with today’s comprehensive crises of racial capitalism and daily life, we build up internal resistance and resources.  Freedom school is always in session.

The post “Gradually at First, Then Suddenly:” US History and Public Education appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Republic of Korea – CC BY-SA 4.0

The Lee Administration leaked the possibility of deploying Korean forces to the Strait of Hormuz on 03 September. The backlash was immediate from Korean civil society that opposes any type of support for Trump’s war of aggression. Furthermore, recent polls reveal that even 55 percent of Lee’s supporters oppose the dispatching of forces. And while the Lee administration has publicly backtracked, stating that nothing has been decided, it is, nonetheless, quietly undergoing the process of deployment: more than simply an assessment of the security conditions on the Strait of Hormuz, the Lee administration sent a team to check key military bases and ports that could be used at the United Arab Emirates.

Despite growing public opposition, the Lee administration is expected to introduce at the end of September a motion into the National Assembly, where it is likely to pass given his party’s considerable majority. Unlike his predecessor, the impeached Yoon Suk-yeol, President Lee is not a pro-US ideologue; he is a pragmatist. Why then is Lee going out on a limb with this deployment when the rest of the world is staying out of it?

Well, South Korea’s history has always been entangled and shaped by US foreign policy. The darker side to South Korea’s pop-culture is a country dominated and shaped through US policy and interventions. Today, it hosts the largest overseas US military base and controls the Korean military (through wartime operational control). In effect, it’s never been a sovereign state. Its economic, political, and military interests have always been beholden to the United States.

Today, Lee is horsetrading with Trump: military support in exchange for more favourable terms in the US’s AI global supply chain of semiconductors and data centres along with a return of wartime operational control. While Lee’s pragmatism is navigating the real structural constraints on South Korea, it is ultimately short-sighted and harmful to Koreans and the world.

The war in Iran is inflicting considerable pain to the world’s economies, including South Korea that imports 61 per cent of its crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz. Yet, even from a completely pragmatic perspective, sending Korean forces to Hormuz does nothing to resolve this problem. In fact, getting entangled with US aggression against Iran would strain the 64-year diplomatic relations with Iran while putting a target on South Korean assets in the region. Furthermore, if the world’s greatest naval and air power cannot secure freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, how could South Korea’s contribution make a difference? In fact, the deployment of Korean troops prolongs this war of aggression by giving Trump cover and leverage to demand that other countries, such as Japan, also deploy forces.

This isn’t the first time that South Korea would deploy forces due to US requests. In 2004, after pressure from the George W. Bush Administration, the Roh Moo-hyun administration deployed non-combat support troops to Iraq. In response, a militant Islamic group kidnapped a Korean translator and, when the Roh administration refused to cancel further and withdraw current deployment, beheaded the translator.

Most importantly, this war of aggression is not only illegal under international standards, but deployment also violates article five of the Korean constitution that mandates the government to ‘maintain international peace’ and ‘renounce all aggressive war.’ Thus, whether intervening in the frontlines, or in the rear, whether combatant or non-combatant, any deployment would be complicit in Trump’s war of aggression.

Ultimately, as Hamid Shahrabi, an Iranian activist and co-founder of the Global Resistance for Peace & Justice states, securing free passage through the Strait of Hormuz can be achieved but not through military pressure and destruction but by adhering to the ‘Islamabad MOU, which outlined measures to ensure free passage through the Strait.’

Being dominated by the US brings out the pragmatic among South Koreans. Yet, the world demands that we fight and that we hold the line against Trump. Deploying forces will prolong Trump’s illegal war of aggression. Fortunately, if Koreans can be pragmatic, they can also be fierce fighters against US imperialism when provoked. Instead of fanning the flames of war, we should fight to extinguish Trump’s forever wars.

This article was produced by Globetrotter. 

The post South Korea Shouldn’t Abet Trump in Hormuz appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Samuel Smith – CC BY-SA 4.0

International responses to Israel’s policies in the occupied West Bank, notably regarding redrawing the ethnic composition of the territory, have been a slow burn affair.  Condemnation and admonitions have issued from various international bodies and civil society groups regarding the settlements of zealous Israeli nationalists.  The International Court of Justice, in its 2024 advisory opinion, clarified the point that the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem had “been established and are being maintained in violation of international law” and that “the State of Israel is under an obligation to bring to an end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible”.  Aside from tepid pronouncements at the government level, specific individuals associated with settlement expansion have been sanctioned in piecemeal fashion by Israel’s allies, a measure never likely to turn the violent tide.  But given that figures such as Mike Huckabee, US ambassador to Israel and an avid Christian Zionist, could be found condemning the actions of “settler terrorists” while demanding “severe consequences”, something was overdue.

