Webzine
In Defense of Derek Peterson’s Commencement Address
Posted May 15, 2026
On May 2, the University of Michigan held its annual commencement ceremony. Nine thousand graduates and almost 60,000 attendees gathered at the Big House to hear a variety of notable speakers — former U-M basketball player Jalen Rose, athlete and Olympian Michael Phelps and U-M President Domenico Grasso. But it was the speech by outgoing Faculty Senate chair Derek R. Peterson that became the focus of national attention as he discussed historic campus events….
Immigrant Defense & the Democratic Party in Hands Off New York City
Marian Swerdlow
Posted May 13, 2026
The following account is an activist’s report of her experiences and frustrations in joining the immigrant rights defense network Hands Off New York City (HO NYC), where the Upper Eastside activity is apparently under the rather heavy-handed leadership of a local Democratic Party club. Perhaps — at least we’d like to think — in other areas the work might be less bureaucratically dominated. In any case we find this detailed chronicle to be useful and instructive. Most importantly of course, we…
May 19: Malcolm X on His 101st Birthday
Michael Steven Smith
Posted May 13, 2026
I HEARD MALCOLM speak when he came to the University of Wisconsin in 1963. He had yet to break with the Nation of Islam and was protected by several of their bodyguards. All were dressed nattily in suits and small knotted neck ties.
Malcolm had light skin and reddish hair. “Detroit Red” they had called him when he lived there….
May Day Strong 2026: A Brief Roundup
Posted May 5, 2026
MAY DAY STRONG, a coalition of unionists, community and left activists, reported over 5000 separate actions this May Day. Attempting to push the envelope, MDS encouraged “no work, no school, no shopping” to celebrate the 1886 struggle for the eight-hour workday.
Earlier this year Minneapolis’s March 23 Day of Action in opposition to ICE terror provided a model for action to alter the balance of forces that have put billionaires in the driver’s seat. It is estimated that on that day fully one…
Supreme Court Guts 1965 Voting Rights Act
Malik Miah
Posted May 3, 2026
ON APRIL 29, the far-right Supreme Court majority, in a 6-3 decision, declared that using race to limit inequality is unconstitutional. The argument discards 250 years of legal segregation and the struggle for equality. It guts the 1965 Voting Rights Act by outlawing electoral maps that provided minority representation, particularly in the states that carried out racial gerrymandering. It is the Court’s third attempt to neuter the Act, considered the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement….…
The Black Radical Imagination
Alan Wald
Posted April 30, 2026
No Race, No Country:
The Politics and Poetics of Richard Wright
By Deborah Mutnick
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025, 312 pages, $13.37 paper, $36.20 hardback.
Baldwin: A Love Story
By Nicholas Boggs
New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2025, 720 pages, $23 paper, $36 hardback.
Survival is a Promise:
The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
By Alexis Pauline Gumbs
New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2024, 528 pages,…
Learning & Advancing from Setbacks
The Editors
Posted April 29, 2026
THE U.S. LABOR movement over the past half century has experienced more defeats — and even more failures to fight — than victories. Defeats are not permanent, though. And neither are victories. What we learn from them often lasts far longer than the specifics of the event itself.
In January, 1919, following the suppression of what became known as “the Spartacist Uprising” in Berlin, Rosa Luxemburg wrote:…
Ecosocialism or class compromise: A fork in the antifascist road after Porto Alegre
Ivan Drury Zarin
Posted April 22, 2026
Report on the 2026 international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre, Brazil
The most important success of the 2026 antifascist conference in Porto Alegre was the one I know I felt as a participant. It was a tremendous achievement of the organizing committee to bring together a mass gathering of militants to chant, march, talk, debate, learn, and celebrate together. The connections we made in the streets of Porto Alegre and the halls of its university, hotels, and other gathering spaces have inspired…
Movement Builds to Free Milwaukee Muslim Leader Detained by ICE
Mike McCallister
Posted April 22, 2026
ON MONDAY, MARCH 30, Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee (ISM), was visiting an old warehouse he owned on the city’s south side to check for random pieces of mail.
As he headed back to his car, an unmarked car almost hit him, and an armed man got out and asked him if he was Salah Sarsour. Eleven other vehicles with 10 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested him and placed him in a van headed for the Broadview Detention Center in Illinois, and then to the…
A Spreading Global Disaster
David Finkel
Posted April 20, 2026
APRIL 16 — IF the war on Iran ended right now, by all accounts it would take many months to stop the ever-greater damage to the world economy, particularly but not exclusively to nations of the Global South and Asia. Repairing energy production and infrastructure in the Gulf is probably the work of years.
This is not counting thousands of lives already lost in Iran and Lebanon, and irreplaceable….
All Webzine articles
Events
125 Years of Socialist Strategy in the US Labor Movement
June 4 to October 8, 2026
Against the Current
- Learning & Advancing from Setbacks—The Editors
- BDS Victory at State Retirement System—Matt Clark
- A Spreading Global Disaster—David Finkel
- U.S. Labor Now
- U.S.: Mixed Reform Results—Dianne Feeley
- Conspiracy, Class & the American Empire—Youbin Kang
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