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Workers’ Voice newspaper: March-April edition
The U.S.-Israel war on Iran is a major escalation in the Middle East that has dangerous implications for working people everywhere. The brutality of the imperialist assault internationally is paired with the attack on civil liberties by the Trump regime inside the U.S. This includes the continued operations of ICE and Border Patrol, the threats to the 2026 mid-term elections, environmental rollbacks that deeply impact the Black community, and unchecked police brutality.
Our editorial in this issue warns us: “There is a great danger of underestimating the determination of the U.S. corporate elite to drive through this effort. We cannot rely on court rulings or upcoming elections to save us. We must organize now, not only for mass demonstrations and community networks against ICE violence, but to find our way to building a new working-class party through which we can organize our political defense on every plane and on every day.”
In this issue we also have articles on the Epstein files and the ruling class, the San Francisco teachers’ strike, and a review of the new album by U2.
The March–April 2026 edition of our newspaper is available in print and online as a pdf. Read the latest issue of our newspaper today with a free pdf download! As always, we appreciate any donations to help with the cost of printing.
Click on the image to read the paper or message us to get a hard copy:
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Trump administration’s response to ICE shooting points to more repression
By AVA FAHY and ERWIN FREED
Early Wednesday morning, Sept. 24, three detainees at the ICE field office in Dallas were shot by a gunman who was later identified as Joshua Jahn, 29. According to reports, the shooter then turned the gun on himself and died by suicide. Three immigrant detainees were shot, and out of those, one has since died.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Vice President JD Vance, speaking at an event in North Carolina, labeled the shooter as a “violent left-wing extremist.” Without being specific, he alleged that evidence proved that the shooter “was politically motivated to go after law enforcement … to go after people who are enforcing our border.”
Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, “This violence is the result of the Radical Left Democrats constantly demonizing Law Enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to ‘Nazis.’” Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Sept. 25, he again emphasized that message: “The radical left is causing the problem. They’re out of control.” He warned that retaliation by the right could become inevitable.
In this particular case, it is quite possible that the shooter was hoping to disrupt ICE operations. According to the FBI, one of the handwritten notes that it recovered read, “Hopefully this will give Ice agents real terror, to think, ‘is there a sniper’? about to fire from a roof.” At the same time, as we discuss below, there is a growing pattern of ideologically mixed symbols connected with recent shootings and assassinations that are either ambiguous or outright distorted by investigating agencies.
Trump, Vance, Homeland Security Agency head Kristi Noem, and other capitalist representatives have gone even further than speculating the motives of the shooter. They are using these tragic deaths in Dallas to paint ICE agents as increasingly at risk. In actual fact, ICE and CBP are two of the safest law enforcement positions, which is itself a generally safe career.
While increases in violence against ICE agents have been reported since Trump took office, this is likely related to the increased frequency of enforcement and the deployment of enforcement tactics wherein ICE agents emerge, wearing face coverings and no agency identification, from unmarked cars with their firearms drawn. These were the circumstances, for example, in the case of Silverio Villegas González, who was fatally shot by ICE agents in Chicago on Sept. 12 after dropping his children off at a childcare center. ICE also has a tendency to completely fabricate claimed “assaults.”
In any case, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLoughlin has already stated that no federal agents were injured in the Dallas shooting. This smokescreen around motives and facts is an example of how the far right has become effective at using acts of violence to demand and facilitate attacks on working people—especially trans and Black people and immigrants of color—as well as progressive activists.
They are aided in the use of “culture war” narratives by the growing prominence of shooters inspired by esoteric neo-Nazi forums and materials from groups like “The Com” and “Order of Nine Angles.” These generally nihilist worldviews take hold in impressionable and often mentally unstable people, who are pushed to carry out acts of violence. Online discussion spaces are often, if not always, penetrated by police infiltrators and informants. A prime example is Joshua Caleb Sutter, a neo-Nazi and former leader of the Aryan Nations, who has gained notoriety for his role as a FBI informant and provocateur. Similarly, police and particularly the FBI are known to plant evidence to bolster their own “official” narratives.
This background context can help us to understand that much skepticism is needed to objectively review the information trickling out from the police agencies. In particular, FBI Director Kash Patel posted pictures of shell casings allegedly left by the shooter that appear to have “ANTI ICE” written on one. Shooters inspired by police-informant-run neo-Nazi networks have been consistently writing both “left” and “right” slogans on their weapons and ammunition. A notable example was Robin Westman, who killed two children when firing on a Catholic school in Minneapolis in August. The news outlets, and certainly the Trump administration, generally only commented on Westman’s “leftist” slogans while ignoring the racist, antisemitic, and nihilistic messages. “The message is there is no message,” Westman wrote in a journal.
And, it should be noted, the FBI has faked evidence in the past to achieve favorable outcomes for themselves—for example, George Perrot spent over 30 years in federal prison based on an FBI hair analysis found to have been completely bogus. His case was one of thousands in which the FBI, in their own words, “provided either testimony with erroneous statements or submitted laboratory reports with erroneous statements.”
In summary, the capitalist class—through its media, police, and politicians—is using acts of violence, no matter the source, to construct narratives justifying further attacks on the left and all oppressed peoples. It is necessary to be highly critical about the information that they release, which is often decontextualized, depoliticized, and missing crucial details.
In particular, the Trump administration and its MAGA supporters are using these horrific deaths to further demonize immigrants as well as distract from the real conditions in ICE’s “detention centers.” We cannot let the voices of the people who are made to suffer in these centers be drowned out by speculation about motives, investigations, and conspiracies. Since Trump took office, 15 people have died in immigration detention, while thousands are tortured. The most recent death, Ismael Ayala-Uribe, a former DACA recipient, occurred last Sunday.
Earlier this year, ICE announced that they were out of detention space, with 50,000 people under detention—4000 more than they had beds for. Rather than parole detainees or slow down the pace of immigration enforcement, ICE has launched contracts with several private, for-profit prison operators.
Today, ICE detentions stand at a record high, at over 60,000 people. Whistleblowers say the conditions are unsanitary and unsafe. Due to overcrowding, detainees are increasingly being denied changes of clothes, blankets, pillows, phone calls to family, phone calls to attorneys, medication, and mattresses. Detainees at the Krome Detention center in Florida made headlines earlier this year for forming a human “SOS” sign in the recreation yard with their bodies. According to a lawyer who represents Krome detainees, his client was only given a cup of rice and a glass of water per day. At one point, Krome detained over 1200 people more than its contractual capacity.
El Pais has reported that the overcrowding in detention facilities has fueled a surge in detainee suicide attempts driven by desperation. At least two of the known detention fatalities this year have been suicides: Jesus Molina Veya and Chaofeng Ge. This is likely caused by jail employees’ blatant lack of disregard for detainees’ health and wellbeing. For example, one woman, a survivor of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C), taken to jail for the “crime” of seeking asylum, was strip-searched in front of a camera—which caused her to go into acute mental crisis and placed on suicide watch. In an ICE detention center, “suicide watch” means solitary confinement.
Importantly, ICE detention facilities are not, ostensibly, criminal detention centers—at least not by the letter of the law. Most violations of immigration law, such as overstaying one’s visa, are not criminal offenses, but are civil offenses that carry no criminal penalties. The highest court in the land, the Supreme Court, has stated that immigration proceedings are not “punitive” (at least, according to the government). For this reason, ICE detainees are not afforded the same due process protections as individuals in criminal proceedings. Unlike folks in criminal court, people facing down immigration charges are not entitled to a court-appointed lawyer, not entitled to “Miranda” rights, not entitled to exclude unlawfully obtained evidence against them, and can be deported for criminal convictions that did not render them deportable at the time they were committed.
These “civil” detention centers are often located directly next to—or sometimes, inside of—already existing criminal detention facilities, and are staffed by the same employees. In this “civil” detention, detainees are forced to wear prisoner uniforms, submit to invasive strip searches and cavity searches, routinely placed in solitary confinement, assaulted by officers, and denied medical care—or, in the cases of some immigrant women, are forcibly subjected to nonconsensual gynecological procedures, including sterilization.
Moreover, the Trump government has promulgated several pieces of legislation and policy directives that have stripped individual actors within the immigration system of the power to parole individual detainees. The Laken Riley Act, signed in March, has made it mandatory to detain without bond immigrants who have not only been charged with or convicted of theft-related offenses, but also those who have merely been arrested for theft, even if the charges were resolved in their favor.
More recently (although woefully underreported), a BIA decision entitled Matter of Yajure Hurtado set a legal precedent that any noncitizen who entered the United States without inspection (commonly known as EWI) is not entitled to bond out of immigration detention. It is estimated that over half of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. fall into this category.
Far from being non-punitive, the point of the poor conditions in immigration detention—and the intentional worsening of the already-poor conditions—is explicitly to deter immigrants from exercising their due process rights. When asked if DHS’s new planned ICE detention center at Louisiana’s Angola prison was deliberately intended to drive immigrants out of the country, ICE director Kristi Noem giggled and said “Absolutely!” with a grin.
Workers’ Voice stands in solidarity with the immigrant victims of Wednesday’s tragic shooting at the Dallas ICE field office. We are likewise in solidarity with all people in immigration detention, imprisoned for the crime of crossing an imaginary line. All sectors of U.S. workers must take a stand against the cruel and unusual punishment of immigrants and for justice and civil liberties for all the millions of immigrants in the United States, regardless of documentation or status.
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U.S. attacks civilian boats near Venezuela
By ERWIN FREED
In a matter of weeks, the United States struck three boats in international waters near the coast of Venezuela. Trump has claimed, without presenting evidence, that 17 “narco-terrorists” were killed in the attacks and that the boats were trafficking fentanyl and cocaine to the United States. In reality, U.S. imperialism is attempting to prepare the psychological and logistical grounds for expanded special forces operations and direct strikes on sovereign territory throughout Latin America—with Venezuela directly in the crosshairs.