The latest announcement by twelve countries, largely seen as friendly to Israel, suggests a change of current.  The joint statement by Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK confirmed “their intention to introduce national and/or support European restrictions on trade in goods with settlements which are illegal under international law, or that they are actively considering these and other measures, in accordance with their national procedures.”  The parties demanded that Israel immediately halt the expansion of the settlements and civilian administrative powers in the West Bank, hold those responsible for settler violence accountable and investigate allegations levelled at Israeli forces. “We firmly oppose actions tantamount to the annexation of Palestinian land and forcible displacement of the Palestinian population.”

Of the twelve, three – the UK, France and Canada – issued a separate statement at the leadership level confirming that steps will be taken “to ban the importation of goods from settlements and enforce targeted measures against settlements and those who facilitate or profit from them.”  Having recognised the State of Palestine a year ago, it was time “to take further action to uphold our commitment to protect the two-state solution, our interests and to stand up for our values, before it is too late.”

In his September 8 statement to the House of Commons, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband gave shape to the direction being proposed.  He spoke of the “most unimaginable trauma and suffering over the last three years” in Gaza and the crisis in the West Bank.  The secretary quoted the firm intention of Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to “bury the idea of a Palestinian State”.  This sentiment is precisely what signalled the need for “a new approach”, one that does not take issue with Israeli citizens but with the conduct of the Netanyahu government.  That egregious conduct had seen more settlements approved in less than four years than in the previous two decades. “Houses bulldozed.  Roads and public infrastructure destroyed. Families displaced from their homes.”  Since 2023, 65 Palestinian communities had ceased to exist, with over 4,000 evicted from their homes for reasons of settler violence and actions by the state.  Last month, the issuing of E1 tenders for 1,200 homes crossed “a long-standing red line” in prospectively evicting the Bedouin communities currently there and installing settlements between East Jerusalem and the West Bank. “Let’s be clear what this means: the creation of a set of facts on the ground to make the two state solution unviable.”

Settler terrorism was specifically underlined, with families being encircled by settlers in such places as Al Mughayir, largely with the blessing of the Israeli military.  Israeli authorities on the predations being inflicted upon the Palestinians were noted.  Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s description on the enterprise spoke of “a violent and criminal effort to ethnically cleanse territories in the West Bank”, likewise former Minister of Health and retired Brigadier General from the IDF, Ephraim Sneh.  According to Miliband, the definition of ethnic cleansing as described by the UN – “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent or terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain areas” – had been made out.  The settler terrorists had led the effort.

Admitting that previous British policy on the illegality of the settlements was clear, the legality of Israel’s occupation had remained untouched.  Pointing to the 2024 ICJ decision, the Burnham government accepted “that the occupation is unlawful”, manifested by Israel’s entrenched control, intention of extending “permanent sovereignty” and the pursuit of an “expansionist agenda via illegal settlements.”

The proposed remedy for such ills is, to date, uncharacteristically firm.  In a nod to arguments advocating a steelier economic approach, Miliband promised the introduction of “a new comprehensive sanctions regime” formulated with the assistance of the Business Secretary “with appropriate religious exemptions.”  (This model, he insisted, will not be along the lines of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign.)  The secretary did “not believe that the British people want us supporting the occupation by accepting products from settlements in our shops and supermarkets.”  As part of the regime, specific companies and individuals offering services in construction, infrastructure, financing or real estate to aid the settlement agenda will be targeted with sanctions.  Advertising in the UK of illegal settlements will be banned.  A further number of extremist settlers were also to be sanctioned.  All license applications for arms and other exports materially contributing to the occupation will be refused.  While these measures are in place, the Palestinian Authority is encouraged to accelerate its institutional reforms; Israel, in turn, should release valuable revenue for the provision of essential services in the West Bank.

The response from the Netanyahu government was viciously surly. The Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar briskly announced measures to counter the UK policy, including the closing of the British consulate in Jerusalem, the expulsion of British representatives from the aid centre for Gaza in Kiryat Gat, the halting of British training of Palestinian Authority forces in the West Bank and the barring of 12 elected officials and British citizens “involved in anti-Israel and antisemitic activities” from entering the country.  Sa’ar also went to work buttering up the British Conservatives, thanking them for “their firm opposition to the hostile Labour Government’s announcement […] and its series of anti-Israel policies since taking office.”

While officials huffed, Israeli commentary focused on a trite point: that the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had done much to bring this upon themselves.  The conservative Times of Israel took issue with a policy that had failed to “isolate obsessively anti-Israel countries in Europe like Spain and Ireland”, making it easier “for those critics to pull powerful states to their side.”  Itamar Eichner, writing in Ynet Global, reported that Israel had not expected the broader coalition to materialise.  “The decision is therefore being viewed in Jerusalem not only as a diplomatic setback but as a significant failure by Israel to prevent a coordinated international initiative.”

Whether intentional or not, this new policy reveals a belated acceptance, at least in part, of such assessments as those offered by Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.  In her July 2025 report, she observed that “post-October 2023, corporate actors have contributed to the acceleration of the displacement-replacement process throughout the military campaign that has pulverized Gaza and displaced the largest number of Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967.”  Among the recommendations are the imposition of sanctions and a complete arms embargo on the Israeli state, covering dual-use items, the suspension of all trade agreements and investment relations and the imposition of sanctions, including the freezing of assets “on entities and individuals involved in activities that may endanger Palestinians.”