The idea that the U.S. ruling class cares about “stopping drug trafficking” is patently absurd. Putting aside the role of Big Pharma in creating the opioid epidemic, the U.S. military itself actively courts relationships with favored international drug dealers.
During the occupation of Afghanistan, which Trump is also attempting to reengage, poppy production increased over 800%. While all of the various administrations hand waved about the need to “combat” drug production, in reality virtually all of the serious drug traffickers in the country were in the Northern Alliance or high-level figures in the U.S.-backed puppet government. The vast majority of heroin from 2002-2021 came from Afghanistan, a decent proportion from fields directly patrolled by U.S. soldiers. One of the first actions taken by the Taliban after the U.S. withdrawal was the eradication of poppy production. Even mouthpieces for Yankee imperialism like The New York Times have been forced to admit that the Islamic Emirate has been extremely successful on this front.
Even the Drug Enforcement Agency, whose entire reason for existence is stopping drug trafficking, is riddled with people actively working with drug traffickers. Beyond the activity of individual agents like Jose Irazzary, the agency actively launders millions of dollars of drug money on behalf of major drug trafficking organizations. Even ICE was caught allowing its planes to be used to bring hundreds, if not thousands, of tons of cocaine into the United States in “Operation Mayan Jaguar.”
The far right has embraced a narrative that neocolonial governments are conspiring to “poison” white Americans. These obvious lies are made to justify military actions against working class, peasant, and Indigenous communities in Latin America and throughout the world (including domestically). At the same time, they give cover to the military and police operations and the big U.S.-based banks who profit politically and economically from the criminalized narcotics trade.
SOUTHCOM’s (U.S. Southern Command’s) horrific acts of violence have no purpose other than to terrorize and threaten working and oppressed people in Latin America. By attacking civilian boats, Trump is signaling that no one is safe from being killed arbitrarily. According to reports, due to the precarious state of the Venezuelan economy, some fishermen find themselves forced to participate in illegal activities such as drug running or transporting migrants. These attacks have already greatly hurt local communities in coastal Venezuelan towns by deterring even “normal” industries.
Of course, there is nothing new about the U.S. ruling class’s complete disregard for human life. As journalist Seth Harp has detailed in his important recent book, “The Fort Bragg Cartel,” Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) operatives are constantly carrying out assassination missions throughout Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean on the basis of bad intelligence. A common situation, for example, will be that a JSOC or CIA “asset” who is himself a trafficker or warlord will give the location of his enemies, clearing the field of competition.
Workers in the U.S. must not be fooled by the xenophobic and racist propaganda shared by both the Democratic and Republican parties that military actions against “drug trafficking” will somehow stop the epidemic of overdose deaths and addiction in this country.
Trump’s decision to publicize these brutal bombings act to normalize extra-judicial killings. But there is nothing normal about the richest country in history mobilizing the newest and most destructive military equipment against poor fishermen. All sectors of workers in the United States must stand completely against these imperialist escalations and with all of the people of Latin America and the Caribbean, including and especially the millions of migrants, regardless of documentation or status.
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Reinstate Tom Alter now! Protect free speech! No to fascists!
Workers’ Voice expresses our full solidarity with Tom Alter, a member of Socialist Horizon and professor at Texas State University, who was fired from his teaching job for expressing his political opinions in an online presentation at a Sept. 8 socialist conference. When the university president ordered Dr. Alter’s dismissal based on false charges that the professor was “inciting violence,” he was taking a page from the discredited McCarthyite witch hunt tactics of several generations ago.We are outraged at this blatant attack on free speech and urge our readers to support and participate in the organized efforts to protest Dr. Alter’s dismissal and demand that his position on the TSU faculty be fully restored.
We reprint below a statement by Socialist Horizon, with a link to a petition to the TSU authorities urging that they retreat from their attack on free speech and reinstate Dr. Alter immediately: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back Donate to help Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
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Beloved History professor and Socialist Horizon member Tom Alter was summarily fired on September 10th by Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse for expressing his ideas in a virtual conference unrelated to the university. The grounds for his dismissal were based solely on false accusations published online by self-declared fascist and “anti-communist cult leader” Karlyn Borysenko. We call on Dr. Kelly Damphousse and the TSU administration to retreat from this flagrant attack on the basic right to free speech and wrongful termination of Dr. Tom Alter. We call for his immediate reinstatement.
Alter’s summary termination is a serious attack on free speech that could set dangerous precedents, contribute to Trump and the far right’s intention of imposing an authoritarian regime, and strengthen the influence of fascists and the most violent and reactionary groups. We call on all (organizations, etc.) to join us in building the broadest campaign to win this decisive battle.
Alter was speaking at an on-line socialism conference last week when he was secretly video recorded by Borysenko, who has publicly called for embracing fascism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gCBU2OOX9Y), stated that Jewish people chose to die in the Holocaust (https://www.newsweek.com/prageru-karlyn-borysenko-holocaust-hitler-heaven-1656788), and refers to herself as an “anti-communist cult leader (https://x.com/DrKarlynB).” She secretly recorded a talk that Dr. Alter gave at the Revolutionary Socialism Conference and began calling for his firing (https://x.com/DrKarlynB/status/1965074589928796538) on social media on Monday, September 8th. Using tactics borrowed directly from the McCarthy era, Borysenko submitted a doctored video to University President Kelly Damphousse, who immediately fired Alter.
The statement issued by Damphousse unambiguously affirms that he fired Alter for what he said at that conference, stating no other reason, claiming Alter of “inciting violence.” This accusation and immediate condemnation without due process is solely based on Borysenko’s doctored recordings and comments.
The fact that a fascist marginal streamer with a dangerous and extremist ideology can pressure the president of a prestigious public university to illegally fire a tenured professor for his opinions is very serious. More concerning, if we do not stop this, it will set a precedent that will embolden the most dangerous bigots, right-wing extremists and fascists. If they can influence the president of Texas State University so easily, who else will they go after?
This attack not only targets Alter. Behind Damphousse’s statement that blatantly highlights Alter’s opinions as the cause for his termination, there is a deliberate attack on free speech that aims to set another dangerous precedent. It is part of the attempt by Trump and the far right to impose an authoritarian regime, one in which dissidence is punished. If we do not stop this, they will be a significant step closer.
Damphousse claims that Alter’s words incited “violence.” But his speech, a transcript of which can be viewed here, (https://universitystar.com/32736/news/texas-state-terminates-history-professor-over-comments-made-at-conference/), called for no violence. It is in fact the fascist Borysenko who incites violence permanently against oppressed people and in this case against Alter. It is Alter’s employer Texas State University that inflicted violence: stripping Alter of his job, refusing him any due process, casting him and his family into the uncertainty of unemployment and slamming the door on his free speech and academic freedom. Alter’s First Amendment right to speak, guaranteed by the Constitution, has been violated, as has his academic freedom, as developed by his faculty union, the American Association of University Professors.
And it is Trump who inflicts violence against millions. It is this capitalist system that Alter spoke against that inflicts mass violence condemning billions to hunger, poverty and war while a handful accumulates ever growing obscene amounts of wealth that steals from the rest of us.
What did Alter talk about that triggered Borysenko, and Damphousse considers so unacceptable? He spoke against this cruel and unjust system and argued in favor of replacing it with socialism. And he advocated organizing politically to achieve this. With nearly 40% of Americans favoring socialism over capitalism, this is far from subversive. It is a just cause that more and more people are joining, one worth fighting for, and one bigots and capitalists are afraid of.
Alter was attacked by Borysenko because he told the truth many people in the United States believe today: that capitalism is ruining their lives, and that socialism is a better system. If Tom Alter can be fired for expressing his personal beliefs and principles, then people everywhere are in danger. If he can be fired for expressing a point of view while *not at work, but in his private life,* then none are safe. His case must draw support from people of all sectors of society: workers, teachers, nurses, students—anyone who upholds the value of free speech. As the great American abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said, “The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected.”
These attacks will not intimidate Socialist Horizon. We will defend our comrade and we will continue fighting for the cause he is being attacked for, and we will continue building the organization to win it.
Alter is not only a beloved faculty member at Texas State but also an advisor to several student organizations. He is the author of a celebrated history of socialism in the American South, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press). He is also the father of two children.
Socialist Horizon demands that Texas State University immediately restore Tom Alter’s position as Associate Professor of History.
Socialist Horizon also calls on all organizations and individuals that defend the basic democratic right to free speech and reject fascism and authoritarianism, and all socialists in particular, to join this fight.
This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defense of free speech and against fascism.
— Socialist Horizon
September 12, 2025
What you can do:
Sign this petition demanding Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
Donate to help Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Alter be given his job back:
- President Damphousse president@txstate.edu
- President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
- Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
- Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
Photo: A participant in the student rally at Texas State University on Sept. 11, protesting the firing of Professor Tom Alter. Simultaneously, the Texas State Employees Union, of which Alter is a member, released a statement demanding that he be reinstated. (Meg Boles / The University Star)
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Philly cops get windfall from new contract
By JOHN LESLIE
On Aug. 15, in accordance with Pennsylvania’s Policemen’s and Firemen’s Collective Bargaining Act of 1968 (Act 111), arbitrators awarded substantial wage increases and incentives to Philadelphia police in a new two-year contract. Police officers will receive a 3% pay increase this fiscal year and the next, along with a one-time $3000 bonus. Cops will also receive an additional paid “wellness” day annually.
According to a Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) published document, the raises also include a 1.5% pay adjustment because of the “civilianization” of some existing roles through attrition, and a “1% increase in the longevity pay scale,” resulting in cumulative raises of 15% over three years. The arbitrators’ award also requires that the city make a lump-sum payment of $5 million to the FOP Retiree Joint Trust Fund within 60 days and another $5 million payment on or before July 1, 2026. Additionally, the FOP says that there is an option to reopen the contract in 2026.
A Philadelphia police recruit makes $64,982 while attending the police academy, which can last from five to nine months. Upon graduation, a police officer’s pay jumps to more than $69,000 annually. A cop’s pay can reach over $104,000 per year after two years, with stress pay, overtime, and other bonuses figured in.
This is in stark contrast to the AFSCME District Council 33 (DC 33) contract won by Philadelphia’s sanitation and other “blue collar” workers following an eight-day strike this summer. During their strike, DC 33 workers were met with stiff resistance and strike-breaking tactics from the Democratic Party’s Mayor Parker and a Democratic-aligned judge who provided injunctions.
The new DC 33 contract includes 3% raises per year retroactive to July 1 of this year, a $1500 signing bonus, as well as retaining the health-care plan, but the raises are not enough to keep up with inflation. The average annual salary of a DC 33 member is $46,000, or $22.12 per hour, and is $2000 less than the $48,387 a single person with no children would need to afford to live in Philadelphia. This is in sharp contrast to the pay won by cops.
Higher pay is supported by police supporters because of the “dangers” that are associated with police work, but statistics show that the work of sanitation workers is significantly more dangerous than that of the police. According to recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 2023, the fatal injury rate for garbage collectors was 41.4 per 100,000 workers, compared to 11.3 for police officers. In fact, police ranked 18th in the number of dangerous occupations in 2020—behind loggers, construction workers, and ground maintenance workers.
Gutting accountability
One of the demands of the FOP was to curb the power of the Citizens Police Oversight Commission (CPOC), which replaced the Police Accountably Commission (PAC) in 2021. According to Axios, “the arbitrators maintained the status quo—neither further empowering CPOC (as the city wanted) nor restricting it.” Axios describes the agency as being “on life support.”
While the PAC had no real power or ability to enforce discipline against violent to abusive cops, CPOC has more power to investigate disciplinary cases–in theory. The reality of this underfunded agency is much different. In 2024, it was reported that CPOC had not investigated a single citizen complaint of police misconduct since it was created, routinely turning complaints over to Philadelphia Police Internal Affairs investigators. About 25% of the complaints included allegations against police officers for crimes including physical abuse, civil rights violations, sexual misconduct, drug use, or other violations.
Police violence costs the taxpayers millions of dollars annually, as court cases and settlements are paid to victims or their families. From 2013 to 2014, Philadelphia paid out an average of $9 million annually to settle cases of police misconduct. Since 2023, the city has paid out at least $60 million to settle claims.
Mayor Cherelle Parker campaigned for office based on a call for more cops and the return to “stop and frisk” under the guise of so-called “Terry” stops. As Workers Voice wrote earlier, the mayor has proven that “a Black woman from an underprivileged background can gain office, but that she nevertheless will uphold institutions that re-enforce poverty and practices that reinforce white racism.”
Police violence still rampant five years after George Floyd
According to a study by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions and Vanderbilt University “an average of 1,769 people were injured annually in police shootings from 2015 to 2020, 55 percent of them, or 979 people, fatally. The study covered a total of 10,308 incidents involving shootings by police.” The study also notes a racial disparity in these incidents, with Black and Brown people disproportionately represented among the victims of police violence. Additionally, 23% of the victims were reported as experiencing a “mental or behavioral health condition.”
After 2020 and until last year, statistics showed that police kill more than 1100 people annually in the U.S.—while Black people have been victims as a disproportionate rate.
Philadelphia has followed the national pattern. In recent years, there have been a number of cases of police killings in the city; these include:
- Robert Jones: On Oct. 3, 2024, Jones, a 54-year-old professional roadside assistance worker, was shot four times and killed by off-duty homicide detective Christopher Sweeney. Jones had approached Sweeney’s car, which was stopped in a turning lane, likely in order to offer assistance. District Attorney Larry Krasner has declined to prosecute Sweeney despite inconsistencies in his story.
- Eddie Irizarry, 27, was fatally shot by Philadelphia Police Officer Mark Dial during a traffic stop on Aug. 23, 2023. Police initially claimed that Irizarry had lunged at them with a weapon. However, body camera footage showed that Irizarry was inside his car when Dial fired through the closed driver’s side window. Dial was later convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to nine-and-a-half months to two years in prison. He was granted immediate parole.
- In October 2020, Thomas “TJ” Siderio, 12 years old, was shot four times in the back and killed by a member of a notorious plain-clothes police unit that was popularly known as the “cowboys” for their free-wheeling and unsafe methods in making arrests. Some charged that the “cowboys” conducted warrantless searches and physical brutality, and planted guns on suspects. Video showed that Sidero had had a gun, but that he had dropped it in the street well before he was shot by Officer Edsaul Mendoza.
- Also in October 2020, Walter Wallace, Jr, 27, was fatally shot by Philadelphia police officers Sean Matarazzo and Thomas Munz during a “domestic disturbance” call. Wallace, who was allegedly experiencing a mental health crisis, was holding a knife when shot by cops. It was Wallace’s family, not police, who called for an ambulance after the shooting.
- Aaron Rainey, 36, was gunned down by Philly cops while experiencing a mental health crisis on March 20, 2025. Rainey’s supporters in the community are demanding the release of body cam footage. Following the protests over the police killing of Walter Wallace Jr., the city and police department had promised to avoid another such situation by equipping police with tasers—which can result in death but are less lethal than guns. In Rainey’s case, the cops claimed that they had tried using their tasers, but found them to be ineffective. One of them then made the decision to shoot Rainey, slightly wounding a fellow officer in the process. Following a press conference by the Philadelphia Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (PAARPR), Philadelphia DA Krasner refused to meet with Rainey’s family. The district attorney’s staff claimed that he wasn’t in the building amid reports that he was seen leaving through a side door.
What is the role of police under capitalism?
The police and military are the organs of state violence dedicated to the preservation of the capitalist state and enforcing the power and privilege of the ruling class through violence and intimidation. Police are essential to the maintenance of the system through strike-breaking, the targeting of oppressed nationalities, and feeding poor people into the prison industrial complex. In this role, police are given what is called qualified immunity, which grants government officials immunity from civil suits unless the official is found to have violated “clearly established” law. In this atmosphere of impunity, Philadelphia police have been exposed for corruption numerous times.
Policing in the U.S. is rooted in the racist development of capitalism in this country from slavery through Jim Crow segregation. In part, the origins of U.S. police lay in the slave patrols tasked with keeping Black people under control. While many cops have working-class origins, they are not part of the working class. By taking the job of police officer, they leave the working class and cross over to the side of our class enemy. As Leon Trotsky expressed it, “The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state, is a bourgeois cop, not a worker.”
Police and prison-guard “unions,” which act to protect cops from any sort of accountability for their actions against workers and oppressed peoples, are reactionary organizations that should have no place in the labor movement. Philadelphia’s FOP has a long and sordid history of covering up police crimes, including its defense of the MOVE bombing in 1985. Recently, there have been credible allegations of corruption inside the FOP bureaucracy.
The militarization of police is nothing new and has paralleled the growth of the national security state, which spies on activists and has framed up Muslims and political activists. The militarization of police and increased domestic surveillance has been a bipartisan project supported by both capitalist parties.
Under Trump, the organs of state repression are growing in strength and power. Using the framework he inherited from years of bipartisan support for repression, Trump has significantly increased the size of U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement (ICE), an unaccountable political police being used to terrorize immigrant communities. Combined with the growth of federal police and Trump’s use of the military for domestic policing, the increased militarization of local police forces can be seen as part of the increasing authoritarianism of the state in the US.
On April 28, 2025, President Trump signed an Executive Order (EO) titled “Strengthening and Unleashing American Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens.” This EO increases the protections for abusive police, elevating their defense against lawsuits and prosecution to the federal level. Additionally, the EO increases support for police from the federal government. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), “The federal government wants to train your state and local law enforcement to be more aggressive, reduce the legal mechanisms you have to hold police accountable for misconduct, and provide financial and legal support to officers accused of violating your rights. The federal government will invest more in prisons, despite the U.S. already having the highest incarceration rate of any independent democracy on Earth.” The EO also provides more military equipment to local law enforcement.
Fighting back
Obviously, we must fight here and now for police accountability. In that fight, we can’t rely on bourgeois politicians and institutions. Demanding accountability of police and repressive forces at all levels, local, state and federal, is one aspect of a broader fightback against the increasing authoritarianism we face. This struggle should be seen as part of the broader fight to protect democratic rights, including our unions, free speech, and the right to organize. Given the treachery of some Democrats, it’s clear that we need to build broad, democratic mass movements independent of the capitalist parties.
Ultimately, the capitalist state apparatus, including its repressive organs, must be done away with and replaced by popular institutions of community safety organized and controlled by the working class and oppressed people.
Photo: Philadelphia police inspector Joseph Bologna strikes a Temple University student during a George Floyd protest in June 2020. Bologna was charged with assault; last year, a jury found him not guilty. (Cellphone image on Twitter)
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Africa and the gig economy
By BRIAN CRAWFORD
Black people make up a quarter of workers in the U.S. “gig economy.” This sector of labor represents just over a third of U.S. workers. Temporary work, individual contractors, freelancers, the side hustle, and gig economy are all terms that describe a form of labor increasingly favored by capitalism. This is labor that is unregulated, without benefits, disposable and thoroughly exploited.
“Side hustles” are common as a means of supplementing income, but for many this is their only employment.
In Africa, most people are trapped in these jobs. Africans have experienced centuries of super exploitation and always fought. Workers on the continent are organizing against their current conditions.
A significant development emerged from Kenya, an outsourcing hub for the tech industry. Workers who perform artificial intelligence training or content modification for companies such as Open AI and META formed the African Content Modification Union. They are demanding an end to the exploitation of African workers by U.S. companies.
Content moderators who have been diagnosed with PTSD and depression after viewing content on the platform have sued META. Besides psychological damage, the members of the tech industry are not credited for their work and are grossly underpaid ($2.20 an hour).