The proposals made by Miliband and his international counterparts differ in confining the sanctions regime to the West Bank settlements (“important and valued trade with green line Israel” would continue), an artificial distinction that fails to account for the broader aspects of the Israeli economy.  Nevertheless, this turn suggests a hardening of relations between Israel and countries long considered unlikely to go wobbly on the Jewish state regarding what has, historically, been euphemistically regarded as the “Palestinian issue”.

The post A New Sanctions Regime: Targeting Israel’s West Bank Settlements appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The ecological crisis is upon us. It touches everywhere on the planet. Its character is complex, manifesting in floods, fires, disease, eradication of forests and fisheries. Interacting factors worsen globally connected catastrophes.

Ian Angus’s Metabolic Rifts: Capitalism Assault on the Earth System makes an important contribution to understanding and guiding a socialist response to these compounding ecological crises.

Angus is an ecological Marxist scholar and founding member of the Global Ecosocialist Network. Metabolic Rifts connects modern science, history, and Marxism’s metabolic rift theory.

Angus says that our ecosocialist politics

must be based on a concrete scientific understanding of how our world has evolved, how it is changing today, and where those changes may take us. The way we build socialism, and the kind of socialism that can be built, will be profoundly shaped by the state of the planet we must build it on. If our programs and activity don’t have a scientific basis, all our efforts to change the world will be in vain. (5)

The book accessibly explains metabolic rift theory, the key insight of Marxist ecology. For Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and subsequent Marxists in this tradition, the Earth’s metabolism is not a metaphor but a material reality. Interacting social, biological, chemical, and geological processes make life possible.

Metabolism

Marx used the concept of metabolism in three related ways. First, there is universal metabolism, Earth’s life-support system. This refers to the biological, chemical, and geological cycles on which all life depends.

Social metabolism is the way human society relates to the rest of nature. Social orders change over time, and class society—and then capitalism marks a significant historical shift.

Finally, metabolic rift is capitalism’s tendency to disrupt Earth’s cycles. The key factor driving this disruption is the subordination of human needs to capitalism’s drive for profit and accumulation. This process breaks the metabolic connection between humans and the rest of nature. Capitalism cannot change the natural laws governing life itself.

Drawing on soil science, Marx first analyzed the rift between town and country. In England, working-class urbanization and the separation of agricultural production and people meant that the food and human wastes previously returned to the soil flowed as pollution into rivers. This process broke the nutrient cycle and undermined soil fertility.

The metabolism of the earth includes material and energy cycles operating on time frames ranging from hours to hundreds of millions of years. These include the water cycle, the carbon cycle, and the nitrogen cycle.

With the attention rightly given to global heating and disruption of the carbon cycle, which is mostly caused by fossil fuels, other disruptions, like with the nitrogen cycle, are less appreciated, although no less important. A handful of healthy soil contains hundreds of millions of microorganisms. Soils are the most species-rich habitat on Earth. Healthy soil is necessary for fertility and absorbing carbon, and for nutritious food.

Angus traces the history of soil destruction to the town-country rift, which then led to imperial struggles to secure nitrogen-rich guano deposits to restore fertility. Ultimately, there was the development of industrial production and its complex of cash crops and fossil-fuel-derived nitrogen fertilizer. Farmers grossly over-apply nitrogen fertilizer, wasting two-thirds of it, polluting water and air, and disrupting a key Earth System metabolic cycle.

Capital versus the Earth System

The main part of Angus’s book is titled “Capital versus the Earth System.” It traces the ecological revolutions, including photosynthesis and land-based organisms, through which life and the rest of the planet historically co-evolved. This evolution created the conditions for more life and, ultimately, the stable equilibrium of the Holocene epoch over the last 10,000 years. Historically, relatively small changes in temperature or oxygen levels supported large changes in the biosphere. This insight is important for understanding ecological tipping points, when incremental change exceeds a threshold and may cause major changes in the Earth System.

Holocene chart in Metabolic Rifts (108).

Angus summarizes the distinctive anti-ecologic logic of capitalism as being characterized by “generalized production of commodities: profit maximization; competition among multiple capitalist; short-termism, and unending accumulation” (115).

These are inter-related dynamics that, among other outcomes, lead to uncontrolled growth. Ecologically, this means an ever-increasing linear flow of material and energy through the system that is in direct conflict with the universal metabolism. Angus writes,

The growth imperative is not, as liberal environmentalists often argue, just a mistaken policy or a false ideology. It is a fundamental structural feature of capitalism. Uncontrolled growth is an inevitable result of the profit system, of capitalism’s inherent drive to accumulate ever more capital.” (122)

The Anthropocene epoch

Angus has been an important proponent of the theory that we have entered into a new Anthropocene epoch. On this view, the Earth has transitioned from a period of temperature and ecological stability known as the Holocene and is now in the capitalist-driven and unstable period of the Anthropocene, a qualitatively new geological epoch where human activity has fundamentally reshaped the Earth.