Facebook has attempted to silence Daniel Montaung, who helped organized the moderators union after he became a whistleblower. Color of Change president Rashad Robinson told Time magazine that Facebook thinks “Black people are property to be controlled.” Frances Hagen, a whistleblower who leaked Facebook documents, did not face this pressure to be silent. Hagen is white and Montaung is Black. There is no subtlety here. This is an effort to keep Blacks, in this case Africans, in their place.
Online platforms have attracted many urban workers with the promise of freedom and independence with flexible hours. But while it saves them from unemployment, in reality there is no freedom. Companies outsource work and use this to shield themselves from any legal responsibility for labor practices. This arrangement lowers production costs, but they provide no overtime pay and no benefits, and they expect plausible deniability of all that takes place in the shop
The flexible schedule means workers can be called in at any time. Regulations that apply to workers’ safety, wages, labor disputes, and benefits such as health care are not available. These workers are more likely to experience greater incidences of injury and poor physical and mental health.
While these workers are classified as independent contractors, they have no control. Everything is dictated by the company, which does not consider them employees, while it profits from their labor. The tech industry, the press, and governments portray this as a way to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. No boots are provided.
Globally, 61% of labor is performed by workers in the gig economy. In Africa these workers represent 85% of the workforce. The rate is over 90% in Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and the Central African Republic. According to the Brookings Institute, “The global gig economy market size was estimated at $556.7 billion in 2024, with Africa experiencing significant growth.”
Roots of underdevelopment
Africa’s position in the world economy has had a direct impact on labor. Colonization left the continent under developed. Low levels of infrastructure and industry have prevailed since. This has hampered advancement toward large scale manufacturing. In post-colonial Africa many countries’ economies were dependent on one export such as agriculture or its mineral wealth. To a degree some countries such as oil producers could manage for a time but when the price of these commodities fell so did the country’s fortunes. International Monetary Fund and World Bank conditions for the loans meant cuts to social spending such as education.While poverty reduction was one of the stated goals the opposite has been the case. There has been increased inequality, and cuts to education has meant low level of skills and high unemployment.
Work and struggle
Agricultural work, the self employed, seasonal workers, family enterprises, tech workers are employed in the gig economy. These are not transitional jobs for workers on the continent. Young Africans represent one in five people looking for their first job globally. Their anger and frustration have been expressed in protests against poverty, unemployment and the implementation of austerity measures. In Kenya and Nigeria there were mass protests last summer. In both cases, these mass mobilizations were met with armed violence, resulting in the death of dozens. The response is typical of the state’s contempt for workers in general.
Drivers for online platforms are challenging working conditions and pay in Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. They are organizing strikes against ride-share companies such as Uber. In large countries— South Africa and Nigeria—unions have made an effort to organize and negotiate on behalf of these workers. Individually, African unions cannot face these tech companies. Nigeria’s Amalgamated Union, which represents ride-share drivers, joined with unions from other countries including in the U.S. to form the International Alliance of APP-Based Transport Workers. Representatives from 23 countries attended the founding convention in 2020. This approach can be a part of the solution.
Capitalism will always devise means of exploiting labor. As artificial intelligence grows, together with contract employment, workers must organize. The power of the African working class can only be realized through the development of class consciousness and organization founded on this basis.
Photo: Unsplash
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Prevent the partition and plunder of Ukraine!
By TARAS SHEVCHUK
From Putin’s brief visit with Trump in Alaska to his meeting with Zelensky and the heads of the EU and NATO in Washington, from the decisions “agreed” upon in the White House to those taken in Brussels, the imperialists—all accomplices to the Zionist crimes against the Palestinian people—are pushing the Zelensky government toward capitulation to Putin’s counterrevolutionary aggression that began in 2014. They are using various rhetorical devices that seem contradictory according to their own interests. However, the Ukrainian people continue to show heroic signs of resistance against the partition and plunder being plotted by the powers that be.
Now, let’s examine Trump’s seemingly contradictory statements and seemingly erratic steps. He began by demanding that Putin agree to a ceasefire, giving him “50 days to do so”—the entire Ukrainian summer—and threatening to impose “tremendous economic sanctions” if he did not comply. Three weeks later, he admitted, “I have been too generous,” and shortened the deadline to 12 days. On Aug. 7, the day the new deadline expired, he decided to meet with Putin. Of course, the Kremlin gladly accepted. No ceasefire was agreed upon. Trump overlooked that detail and invited the war criminal to meet in Alaska, a vast territory that the U.S. purchased from the Russian Empire.
The world’s media outlets reported on Trump’s warm welcome of Putin. Trump rolled out the red carpet at the foot of the plane’s steps. At the end of the carpet, which was longer than his tie, Trump waited to shake his hand and pat him on the back before boarding the limousine. We consider it an exaggeration when numerous analysts say that “Trump brought Putin out of international isolation” because the Kremlin maintains close relations with China, India, Brazil, dozens of African countries, and some European governments that are members of the EU and NATO.
Clearly, Trump’s ceremonial gestures are intended to empower the Kremlin leader. They are part of Trump’s strategy to recognize Putin as a global leader. This status allows the head of an imperialist power, such as the U.S., to commit war crimes without facing any challenges to their international impunity.
One of Trump’s main objectives is to exploit the Arctic and Sakhalin in the Far East of Russia through joint business ventures. One topic under discussion, overshadowed by the war in Ukraine, is the return of Exxon Mobil to its partnership with Rosneft.
Amid such flattery, Putin made it clear to Trump that he does not accept a ceasefire. Instead, he proposed entering into negotiations to sign a “comprehensive agreement to end the war.” In other words, a peace treaty! How did Trump, the leader of the “hegemonic imperialist power,” respond? He accepted Putin’s proposal, forgot about demanding a ceasefire, and disregarded the tremendous sanctions he had previously demanded.
Why did Putin oppose a ceasefire and propose this alternative?
It is important to understand the qualitative difference between the two proposals. Despite the fact that the front line is 1200 km long, a ceasefire can be organized in the short term. All that is required is an order, after which it is up to the field commanders to enforce it. A ceasefire can quickly stop a war if senior commanders, field commanders, and rear guards on both sides comply with the agreement. At worst, it can minimize violence on the front line.
In contrast, a peace agreement is a complex process that can take years or even decades. Let’s review some examples from history: North and South Korea declared a ceasefire in 1953 (by the UN, China, and North Korea; South Korea did not sign anything), yet there is still no peace treaty.
Egypt and Israel: ceasefire in 1973; peace treaty in 1979 (six years). Jordan and Israel: ceasefire in 1949; peace treaty in 1994. 45 years. Armenia and Azerbaijan: ceasefire in 2020; peace treaty in 2025. Five years. We could add Vietnam and Afghanistan to this list. The logic is clear: peace treaties and the end of wars are long processes that can take half a century. Even “quick” signings take five years or more.
Putin rejects the first stage—ending the war itself, i.e., a ceasefire—and proposes skipping all the stages to “end the war with peace.” It’s an obvious trap! The Kremlin knows this process is lengthy. It cynically expresses this by insisting on the condition of “overcoming the root causes that gave rise to the Ukrainian conflict.” We know what those root causes are for Putin: the existence of Ukraine as an independent state and its people, who have overthrown governments since Maidan and continue to demonstrate their rejection of authoritarianism and their desire to live outside the “Russian world” under the control of the Moscow oligarchy.
Putin has never accepted a ceasefire, not even now. This has allowed him to continue the bombings that destroy cities and kill and terrorize civilians, as well as military actions that use the so-called “kontrakniki” from oppressed peoples of the Russian Federation, the former USSR, and North Korea as cannon fodder. In the meantime, he can constantly accuse Ukraine of “boycotting the peace negotiations.” How is Ukraine “boycotting”? By defending itself and resisting the aggression and occupation of nearly a fifth of its territory!
Nothing we propose is the product of suspicion or imagination. How is it possible that the Kremlin included cities and regions in the Constitution of the Russian Federation that it has not yet occupied but already considers Russian territory? Now, with Trump’s help, Putin wants to conquer through “peace negotiations” what he could not conquer on the battlefield with his military machine and hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Putin tells Trump that he is “against the ceasefire but in favor of peace and an end to the war.” Trump repeats this absurdity. From the White House, Trump proposes a “tripartite meeting” with Putin and Zelensky. There have already been three bilateral meetings between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul, but they have yielded no results. The Kremlin has rejected a Putin-Zelensky meeting with utter contempt and insists on discussing with the U.S. “the partition of Ukraine without Ukraine.” Despite some tantrums, Trump continues to facilitate the implementation of this policy.
Basically, Putin wants to continue the war. He will continue until “peace” is achieved. That is, until Ukraine capitulates.
European imperialists are prioritizing their own armament and their share of the spoils
Trump invited Zelensky to the White House. The European imperialists, who had been insisting on a ceasefire alongside Kiev, accompanied Washington, supposedly to “explicitly support” Zelensky. This time, there were no embarrassing incidents in the Oval Office. However, during the meeting, Trump continued to justify Putin’s aggression due to Biden’s alleged mistakes. All of NATO’s European “partners” behaved like students taking notes in front of an ignorant teacher, stopping their demands for a ceasefire.
The IWL rejects Trump’s imperialist policy, which pushes toward capitulation in the midst of a war of attrition. The majority of the Ukrainian people also reject this policy: 73% oppose it, and only 16% support it.[2] We reiterate that the minimum requirement to expose Russian imperialism’s intentions is demanding an immediate and complete ceasefire.
Furthermore, we denounce the perverse media campaign focused on “future security guarantees” and which imperialist powers will provide them. Trump himself responds evasively, exposing his complicity in the partition of Ukraine. Hiding behind hypocritical phrases, they take it for granted—and Zelensky acknowledges this—that Ukraine will be unable to fight to reclaim occupied territories. Refusing to hand over the Donbass territories that Putin has not yet occupied, which are currently the focus of his offensive, is presented as a “firm stance in peace negotiations.” The legitimate goal of the Ukrainian resistance is to expel the occupiers. Anything else is a trap imposed by imperialist interests.
Furthermore, Putin does not have unlimited time for his war of attrition. He has vulnerable flanks in the South Caucasus due to growing tensions with Azerbaijan, a country that supports Ukraine’s territorial integrity and has committed to selling Ukraine weapons. Additionally, the Armenian regime has distanced itself from Russia following its historic reconciliation with Azerbaijan. There are also vulnerabilities in Central Asia, such as Kazakhstan’s shift into China’s sphere of influence and the resurgence of tensions over historic Russian oppression.
Ukraine is waging a war of national liberation amid the crisis of the world order.
The reality of the class struggle has placed Marxists and the global working class in the midst of a semi-colonial country’s war of liberation against the counterrevolutionary imperialist aggression of Putin’s regime. Zelensky and Ukraine’s political and military leadership are bourgeois and subordinate to Western imperialism.
This conflict is taking place amid a profound crisis of the world order, growing disputes, and realignments of power. Most so-called “Marxists” have failed the test. They defined it as a reactionary war in which there is no progressive side, thereby capitulating to the imperialist Putinist camp. Though they cloak themselves in supposed neutrality, they espouse slogans such as “Not a single tank to Ukraine!”
In doing so, they abandon Lenin’s theoretical and political legacy, which categorically states: “If, for example, Morocco were to declare war on France tomorrow, or India on England, these would be just wars, and every socialist would sympathize with the victory of the oppressed states.” [3]
“First of all, socialists have never been and can never be enemies of revolutionary wars. What could be said about a war of colonial peoples for their liberation?” To deny any possibility of national wars under imperialism is theoretically false and, in practice, equivalent to European chauvinism. [4]
Zelensky yields to imperialist pressure, weakening Ukrainian armed resistance
We support Ukraine’s resistance in defeating the occupiers. However, we denounce the oligarchic regime, the government, parliament, and Zelensky as president of Ukraine for perpetuating dependence on Western imperialist dictates. These dictates increasingly undermine the will of the masses, who have been resisting and holding back the Kremlin’s aggression for 42 months. In three and a half years of war, the government has only begged for foreign aid. It has not developed its defense industry, which is essential. It has submitted to many dictates from the “West,” which not only push for capitulation in the face of invasion but also divert any prospect of true independence.
However, driven by the urgent need to confront the aggression, the military forces “transgressed” the limitations, and Ukrainian “Flamingo” missiles with a range of 3000 km have only begun to be produced today. “Neptune” missiles have also been improved. Additionally, after months of hesitation in the face of U.S. pressure, drones are now being produced en masse and striking oil refineries on Russian territory, depriving Putin’s military machine of fuel.
A program to reject capitulation and strive for victory
The Ukrainian people have shown that they can change the course of the government with their program to reject capitulation and strive for victory. Amid martial law, the Ukrainian people have shown that they can change the course of the government through mobilization. The slogan “The poor fight, the rich get fat!” has resonated throughout Ukraine, shaking Zelensky and the Rada deputies. The struggle against the occupiers has given way to a class struggle. It has become clear that corruption at all levels of government is considered treason. The fight against corruption is the responsibility of the workers who sacrifice their lives defending the territory and freedom with weapons.
By rolling out the red carpet for Putin, Trump provided the strongest evidence that the “West” is not coming to the aid of the Ukrainian people but is another dangerous enemy. This is why the working class, enduring deprivation and destruction from Putin’s genocidal bombings while sustaining the cities and countryside, must prioritize national defense over local oligarchs and foreign usurers. They must control production and finances in factories, mines, and fields.
Ukraine can only achieve national liberation if the working class wins political independence and takes leadership of the war with its own military program. There are reserves! Retired colonels who have been fighting since 2014 explain this in the media and denounce the government. Rotation on the front must be guaranteed. There are more than 100,000 Ministry of Internal Affairs security forces personnel who are trained in the use of weapons because they engage in police work. These troops can be sent to the front after brief training. The workers who have been on the front lines for 42 months fighting Putin’s imperialist invasion can then be replaced in those tasks. These workers understand that they will also have to face colonization, plunder by Western imperialists, and corruption by “politicians.”
NATO and the “Group of the Willing” bluff about “sending troops”
Trump has said that “in order not to further irritate Putin,” Ukraine should not join NATO. However, we denounce the reactionary policies of the European Union and NATO. We oppose NATO integration for reasons opposite to Trump’s. As part of the smokescreen we have pointed out, Zelensky is now begging for “security guarantees.” Trump ambiguously suggests that if Zelensky capitulates, he will receive “some kind of guarantee.” While Macron and Starmer discuss future military forces as “peacekeeping troops”—or to protect their future colonial investments—the Kremlin responds that it “categorically rejects the presence of European troops.”
The Ukrainian people have learned the bitter lesson of what security guarantees meant in the “Budapest Memorandum,” signed in 1994. In exchange for disarming and handing over its entire nuclear arsenal to Russia, Ukraine was promised unrestricted respect for its territorial integrity by the U.S. and Britain. We have already seen how imperialists respect integrity and sovereignty.
The only guarantee of integrity and independence is a working-class government
The IWL is contributing all of its modest resources to building a revolutionary working-class party in Ukraine. The party aims to establish a workers’ and people’s government with the perspective of United Workers’ States of Europe. In order to advance toward this goal, it is crucial to defeat the Kremlin’s invasion and dictatorship. This was also the case with the Nazi regime in Germany. We know it will be difficult, but it is necessary and possible if we appeal to the oppressed peoples and nations of the Russian Federation and the former USSR for unity in action and solidarity against the yoke of the Kremlin and its satellite regimes, such as Lukashenko’s in Belarus. We also call for unity in the struggle with all oppressed peoples, beginning with the heroic Palestinian people in their fight against Zionist genocide. We also call on workers’ organizations around the world to overcome the treacherous obstruction of the numerous so-called “leftists” and even “Trotskyists” who abandon Marxism and align themselves with Trump and Putin.
Sources
1) https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acuerdo_de_alto_el_fuego_en_el_Alto_Karabaj_de_2020#
2) Gallup poll of 07.08.25, published in Ukrainska Pravda on 08.21.25.
3) “Socialism and War,” Lenin, 1915.
4) “The Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution,” Lenin, 1916.
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Warships in the Caribbean: Militarizing the War on Drugs
By JAMES MARSH
The War on Drugs, like the War on Terror, has proven itself to be a war on a construct abstract enough to provide rhetorical backing for a wide array of U.S. imperialist policies.
President Donald Trump, in the latest use of War on Drugs rhetoric as cover for pursuing military objectives, is mobilizing the U.S. military in the Caribbean. At the same time that his administration is rolling out the national guard at home to “fight crime” (or, in reality, to perform a test run of using military forces to carry out political policing by terrorizing working-class communities), it is rolling out the Marines and Navy in the Caribbean Sea. Trump has sent seven warships, a nuclear submarine, and thousands of troops as part of what he describes as anti-cartel operations.
This operation included a Sept. 2 armed strike on a boat allegedly operated by the Tren de Aragua cartel in order to transport illegal drugs from Venezuela to the U.S. According to Trump, 11 people on the boat were killed in the attack. International observers have condemned the attack as a human rights violation.
This attack on a civilian boat and the dispatching of the U.S. Navy darken the long shadow of military intervention cast over Venezuela. Venezuela has already seen coup attempts in 2002 by opposition forces with U.S. approval and in 2020 with direct involvement by U.S. mercenaries. In April of this year, the Venezuelan military also stated that it had uncovered plans for a “false flag” attack framing Venezuela for attacking an Exxon Mobil oil platform in the waters off the disputed territory of Essequibo/ Guyana Esequiba, which would be used as pretext for invasion. President Nicolás Maduro is mobilizing 4.5 million militiamen in response to the threat posed by U.S. warships lingering off the country’s coast.
Taken together with the heightened threat of military intervention in Venezuela, the narrative that the primary objective of the mobilizations is to fight the drug cartels is questionable. Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary of Trump’s White House, stated on Aug. 19 that “the Maduro regime is not the legitimate government of Venezuela. It is a narco-terror cartel. Maduro is not a legitimate president. He is a fugitive head of this drug cartel.” These accusations, for which precious little evidence has been provided, attempt to use War on Drugs rhetoric to delegitimize Maduro and justify regime change.
Rhetoric of fighting drug cartels in Latin America has, for several decades, repeatedly provided cover for the U.S. to strengthen police forces in collaborating states to better protect its investments abroad and to intervene militarily to expand its hegemony. From overthrowing the government of Panama to fighting guerrillas in Colombia, this rhetoric has attempted to justify flagrant military aggression.
Counter-insurgency and intervention
The end of the Cold War saw a transition in U.S. policy in Latin America, as it consolidated gains won through counter-insurgency tactics and military intervention and pivoted from Cold War narratives to using the framework of the War on Drugs as justification for its policies.
The Cold War saw U.S .military interventions across Latin America, from the 1973 coup carried out in Chile to the invasion of Grenada in 1983, among a host of others.
In Central America, the epoch opened by the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua in 1979 saw guerrilla resistance to dictatorships carried out in Guatemala and El Salvador throughout the 1980s. The U.S. fought this threat to its power by backing state terror and right-wing paramilitaries. These counter-insurgency tactics forced guerrilla organizations to capitulate, with their leadership accepting peace deals in the late 1980s which incorporated their groups into institutional politics.
Along with the fall of the USSR, the waning power of these left-wing guerrillas weakened the justification of continued U.S. military meddling in Latin American affairs as the Cold War drew to a close. But the U.S. still had political ambitions that demanded continued military interventions. To continue to justify intervention, one of the new lines of argument turned to was that the military and military aid would fight the sale of drugs by cartels.
One such case of the changing propaganda deployed following the Cold War was the invasion of Panama in 1989. General Manuel Noriega had for years acted as a U.S. strongman in Panama and worked closely with U.S. intelligence agencies. However, by the late 1980s, the growing backlash against his dictatorial governance was proving to be a liability for Washington, with civilian neoliberal parties seeming to be more appealing collaborators.