The reference point for this thesis is the post-World War II period known at the Great Acceleration. This marks an unprecedented era of fossil fuel enabled economic growth.

The charts below show the general trends.

The Great Acceleration: Socio-Economic Trends Since 1750. Image credit: A Planetary Health Check.

The Great Acceleration: Earth Systems Trends Since 1750. Image credit: A Planetary Health Check.

In an Earth Systems framework, the result of capitalist production is that key planetary boundaries for maintaining a stable biosphere are being exceeded.

The ecological crisis is much more than about global heating and the need for green energy at scale. Exceeding boundaries also risks creating new tipping points, producing even worse outcomes. In one global heating scenario, for example, after a certain point of warming, a cascade of factors could set in to produce Hot House Earth, an environment inhospitable to human society and many existing forms of life.

Rough Guide to Planetary Boundaries. Image credit: A Rough Guide to Planetary Boundaries.

Scientists share with socialists and millions of oppressed and exploited workers a sense that we need a radical break with the status quo to resolve escalating crises and deteriorating living conditions. Angus quotes from the 2018 landmark earth science article “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

“Incremental linear changes to the present socioeconomic system are not enough to stabilize the Earth System. Widespread, rapid, and fundamental transformations will likely be required to reduce the risk of crossing the threshold and locking in the Hothouse Earth pathway: these include changes in behavior, technology and innovation, governance, and values.” (215)

Ecosocialist strategy

While revolution must be the goal of ecosocialists, this doesn’t mean we have no options for immediate political struggle.

Ecosocialists need to help elaborate necessary non-incremental and revolutionary social and ecological changes. But we must also contribute politically and practically to immediate fights for reforms.

Angus makes the case that our collective goal can’t be to govern nature, as capitalists and ecomodernists urge, but to democratically govern our dynamic interaction with the Earth. For Metabolic Rifts, a guiding goal is expanding the commons—the democratically regulated and accessible provisioning of our basic needs. Housing, education, healthcare, and food shouldn’t be commodified but freely available to all.

The original expropriation of direct producers from the land was integral to early capitalist development. Solving the general metabolic rift requires overcoming the social rift between workers and their communities from the means of livelihood.

The long process of original expropriation, of evicting peasants from the country and forcing them into cities, was a long, extremely violent, and contested process in Europe. Ian Angus’s earlier book The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism chronicles this history and points to the role of popular resistance and the need to reestablish a conception of the commons.

Other goals—from closing fossil fuel corporations and expropriating agribusiness, to banning single-use plastic and other chemicals that nature cannot absorb and recycle, to paying international ecological debts and abolishing the U.S. military empire—would be part of the revolutionary transformation to ecosoicalism.

Immediate reforms are challenging—and will not immediately affect the global crisis. But we must engage in struggles that people can learn from and that can have real-world impact. The expansion of the global commons can only come about through the mass struggle of the global working class, indigenous communities, and colonized peoples.

From halting fossil fuel infrastructure, closing data centers, taking back public water supplies, and demanding public housing and transit to the struggle for a free Palestine and end to genocide, everything has an ecological dimension.

Our challenge is to bring the broad scope of ecological breakdown and the need for democratic social and ecological renewal into all our struggles. Metabolic Rifts helps us do this.

This piece first appeared at Tempest.

The post Confronting the Ecological Crisis appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Let me imagine that, at some future moment, I might be ushered into the presence of President Donald J. Trump and the question would then be: What in the world would I have to say to him? Keep in mind that this would be after he had renamed the former Lake America (once, of course, Lake Ontario) Lake Trump, the former Gulf of America (once, of course, the Gulf of Mexico) the Gulf of Trump, and the former Ocean America (once the Atlantic Ocean) Ocean Trump. (Okay, Ocean America hasn’t happened quite yet, but don’t for a moment think that it won’t, sooner or later.)

As a start, I would certainly want to say as politely as possible: “Just in case no one has told you yet, sir, you are a genuine self-aggrandizing maniac.”

And I have no doubt that he would smile back at me all too proudly.

And then, I might add that I still believed in Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico, not to speak of the Atlantic Ocean, and that I considered him a genuine madman for starting a war with Iran that, by definition (given American wars since World War II), he couldn’t possibly finish in any faintly successful fashion.

And I might next want to add that, once upon a time, nothing I ever imagined about this country, dismal as its politics could sometimes be, had faintly prepared me for him — and not, mind you, just for him to be elected president of the United States one time (itself a genuinely unbelievable phenomenon), but somehow yet again, eight years later, by 49.8% of voting Americans. Honestly, once upon a time, you couldn’t have made that up and, had any novelist written such a plot back then, the book would have been laughed off the shelves.