While the CIA had long been aware that its collaborator had been complicit in the drug trade, this involvement was brought up as a pretext to remove Noriega from power. The U.S. invaded and occupied Panama, leveling criminal charges against Noriega for drug trafficking and racketeering as justification. While Noriega had accepted several million dollars in bribes from the Medellin Cartel, there were other stories that were outright fabrications, such as how he was alleged to be doing cocaine with prostitutes at the time of the invasion rather than spending the time with his wife. This was also the same Noriega who just two years earlier had received a letter of praise directly from the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for cooperating in drug enforcement operations.
This invasion escalated rhetoric of criminality to justify overthrowing a regime, based on the premise that in the U.S. government’s quest to stamp out the drug trade, it had the right to intervene in other countries’ political affairs.
Counter-insurgency operations and the rhetorical use of the War on Drugs to justify military intervention fused as part of Plan Colombia. Launched in 2000, Plan Colombia began as plans for the U.S. to provide strategic economic aid that would strengthen the position of the Colombian state in negotiations with left-wing guerrilla groups like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). However, following the dictates of U.S. imperialism, the operation moved away from providing economic aid and toward funding the Colombian military, along with right-wing paramilitaries. FARC, which operated in sympathetic peasant communities in coca-growing regions and sold cocaine to fund its operations, was branded as the “narco guerrillas” behind the trade in cocaine, making counter-insurgency efforts part of the War on Drugs.
While Plan Colombia saw paramilitaries terrorize peasant communities, the strengthening of Colombia’s military, and the weakening of FARC as a thorn in the side of U.S. hegemony in the region, it did next to nothing to stem the sale of cocaine. The spraying of herbicides on coca fields from planes simply drove peasant farmers deeper into the Amazon. While Plan Colombia was in effect, coca growing increased and the price of cocaine exported from Colombia fell. Despite failing to thwart the cocaine trade, the operation was held up as a model for militarizing the War on Drugs.
The end of the Cold War did not see the end of U.S. counter-insurgency tactics and military interventions in Latin America. Instead, it saw counter-insurgencies and invasions fall under the rhetorical framework of the War on Drugs.
Militarization of the police state
The role of the United States in the War on Drugs in Latin America has been to work with right-wing parties to use drug enforcement operations as a pretext to militarize the police state. The War on Terror only served to further this dynamic.
War on Terror rhetoric tried to assert that ungoverned terrain and weak states anywhere in the world threatened the U.S. by serving as potential safe harbors for terrorist cells. Despite the lack of evidence of Islamist terrorist activity in Latin America, the logic of this narrative suggested that the U.S. needed to exert control or strengthen collaborating governments across Latin America and the entire world—a convenient cover for the imperialist mandate to control and police global markets.
This rhetoric turned on Mexico during the War on Terror. The U.S.-Mexico border was described in the media as a wide-open front in the War on Terror, providing an open door not just to immigrant laborers but to imagined armies of terrorists, motivating the beginnings of the border wall and intensified border policing. Barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border, which included about 75 miles (~120 km) of fencing in 2005, were expanded to about 650 miles (~1000 km) of barriers by 2011. Corruption and drug cartels were pointed to by some military analysts under the Obama administration to back claims that Mexico was a failed state in need of a stronger response to cartels.
In Mexico, the militarization of the struggle between the state and drug cartels was launched by the conservative party PAN with Operation Michoacan in 2006. The operation used federal police and military forces, and directed special attention toward the Gulf Cartel specifically, which was responsible for a spike in violent crime. The escalation of the drug war also led to the rollback of civil liberties, as under the policy of arraigo, citizens suspected of involvement with organized crime could be held without trial for up to 80 days, a policy used to keep people in holding cells and to extract information through torture. The operation expanded with U.Sd support as part of the Merida Initiative launched in 2007.
The Merida Initiative, also called Plan Mexico, took inspiration from the counter-insurgency tactics of Plan Colombia. As with Plan Colombia, rhetoric of fighting the drug war provided cover for targeting left-wing guerrilla forces based in peasant communities, as it strengthened the Mexican military in fighting Zapatista guerrillas in Chiapas. It also expanded U.S. neocolonial control of Mexican institutions, as funding and training strengthened ties between the US and repressive forces in Mexico.
As with Plan Colombia, the Merida Initiative did not stop the drug trade; instead it reorganized it. The winner of the Mexican drug war was the Sinaloa Cartel, which avoided the decapitations directed at its competitors like the Gulf Cartel by collaborating with drug enforcement agencies. The DEA struck deals with Sinaloa leadership in which it allowed the cartel to continue smuggling drugs in exchange for information, as well as helping to arm the Sinaloa Cartel through the gun-running operation known as Operation Fast and Furious.
The tactics used by the Merida Initiative were not only part of a largely failed project of prohibition, but they served to militarize the police state and carry out counter-insurgency operations, strengthening the repressive forces in Mexico on behalf of U.S. interests. In the context of the rhetoric of the War on Terror, this plays into the ruling class notion that the U.S. needed to do more to expand control over ungoverned regions across the entire world.
The role of the U.S. in militarizing the police forces of collaborating states uses the War on Drugs as cover for neocolonial control over working class communities in Latin America.
Trump and missile strikes in the Caribbean
Trump, using the narrative of fighting the cartels to justify the deployment of the military in Latin America, has designated a list of drug cartels as terrorist groups. This accusation is the legal basis for the airstrike carried out days ago in international waters off the coast of Venezuela. This designation of cartels as unlawful combatants lacking the legal protections of either accused criminals or enemy soldiers attempts to justify military actions that ignore civil liberties and human rights protections. As has been the case with many other military operations working under the name of drug enforcement, it also threatens military intervention, particularly against Venezuela.
In Mexico, the designation of cartels as terrorists and the presence of the Navy in the Gulf of Mexico poses the threat of expanding drone warfare. The Trump administration has deployed troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, and is carrying out drone surveillance flights over Mexico. As with the recent missile strike in the Caribbean, sources within the U.S. military have suggested Trump may be preparing unilaterally declared military action against cartels in Mexico, in violation of Mexican sovereignty. Threats to act militarily against cartels highlight the fact that the U.S. government feels it has a prerogative to intervene in the internal affairs of its neocolonies.
In Venezuela, the narrative that military mobilizations are fighting drug trafficking is even more questionable. For starters, the forces sent to Venezuela in August are too large to be used for drug policing. Furthermore, the main flow of the drug trade passes through the waters of the Pacific, not the Caribbean, and so sending the Navy to the southern Caribbean would not be especially useful for drug enforcement. And perhaps most importantly, the mobilizations against the cartels come at the same time that the Trump administration is baselessly accusing President Maduro of being a cartel leader.
While some observers have suggested the current mobilization is too small to be an outright invasion, the rollout of the military is still a threat to attempt regime change. Venezuela’s populist leadership under President Maduro has consolidated a military dictatorship, with nationalist policies (in this case, nationalizing oil revenues) that present a barrier to oil extraction in the country by U.S. multinational corporations. In light of the series of U.S.-backed coup attempts in the country, the threat of imperialist intervention remains high. By slapping the brand of “narco terrorists” on the Venezuelan government, airstrikes on cartels threaten larger military action aimed at regime change.
Sending the Navy could also be part of an attempt by the U.S. to scare concessions out of Venezuela as a tactic of gunboat diplomacy. Despite the nationalization of oil, Venezuela allows U.S. companies like Chevron to operate within the country as partners in oil extraction, highlighting a willingness to negotiate with U.S. capitalists. Another front for negotiations is the disputed territory of Essequibo/ Guyana Esequiba, the region surrounding the Essequibo River between Venezuela and neighboring Guyana, where the U.S. has a vested interest in influencing negotiations of which oil firms have extraction rights in the oil fields off the coast.
Using the narrative of the War on Drugs as cover for military action in Latin America is not new for the U.S. government, as shown in counter-insurgency efforts against FARC and the Zapatistas, and importantly in the invasion of Panama. Militarizing drug enforcement efforts also has a troubling history of rolling back civil liberties and strengthening the police state.
The working-class movement must oppose imperialist interventions. We must demand an end to the disastrous War on Drugs. And we must demand the U.S. keep its hands off Venezuela.
Sources:
“US military deploying over 4,000 additional troops to waters around Latin America as part of Trump’s counter-cartel mission,” Natasha Bertrand, CNN, Aug. 15, 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/15/politics/us-military-deploying-caribbean-latin-america-cartel-mission
“US strike on ‘Venezuela drug boat’: What do we know, and was it legal?,” Matt Murphy & Joshua Cheetham, BBC, Sept. 3, 2025. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdjzw3gplv7o
“U.S. warships to sail off Venezuela as tension soars between Trump and Maduro regime over cartel accusations,” CBS, Aug. 21, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-warships-venezuela-trump-nicolas-maduro-tension-drug-cartel-accusations/
“Venezuela Says It Uncovered U.S. Plot to Fabricate Incident And Justify An Invasion,” Demian Bio, Latin Times, April 7, 2025. https://www.latintimes.com/venezuela-says-it-uncovered-us-plot-fabricate-incident-justify-invasion-580110
“Venezuela Mobilizes 4.5 Million Soldiers as Trump Deploys U.S. Marines to Caribbean,” Democracy Now!, Aug. 20, 2025.
“Truth was apparently one casualty of Panama invasion,” Susan Benesh, Tampa Bay Times, May 26, 1990.
https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1990/05/26/truth-was-apparently-one-casualty-of-panama-invasion/
“Geopolitics of Plan Colombia,” James Petras, Economic and Political Weekly 35, no. 52/53, 2000. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4410105.
America’s Backyard: The United States and Latin America from the Monroe Doctrine to the War on Terror, “George W. Bush and the ‘War on Terror’,” Grace Livingstone, 2009.
“Ghosts of the War on Terror: Perils and Promise in US Drug Policy for Latin America,” Alejandro Roemer, Oxford Political Review, June 26, 2025. https://oxfordpoliticalreview.com/2025/06/26/ghosts-of-the-war-on-terror-perils-and-promise-in-us-drug-policy-for-latin-america/
“Mexico, the Failed State Debate, and the Mérida Fix,” Carolyn Gallaher, The Geographical Journal 182, no. 4, 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44132379.
“Obama’s Lost War on Drugs,” Jeremy Kuzmarov, History News Network, Aug. 5, 2013. https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/obamas-lost-war-on-drugs
“What I Rediscovered in Mexico,” Michael Estrada, Counterpunch, August 6, 2008.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2008/08/06/what-i-re-discovered-in-mexico/
“The End of the Drug War: Its Implications and the Future of Drug Trafficking in Mexico,” Tomas Kristlik, Georgetown Security Studies Review, Dec. 19, 2013. https://georgetownsecuritystudiesreview.org/2013/12/19/the-end-of-the-drug-war-its-implications-and-the-future-of-drug-trafficking-in-mexico/
“CONFIRMED: The DEA Struck A Deal With Mexico’s Most Notorious Drug Cartel,” Michael B Kelley, Business Insider, Jan. 13, 2014. https://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-government-and-the-sinaloa-cartel-2014-1
“Military Preparing Attacks on Mexican Cartels: Secret orders target cartels as the new terrorists,” Ken Klippenstein, Aug. 20, 2025. https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/military-preparing-attacks-on-mexican
“Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum denies knowledge of US drug initiative,” Al Jazeera, Aug. 19, 2025. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/19/mexicos-president-claudia-sheinbaum-denies-knowledge-of-us-drug-initiative
https://www.editorial24.com/en/cartel-de-los-soles-fantasma-poder-sombra-dentro-venezuela/
“US Sanctions Mischaracterize Venezuela’s Cartel of the Suns,” Venezuela Investigative Unit, InSight Crime, Aug. 1, 2025. https://insightcrime.org/news/us-sanctions-mischaracterize-cartel-of-the-suns-venezuela/
“US builds up forces in Caribbean as officials, experts, ask why,” Idrees Ali, Patricia Zengerle and Andrea Shalal, Reuters, Sept. 1, 2025.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-builds-up-forces-caribbean-officials-experts-ask-why-2025-08-29/
“US Non-Profits ‘In the Tank’ for Exxon, Chevron over Venezuela Oil,” Joseph Bouchard, World of Crime Newsletter, Aug. 26, 2025. https://www.seasonsofcrime.com/p/us-non-profits-in-the-tank-for-exxon
Photo: U.S. Navy operatives practice drug interdiction actions off the coast of Panama on July 16. (Staff Sgt. Sadie Colbert/U.S. Air Force/Joint Task Force Bravo/DVIDS)
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Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists affiliates with Workers’ Voice
By WORKERS’ VOICE OHIO / CORSWe are excited to announce that Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists (CORS) has voted unanimously to affiliate with Workers’ Voice!
Since CORS became an independent local organization in 2019, we have been committed to building the revolutionary left not just in Columbus, but across the country and the world.
Over this period we have organized for Palestine, trans rights, reproductive justice, climate justice, workers power, and against fascism, police brutality, and capitalist politics with an orientation towards mass action, working-class political independence, and the rebuilding of the revolutionary socialist movement.
In tandem with these practical efforts, we have worked to build up a small pole of attraction for Marxist politics in the social and labor movements with the aim of pushing forward struggles against all forms of capitalist exploitation and oppression. From the start we’ve seen these efforts as a small part of the broader socialist movement developing across the world.
We have worked to make this connection more concrete by building relations with other local and national organizations committed to advancing the socialist movement. Through these efforts in groups like the Revolutionary Socialist Network (RSN), we built close relationships with many other organizers who share our commitment to mass action and workers’ power. In 2022, many comrades we met in RSN successfully regrouped as Workers’ Voice, and we have worked with them in this process since.
On July 24, 2025, the CORS membership decided to formalize our relationship with Workers’ Voice and help to launch the new Ohio branch of the organization.
We made this decision due to our shared commitment to Workers’ Voice’s politics and their serious approach to organizing in the movements. We seek to build a nationwide organization of socialists capable of developing a mass base for revolutionary politics through effective party building and systematic intervention in social and labor movements across the country.
Moving forward
As we transition into this new phase of organizing, we welcome other revolutionary socialists across Ohio to join Workers’ Voice! We currently have members in Columbus and Athens, Ohio, as well as in Pittsburgh, Pa., and Indianapolis, Ind. We welcome comrades from across the region to work with us to build the socialist movement everywhere we can.
Whether you’re just now becoming a socialist or have been an organizer for years, now is the time to commit or recommit to collective struggle and the building of a mass movement for socialism. The capitalists and their parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, are committed to oppressing and exploiting the masses and only mass struggle for revolutionary change can bring power to the working class.
The working class has more power than the billionaires and the politicians, but only when we organize in our millions and dedicate ourselves to resolute struggle against the capitalist ruling class. Today is the day to fight back against capitalism and imperialism and the exploitation and oppression it depends on.
We are beginning public activities as Workers’ Voice Ohio now, and in October we will be hosting the founding congress of the Ohio branch of Workers’ Voice in Columbus. We welcome all those interested in joining or learning more to attend!
Moving forward, Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists will begin the transition to become the student-and-youth wing of our organization in Ohio, working alongside our fully-fledged Ohio branch. We are excited to deepen our organizing for socialism in the region and we are looking forward to working with our friends, allies, and comrades to help build the movement we need to win justice and liberation for all.
Contact us at WorkersVoice.Ohio@gmail.com or through our social media pages (IG – CORS, IG – WV Ohio, Facebook) to get involved!
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Workers’ Voice Newspaper: September – October Edition
The authoritarian march of Trump expands to include a troop deployment in Washington D.C., the expansion of ICE, and attacks on federal workers and their unions. Why are trans youth being denied access to health care? What about the tech bro alliance with Trump? What way forward for working people and students? Read the socialist viewpoint in the current edition of Workers’ Voice/La Voz de los Trabajadores.
The September – October 2025 edition of our newspaper is now available in print and online as a pdf. Read the latest issue of our newspaper today with a free pdf download! As always, we appreciate any donations to help with the cost of printing.
Click on the image to read the paper or message us to get a hard copy.
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A banner for all of humanity: ‘The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine’ reviewed
By M.A. AL-GHARIB
Ghassan Kanafani’s “The Revolution of 1936 – 1939 in Palestine: Background, Details, and Analysis,” is a concise and densely argued book, translated with clarity and beauty by Hazem Jamjoun and contextualized with a helpful introduction and afterword by, respectively, Layan Sima Fuleihan and Maher Al-Charif. Originally published in 1972, the Peoples Forum-affiliated 1804 Books reissued it in the annus horribilis of 2023, just as Israel began the genocide of Gaza.
Kanafani’s book is a must-read to deepen our knowledge about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom and to arm our solidarity movements with the knowledge to combat Zionist hasbara.
Kanafani began writing “The Revolution in Palestine” in 1969. This was a turning point in Arab history, the aftermath of the great defeat in the Six Day War of 1967. As his subject, Kanafani took up another major defeat, that of the Palestinian revolution of 1936-1939, both to recuperate the heroism of the early struggle against Zionist colonization and to assess its lessons for contemporary political work.
Kanafani was born in Acre in Mandatory Palestine in 1936 into a middle-class professional milieu. After the Zionists expelled his family during the Nakba, they fled to Syria, where they experienced proletarianization and its attendant precarity. His father, a lawyer in Palestine, was so devastated by the Nakba that he was unable to work again. Kanafani, educated early on in French, began seriously studying Arabic literature at Damascus University. There, he also joined the Arab National Movement (ANM), a network of reformists and revolutionaries, many of whom were disillusioned with the soft-Zionist politics of the Palestine Communist Party. Expelled from Syria because of his membership of ANM, he decamped to Kuwait, which would become the setting for one his most important novels, the devastating and brilliant “Men in the Sun.” By 1960, he had moved again, this time to Beirut. It was there that he composed “The Revolution of 1936-1939.”
Kanafani’s thesis in brief
British authorities search passengers of Palestinian bus in 1938. (Library of Congress) Kanafani sees the Revolution of 1936-1939 as perhaps the decisive moment that sealed the Zionist-imperialist victory over the forces of Palestinian national liberation. The reasons were fourfold: the weakness of the Palestinian working class and bourgeoisie, the hegemony of the feudal-clerical stratum over the Palestinian movement, the failure of the landless peasants—the vanguard of the revolution—to achieve class independence, and the British-Zionist alliance with its huge advantages in resources and violence. With respect to the last item, Kanafani is brutally honest. The main reason that the British sided with the Zionists was because the latter were more competent and effective imperialist collaborators than the often equally amenable Palestinian feudal elite.
Kanafani wrote his book after his political conversion to Marxism-Leninism, albeit a version of it that was critical of the Stalinist USSR and allied parties, such as the Palestine CP. In spite of its name, the PCP was dominated by Jewish members and had failed to “Arabize” or to build a base among the peasantry. Kanafani’s conversion to Marxism enriched his secular Arab nationalism by increasing the materialist rigor of his method. Specifically, it allowed him to appreciate the political evolution of the landless peasantry in the 1930s as central to the story of the revolution.
The landless peasants: Origins and politicization
The emergence of this class was a phenomenon produced by Zionist settlement. As Kanafani acknowledges, it was Hitler’s persecution of European Jews that led to the explosion of Jewish migration to Palestine between 1933 and 1936. Between 1926 and 1932, 7201 Jews were migrating to Palestine annually. This number increased to nearly 43,000 per year between 1933 and 1936 (p. 5).