Let’s just hope that, by the time he has the urge to give himself an unprecedented third term in office in January 2029, everything will have been such a Trumpian nightmare that he’ll be laughed off the shelves himself. Take my word for it, it could happen to the president whose approval rating, at the very moment I was writing this, had already dropped to 38%. And of course, his name could then be changed to Donald Ontario.

Honestly, once upon a time, in another world, the scenario I just described — and I’m not even thinking now about that imagined third term, but the two thoroughly idiotic ones we’ve been living through — would have been as ridiculous, if nightmarish, a fantasy of the first order (or do I mean the second order, or for that matter the final order?) as anyone could previously have imagined. It wouldn’t even have been a reasonable plot for a thoroughly dystopian novel. And yet here we are.

Yes, 20 years ago, if you had suggested that all of us might someday be the apprentices of Donald J. Trump, that every one of us would be thoroughly Trumped, it wouldn’t even have been a bad joke, no less a possible reality of any sort.

Honestly, it would have been too ridiculous even to mention. It would have been literally — to call up a term from my childhood — out of the ballpark. Of course, speaking of ballparks, when I was a little kid rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team, if you had told me that, by the time I was 14, after 68 seasons in Brooklyn and a couple of recent world championships, they would depart for — yes! — Los Angeles, I would have thought you an idiot first class. And yet, of course, they did just that. And if you had told me that, almost 70 years later, the whole team would have visited Donald Trump — yes, him! — in the White House not once, but — yes, again!! — twice, I would have thought you mad as a hatter.

Similarly, if years ago, you had told me that I — and every other American — would functionally be apprentices to President (though not yet Emperor) Donald Trump, I would have known you were — yes! — out of the ballpark and as crazy as the proverbial loon (as in, of course, the word loonatic).

And yet, whether our world is now completely loony or just Looney Tunes, there he is, at this very moment, the second time around, creating a World Eeries (not Series) of chaos on this planet of ours from Iran to Ontario. And these days, who even knows if, in 2028, he’ll agree to leave the White House? He may, of course, but in our present world, it seems as if there’s all too little of a nightmarish nature that’s not possible.

In short, reality — or at least what passes for it these days — increasingly appears all too wildly ridiculous and madly unbelievable.

The United States of Trump

Still, taking all of that into account, Donald Trump — or rather President Trump (you must be kidding me!) — has given wildly ridiculous and madly unbelievable new meaning to so much in this ever-stranger world of ours. In some sense, even after all these years, he remains eerily indescribable. (Give it a try and see what I mean!) And of course, what makes his version of reality so unbearably crazed is that our world is going down around us, even if in slow motion. And you can’t say that he’s doing nothing about it either, since he’s clearly doing his damnedest to take this planet of ours down (or do I mean to heat it up?) ever faster, making him all too literally the definition of a world-destroying head of state. (Or perhaps, if you’ll excuse me for saying so, I’d prefer to call him — far more appropriately — an ass of state.)

Hey, if he can change the names of anything he wants, why can’t we? Why can’t we call him Donald Lump, or Donald Grump, or for that matter Donald Dump, or… well, it’s your turn now.

Put another way, just imagine that, in 2024, almost 50% of Americans voted in someone who, when it comes to the two ways humanity has created to destroy this planet, doesn’t believe the first one, climate change, even exists (”It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world“) and couldn’t be happier to feed ever more fossil fuels into the atmosphere to make our global situation so much more perilous. And when it comes to the second one, he could hardly be more ominous. After all, he’s at least suggested that he might restart nuclear testing and expand this country’s already monstrous nuclear arsenal.

So, can he be thought of as the Mission (Un)Accomplished president? Well, when it comes to Iran, more than six months later, you bet, even though on April 7th, 38 days into his already failing war, he swore on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” And he later suggested he might destroy that country’s civilian infrastructure on what he termed “Power Plant Day and Bridge Day,” even implying that he might use nuclear weapons to do so.

And if you want a sign of how bad things could in the end become, consider that former Trump ally Tucker Carlson evidently now fears the president might indeed use nuclear weapons in his failing war with Iran. He only recently asked, in fact, “Why isn’t there an attempt to remove him from office, like, immediately?”

And yet, more than six months after his disastrous war on Iran began, here we are (again).

Still, let me be balanced in this piece and not claim that Donald Trump has accomplished nothing. Quite the opposite: he has accomplished his mission, just not in Iran but right here in the United States of America. After all, he did manage a total presidential first by tearing down the East Wing of the White House to build a distinctly Trumpian dance hall (with a recent helping hand from five justices on the Supreme Court) and that’s no small thing, don’t you think? And mind you, that’s not faintly the end of it either. After all, the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts recently voted to inscribe “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump” on the building’s facade and what more could any president want?

So, here we are, distinctly in Donald Trump’s America on Donald Trump’s planet — both of which are undoubtedly to be renamed The United States of Trump and Planet Trump — and what could possibly go wrong?