Moreover, by 1930-1931, Jewish organizations’ landownership had risen to around one-third of arable land, causing widespread impoverishment among both the peasantry and the bedouin. In this process, the Zionists expelled around 20,000 peasant families from their land, such that, by 1941, around 80 percent of Arab peasants were either landless or owned land insufficient for subsistence. With expanding Zionist settlement and the forced transition toward Jewish-controlled industrialization, Arab smallholding peasants bore the brunt of “extortionist” taxation designed to offset tax exemptions for Jewish settlers and to encourage Jewish industry. An example of the latter can be seen in the British tariff regime: high tariffs on imported retail goods, low tariffs on raw materials, unfinished goods, coal etc. (pp. 15-19).
By the time that the British assassinated Shaikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam in November 1935, the landless peasantry was at a boiling point. Al-Qassam was unusual for his class: a leader who advocated Arab unity and Palestinian liberation and who was a talented organizer, a disciplined fighter, and uncompromising in the struggle against Zionism-imperialism.
For all its self-sacrifice and heroism, about which Kanafani is clear, this class-in-formation’s inability to become a class for itself, independent of the reactionary Palestinian leadership, was a main reason for the revolution’s failure. This made it increasingly difficult to defend the movement against Palestinian liberation’s two other implacable foes, the collaborationist Arab regimes and the Zionist – imperialist alliance (p. 1).
Zionism and fascism
The Jews flowing into Palestine by the mid-1930s counted among their ranks a much higher number of capitalists, professionals, and intellectuals than could be counted among the Palestinian side. The land grabs of the settlers were in the service of transforming Palestine from an “Arab-agrarian” to a “Jewish-industrial” economy and were facilitated “through capital concentrated in Jewish hands [which] simultaneously aimed to provide this transition with a Jewish proletariat.” Deploying the slogan “exclusively Jewish labor” and led by the reactionary Zionist labor federation, the Histadrut, this process drove “Jewish settler society in the direction of fascism” (p. 6).
Kanafani here is both launching a clear-eyed critique of what would later become known as liberal Zionism and entering into the Marxist debate on fascism. A rejection of liberal Zionism is now so accepted by the Palestine solidarity movement that is easy to forget how hegemonic it was, at least in the West, until the Gaza genocide revealed the true logic of Zionism to a mass audience. At the time he was writing the book, the understanding that Zionism was a form of racism and colonialism tending toward genocide of indigenous peoples was only widespread among people in the Global South, particularly Muslim-majority countries.
Regarding whether Zionism inevitably leads to fascism, or whether it is fascist from the start, is a more complicated question. Engaging Kanafani on this would require a separate article, on which this reviewer is currently working. For now, it suffices to say that Kanafani’s discussion of fascism here remains undeveloped, though it resonates with understandings of fascism generally more aligned with, for lack of better terms, “postcolonial” and “Black radical” currents of the left than it does with those within the Trotskyist tradition.
There have too few instances of these two currents engaging in debate. With the far right and neofascists running rampant across the political terrain of a declining Western imperialism, such a debate can highlight both overlaps and differences in theory and strategy. It is much needed today, and Kanafani’s work on Zionism would undoubtedly play an important role.
Marxism and culture
Kanafani’s analysis of the relationship between art and the revolution is one of the more engaging parts of the book. During the revolution, a generation of artists and intellectuals came of age who, though mostly born into the feudal-clerical or professional middle classes, rejected their class and instead solidarized with the armed peasant masses.
Poetry, in particular, was the genre that best played what Kanafani calls the dialectical role of a truly revolutionary art form. Experimenting with both fusha (classical Arabic) and vernacular forms, a “wave of patriotic poets” (p. 29) such as Ibrahim Tuqan, Abu Salma, and Abd al-Rahman Mahmoud expressed the militancy of the revolutionary zeitgeist and politically intervened to raise consciousness.
Kanafani’s discussion of Palestinian patriotic poetry is one the most compelling parts of the book—a sophisticated, materialist and dialectical analysis of the role of organic intellectuals in a revolutionary process—by an organic intellectual himself. Echoing Trotsky’s discussion of the ways that active participation in the Russian Revolution propelled the vanguard of the Russian empire’s working class beyond religious consciousness into a higher, socialist consciousness, Kanafani highlights the role of revolutionary Palestinian poems in combatting “the abject fatalism under the banner of religious loyalty” that defined the cultural world of the pre-revolutionary peasantry (p. 26).
The importance of 1936-1939 in understanding the Nakba
For Kanafani, the armed peasantry, representing the vast majority of the Palestinian population of the 1930s, was the class with both the objective capacity and the developing subjective consciousness to seriously disrupt if not defeat Zionist colonization. Its failure to do so set the stage for the eventual Zionist victory of 1948, the Nakba.
By 1939, the movement was exhausted. The British consolidated their alliance with the Zionists by, among other things, implementing a vicious regime of repression against the Palestinian toiling classes, from year-long prison sentences for the most minor transgressions against the colonizers to campaigns of physical violence enacted both by the British military and the Zionist gangs under their aegis to a policy of “widescale home demolition” (p. 50). The feudal-clerical leadership and the Arab collaborationist regimes—most notoriously exemplified by Abdullah of Transjordan, Nuri Al Said of Iraq, and Ibn Saud—actively betrayed the Palestinian masses by, among other things, imprisoning and deporting Palestinian revolutionaries back to the British authorities, where they faced execution.
The crushing of the revolution allowed the Zionist movement to pursue its main aim, alongside that of allying “with the British to the greatest extent possible.” This was to establish “the foundations of a military society and providing it with its martial and economic instruments” (p. 67). Freed from competition with Arab agriculture, the Jewish bourgeoisie was also freed to develop its economic capacity. The defeat of the revolution, for example, allowed the Zionists to build roads and ports to integrate their economy into emerging postwar capitalist order, a process helped along by monopolies granted by the British, such as for provisioning British troops in Mandatory Palestine.
Equally if not more importantly, the British actively supported, through personnel and training, the expansion of Zionist military capacity. For example, the imperial patrons employed Jewish auxiliaries as part of their police force as well as Jewish troops to defend the Mediterranean pipeline that transported crude oil from Kirkuk in Iraq to the port of Haifa. They also deployed those troops to violently repress the revolution (pp. 69-71). “Such an escalation in the role and activity of Zionist military units would not have been possible,” writes Kanafani, “had it not been jointly planned and orchestrated between the British and the Zionists” (p. 70).
“He went to battle with his pen”
“The Revolution of 1936-1939” is essential reading for activists in the socialist and Palestine solidarity movements. It is an irreplaceable classic of Palestinian and anticolonial movement history. That being said, it leaves major questions unanswered, questions that Kanafani, martyred at the age of 36 by a Mossad assassin’s bullet, surely would have further developed had he lived longer. The aforementioned question of fascism is one. The term appears several times throughout the short book and the reader is meant to understand that Zionism, which reflects and organizes a society of total military mobilization, an economy of land theft, and the genocide of the indigenous people of Palestine, is either a phase of fascism or a form of it. However, which of these apply, and how it applies, is not clarified.
A second question relates to Kanafani’s criticism of the Palestine Communist Party of the 1920s and 1930s for ignoring the colonial question and for normalizing Zionism. This is a prescient critique, to which he contrasts his own position, in which he attempts to harmonize Arab nationalism, anti-imperialism, and socialism.
As Kanafani put it in a 1972 interview: Anti-imperialism gives the impetus to socialism if it does not stop fighting in the middle of the battle and if it does not come to an agreement with imperialism […] The Arab nationalists realized this fact in the late 1950s. They realized that they could not win the war against imperialism unless they relied on certain [social] classes: those classes who fight against imperialism not only for their dignity, but for their livelihood. And it was this [road] that would lead directly to socialism. [p. x].
This position has parallels with Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, specifically, that the struggles for democratic rights and economic reforms are not simply “stages” on the way to socialism, but rather, dialectically interrelated with the struggle for socialism. The struggle for socialism, in short, must put the question of working-class power on the table if it is not to fatally undermine itself. Reform and revolution, to paraphrase Rosa Luxemburg, are not different paths to socialism—they are paths to different destinations. Kanafani seems very much in agreement.
Yet while for Trotsky, as for Lenin and Luxemburg, it was the proletariat that must be the class leading the process of permanent revolution, for Kanafani, as for Mao and Ho Chi Minh, it is the armed peasantry that must exert hegemony in the revolution. Again, we are left to wonder, had he been able to live to see the profound changes undergone by the Arab region in the decades since his death—not least the proletarianization of the majority of the Arab working classes and their leadership role in some if not all the Arab revolts of the 2010s—whether and how Kanafani would have rethought his 1972 analysis.
As we conclude this article, Israel is engaged in a deliberate starvation campaign against the people of Gaza and a seemingly unending wave of terror and pogroms in the West Bank. The Israelis have also murdered four more journalists in Gaza: Anas al-Sharif, Mohammad Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, and Mohammad Noufal. This brings the total since Oct. 7, 2023 to 270, making this genocidal campaign the deadliest for journalists in recorded history. Unfettered by a U.S. empire mired in a cycle of rapid, grotesque decline, the Israelis hurtle onward in this, one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history. The U.S.-Zionist axis is not only annihilating Palestine, it is saying to the rest of the world’s working classes: “This is what happens to you if you get in our way.”
More and more, we see the necessity today of Kanafani, a revolutionary socialist intellectual “who went to battle with his pen.”
“Kanafani guides us to resist the isolation of the Palestinian cause as simply an issue for the Palestinians alone, or for the Arab states alone,” writes Layan Fuleihan in the introduction to “The Revolution of 1936-1939.” “When Zionism is understood as an imperialist project in its origin and its agenda, it becomes an enemy of all of humanity, and the Palestinian cause a banner for all of humanity” (p. xii). More and more of the world’s working masses, the only force that can stop this horror, are now seeing the truth that Kanafani shares in this book and in his life’s work.
Top photo: Palestinians meet at Abou Ghosh, west of Jerusalem, during the 1936 general strike. (Library of Congress)