This piece first appeared on Tom’s Substack.

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What exactly is the Democratic Socialists of America? It’s not a vanguard party or revolutionary socialist organization. It’s not a single-issue movement. It carries out a lot of electoral campaigns, but it’s not a political party like the Democrats or Republicans. It has some similarities with labor unions, or at least the NYC-DSA chapter does, but it does no real labor organizing itself.

Then it struck me: DSA* shares many commonalities with what passes for American anarchism. Having reported on social movements since the 1980s, I have been in the thick of anarchist-led or anarchist-style movements such as the squatter and anarchist scene in the pre-Giuliani days in the East Village, Youth Greens, the antiglobalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, Occupy ICE, climate justice activism, antifa, BLM movements in Portland and Seattle, and most recently the campus movement for Gaza.

(*Officially it’s “The DSA,” but when I was in DSA in the early 90s, everyone called it DSA, and using “The” sounds as clunky to me as saying “The Facebook.”)

When I explained this to a friend, they said, “Is that a bad thing they are like anarchists?” Not necessarily. DSA’s anarchist-like qualities of decentralization, volunteerism, and horizontalism have contributed to its success. The problem is DSA is falling into the same trap as anarchists by going all in on one tactic as its theory of change — canvassing. Like anarchists, DSA values action over a thought-out strategy and by default it elevates one tactic to a strategy. Because none of the anarchist movements had a plan B, they crumbled when their tactic hit a dead end. DSA risks a similar fate.

Canvassing is the motor of DSA’s theory of change. To its credit, DSA has created a virtuous cycle. The more it canvasses, the more elections it wins, the more new members join, and the more talented candidates it attracts. This kickstarts the cycle anew. DSA stalwarts believe this is how it will force the Democratic Party to the left, put democratic socialism into action, and then it is free ponies for everyone.

In June, Zohran Mamdani summed up the thinking after three candidates he endorsed won primaries for congressional seats, saying, “a democratic socialist can get elected anywhere across this country for any position.”

DSA’s strategy, however, is fatally flawed: It assumes the Democratic Party is a shell and its leaders are incapable of stopping a takeover. There is no need to recount how liberals spawned the post-war Red Scare and unleashed COINTELPRO on the left, or how Clinton and Obama embraced a hard-right agenda while bashing the left. But many leftists forget that in 2024 Democrats showed they would rather lose to Trump than end the Zionist genocide, and they are doing it again in 2026. Rather than make the midterms about inflation, climate chaos, data centers, or the disastrous Iran war, many Democrats are embracing Islamophobia by using Abdul El-Sayed and Hasan Piker as proxies to attack the left (and Zohran Mamdani and Ilhan Omar before). It’s more evidence we don’t need that Democrats prefer fascists to the left every time.

Despite the Democrats’ history as an organ of the ruling class, many lefty journalists fantasize the party is a level playing field. One imagines “the vacuum left by Democratic Party fecklessness is being filled by … an anti-establishment revolt from below” that promises to “kick out capital.” Another thinks “if a random businessman can … run a neoliberal campaign on the Democratic line, why shouldn’t a socialist use the same tools?” A third says “the dream of having an organized faction inside of the Democratic Party that can pull it left in a systematic and irresistible way, in a way more powerful than futile appeals to morality, is on the cusp of becoming a reality.” The Nation hallucinates that “Insurgents are revitalizing the Democratic Party.” Jacobin, which acts as DSA’s house organ, is full of magical thinking, but that is grist for another article.

ANARCHY IN THE USA

So how is DSA similar to anarchist-style movements? For the sake of brevity, I use anarchist as shorthand for anarchist-style or influenced, and I am talking about actually existing anarchism rather than tediously debating what is and isn’t anarchism. I am not claiming that Black Lives Matter or the Palestine solidarity movement are anarchist, but on the ground they often looked remarkably similar to recent anarchist movements.

Much of my evidence comes from a history I wrote of U.S. social movements since the 1990s that was published in the 2025 edition of The Socialist Register. I started by observing that for over a decade a similar slogan popped up across different movements: “All day, all week, occupy Wall Street” for Occupy Wall Street; “Stay together, stay tight, we do this every night,” for the George Floyd movement, “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest,” for the student-led movement for Gaza.

In each moment there was an imperative to act with little self-reflection. In the 1960s, Theodor Adorno dismissed this as actionism: “a self-defeating and exhibitionist commitment to political practice.” The three moments above also employed an existing tactic that made the movement real: occupying, campus protests, and anti-police brutality marches. A shift in society and ideas, and the state being caught flat-footed, allowed the tactic to take hold and spread rapidly. In the end, the tactic became the strategy. That tactic was how the desired change would happen, instead of being one arrow in a quiverful of tactics changing according to the forces, conditions, and goals. Each movement lived and died by its tactic, unable to adapt. (Some buzzkills will retort that Adorno once called the cops on students protesting his lectures in Frankfurt, but Adorno can both be right and an asshole.)

DSA shares many similarities. Chief among them is a focus on canvassing, elevating it to strategy, actionism, and no plan B. Now, DSA’s anarchist quality is in practice, not ideology. It differs significantly from anarchists. DSA is organized, eschews anarchists’ love of direct action and spontaneity, has elected leaders, and seeks state power, which for anarchists would be like becoming a cop to fight police brutality. At the same time, numerous DSA members grumble that power often resides in opaque self-selecting networks like it does among anarchists.

TURNING TACTICS INTO STRATEGY

A key feature of anarchism in practice is turning a tactic into a strategy. Before the “Battle of Seattle” in 1999, other anarchist movements revolved around a tactic, such as squatting, monkeywrenching and tree sits for forest defense, and street parties to protest rampant urbanization, often organized by Reclaim the Streets and the Ruckus Society. For the climate justice movement a decade ago, the tactic was blockades of oil pipelines, trains, and ships (known as “kayaktivism”).

The tactic is the one weird trick to change everything. During the antiglobalization years, the tactic was convergences, such as in Seattle. Activists hopped from city to city, chasing after the G7, World Bank, IMF, and the World Trade Organization. The strategy, if it could be called that, was to amass enough protesters to shut down a summit with the idea that it would create a crisis for capitalism, perhaps fatal. Naomi Klein and others criticized the tactic as “summit-hopping.” The logic of Occupy was the same. Create enough occupations, and we will build the new world in the shell of the old. With the George Floyd movement, the strategy was to get enough people in the streets and we can overwhelm the police state.

The idea that all we need is more people doing the same thing at the same time is a horizontalist fetish. That is how canvassing works. Everyone can do it, they do it at the same time based on election calendars, and many do it relentlessly. DSA canvasses for candidates, for legislation, and for signatures. It tables in public spaces and lobbies in the halls of power, which are kissing cousins of canvassing.

Like anarchists, DSA’s only strategy is to scale up. I get lots of emails from NYC-DSA about canvassing (and begging for money). I can canvass for get out the vote, canvass door-to-door for the “Delivery Protection Act,” canvass to inform neighbors about ICE operations, and canvass other DSA members to vote. I can table, a form of canvassing, for “Green Schools for a Healthier New York City” or ending weapons shipments from JFK to Israel. I can phonebank, another type of canvassing, for “Tax the Rich.” A proposal for “fast and free buses” in Brooklyn calls for “canvassing of both ride[r]s and businesses along important bus corridors.”

For this article, I talked to half a dozen DSA activists across the country. They raised two objections. They said not everyone agrees with the electoral approach and DSA does much more than electoral politics. That is true. Nearly all my contacts are skeptical of the electoral strategy, but they are outnumbered by DSA’s electoral wing — often called the right wing. As DSA wins more elections, it selects for new members who agree that elections are the way to build power, tilting power further toward the electoral wing.

As for what ele DSA does, there are beach days, book swaps, picnics, “coffee with comrades,” singles mingling, sing-alongs, soccer, and a running club, as well as committees on antiwar politics, immigrant defense, socialist-feminism, labor, trans rights, the environment and more, but it’s hard to figure out what these committees do apart from meeting and, well, canvassing.

INSIDE-OUTSIDE

While some claim DSA is pursuing an inside-outside strategy, the outside is a mirage. DSA committees such as NYC’s Anti-War Working Group have organized a few small protests in the past and some DSA chapters are active in local tenant-rights movements, but there is no coordinated national campaign around any issue, much less a dual-power strategy. This is a marked divergence with communists and anarchists, both of which pursue dual power. DSA activists confirmed that after a decade, DSA has not built a single national campaign or movement around any issue.

Protests and movement work have none of the scale or centrality to DSA that canvassing does. NYC-DSA alone organized hundreds upon hundreds of canvass operations in the past year. There are one-off events such as court support for immigrants being deported, a DSA tenants rally and protest in June at the Rent Guidelines Board, and DSA elected officials speaking at a protest in June at City Hall denouncing Mamdani’s plan to hire 580 more NYPD cops, which he later walked back. But this is precisely the problem: random protests do not make a movement. DSA committees and chapters also endorse and publicize rallies such as on May Day or the No Kings parades, but this is not organizing. DSA also likes passing resolutions at its conventions to support campaigns and movements, but that is no substitute for launching a campaign and committing organizers, resources, and strategy to it.

Compare DSA’s approach to the anti-Iraq War movement. Every antiwar group, which regularly brought out hundreds of thousands of people in the streets for years, was led by Marxist-Leninist or Trotskyist parties with cadre numbering in the hundreds. (I detail some of this history in The Socialist Register.)

If an organization with 120,000 members can’t organize one national movement after a decade, that is a feature, not a bug. DSA is a one-trick electoral pony.

The lack of strategy is compounded by decentralization — DSA chapters have considerable autonomy in projects they pursue — and volunteerism; work is determined by those who show up and do it. Anarchists have a similar free-for-all approach, which differs from socialists and communists who seek “unity in action” and develop disciplined cadres who execute a collectively determined strategy. Network strategies like the ones DSA and anarchists employ make them more resilient to state repression than top-down groups, but it comes at the cost of having no developed strategy.

DSA’s voluntarism extends to study. It has no mandatory political education. Socialist organizations usually require collective study so everyone has a shared language and knowledge of world history, left history, Marxist theory, and present conditions. In 2024 I took a course on fascism at the NYC-DSA Academy. It was engaging and useful, but only a couple dozen people, or about one out of 400 members, attended all four sessions. DSA treats education like it does organizing: random, disconnected, and voluntaristic. It leads to lowest common-denominator politics like anarchists that select for repetitive action over strategy.

LABOR DISORGANIZATION

No area indicates DSA’s underdevelopment more than labor organizing. Many contacts claim DSA does labor organizing. That is simply not true. DSA labor committees do strike support, publicity, and create space for networking and discussion. It’s valuable, but it’s a far cry from organizing workers. In the 1960s, many communists and socialists decided to “turn to industry.” The International Socialists, for one, achieved an astonishing record in unionized workplaces despite having only 500 cadre at its peak. One former organizer writes, “The IS itself initiated and sustained over thirty-five local rank-and-file groups.”

When I asked one union organizer if DSA has organized any rank-and-file caucuses, they said, “We have been debating whether to turn to industry for the last 10 years!” DSA’s existing rank-and-file strategy smacks of anarchist individualism: get a union job and “foment badly needed class struggle.”

Same with salting. DSA members I have talked to who say they are salting workplaces are confused about the concept. One labor organizer said many DSA members think rank-and-file work is salting when it really means you work under the direction and often the pay of a union to get a job at a non-union site with a strategy to unionize it. Instead, DSA encourages individualism devoid of any strategy to systematically build working-class power like the IS did. One source says that a new labor organizing project coming out of DSA decided to be independent because DSA is “a bureaucratic mess.”

Another big difference with anarchists, who focus on direct-action tactics, is that DSA shuns direct action. For decades, social movements have been marked by direct-action ruptures like Seattle, Occupy, BLM, and Gaza that change public consciousness and catalyze movement building. But DSA chapters rarely lead marches, protests, direct actions, unionizing, blockades, strikes, and so on. That makes it unlike any other activist left organization that has existed for generations.

DSA did not appear ex nihilo. Given that anarchist-style politics have dominated social movements for decades, it makes sense that DSA is shaped by this history. That’s not to say this is planned. Much of how DSA operates is a result of stumbling onto successful practices, decisions by default, and an orientation toward the Democratic Party baked into its founding from the merger of two organizations in 1982.

DSA is ultimately a hybrid organization. It functions as a left electoral force within a Democratic Party hostile to it. It adopts practices from unions, such as paid staff and organizers who mobilize members to pressure politicians and the policy process. And it mimics anarchist movements with a single-minded tactical focus based on a flawed premise.

DEAD END?

Occupy Wall Street was an incredible moment that exemplified the danger of doing the same thing over and over. After major occupations began being ousted in October 2011, activists kept trying to occupy for a year. They occupied parks, schools, homes, and government buildings but the state was not going to be caught by surprise again and responded violently. Activists futilely tried the same tactic until the movement petered out from police violence, criminal sanctions, frustration, and infighting.

In Portland, I had a front-row seat to the George Floyd and Occupy ICE protests, both of which made national news. They each clung to one tactic as they spiraled into a maelstrom of infantile politics, rage, and internal warfare. After capturing attention in the spring of 2024, the campus movement for Gaza tried the same tactics in the fall, but it was unable to adapt to repression and harsh sanctions meted out by the administrators.

Nonetheless, these movements had a real impact. Bernie Sanders credited Occupy Wall Street with his surprisingly popular 2016 presidential campaign. That in turn transformed DSA from an old man’s debate club into the electoral force it is today. Before a backlash, Black Lives Matter made defunding the police a majoritarian issue in the summer of 2020, with 67 percent of the public supporting the movement. In 2024, university students galvanized world opinion against the brutality of Zionism, provided Palestinians facing genocide with a profound source of hope, and led to the only suspension of US weapons shipments to Israel. But in the end, all these movements collapsed, unable to adapt while retaining popular support.

There is another danger facing DSA. When movements enjoy success and rapid growth, it can lead to unrealistic triumphalism. Activists are convinced they will win. This cuts in two contradictory ways. One is that to sustain a mass protest in the face of elite hostility and state violence, activists need absolute faith in their cause. Students at the campus occupations for Gaza fervently believed they could end their university’s complicity with Israel and even stop the genocide. That hope drew in thousands of others and campus protests spread like wildfire. But the other way it cuts is that activists are so convinced they have found the secret to success that they never develop other strategies to build power. When they find their path blocked, they perish in the wilderness.

That is the path DSA is currently on.

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