Tempest Magazine

A stabbing is an intimate kind of violence. It is physical and deliberate, requiring proximity and often, the touch of skin against skin. So, when University of Washington student Juniper Blessing, a young transgender woman, was stabbed 40 times and left in an apartment complex laundry room to die, there is no doubt her killer, motivated by the toxic mixture of hatred and shame, felt life slip from her precious body.

Intimate violence cannot be separated from the violence mediated through the state. This is not a mechanical process, however, and state policy does not directly produce interpersonal harm. Still, the terms set by the state, the violence it permits and condones, define the boundaries of what becomes possible. One flows from the other.

Juniper was murdered just days before the Trump administration issued sweeping grand jury subpoenas to hospitals across the U.S., including NYU Langone, for providing what it calls “sex-rejecting” procedures. As S. Baum has reported, these subpoenas are unprecedented in scope. They demand patient-identifying information, parental consent forms, employee records, and target doctors, nurses, billing staff, administrators, and even volunteers in an effort to intimidate and criminalize the provision of care.

Juniper was not a trans minor. At nineteen (that arbitrary marker), she had survived childhood by a single year, achieving what the state increasingly seeks to prevent. For that defiant act of claiming trans personhood, her life was taken.

She had survived childhood by a single year… For that defiant act of claiming trans personhood, her life was taken.

There is no end to state violence; there is no limit to what the state will do to preserve corporate profits, stabilize the position of those in power, and, at present, shore up its authoritarian rule. One of its most enduring expressions of that effort is the systematic withdrawal from collective care.

Even before the Trump administration took power, the U.S. health care system was already in crisis and failing to meet basic needs. Decades of neoliberal policy have hollowed out public health infrastructure, privatized care, and priced many out of access to care altogether. This is a system that sorts people into categories of the deserving and the disposable. Producing a hierarchical matrix based on race, immigration status, religion, gender, and sexuality, it tells us that some bodies are worthy of care and others are not. Transness is now central to this ideological taxonomy.

This is a system that sorts people into categories of the deserving and the disposable… Transness is now central to this ideological taxonomy.

MAGA pundits recognize the widespread anger and dissatisfaction with the health care system, but they have redirected that ire away from insurance executives and hospital administrators, obscuring the steady erosion of health care as a public good. This displaced blame requires a scapegoat, and so a fraudulent narrative about a supposed transgender industrial complex where reckless health professionals manipulate children into receiving gender-affirming care emerges as the Right’s justification for systemic neglect.

This right-wing narrative is strategic and false. Gender-affirming care represents a tiny fraction of health care spending, and for many trans people, access to that care requires enormous sacrifice. Even after navigating a bureaucratic labyrinth of insurance, those who pursue medical transition are often saddled with untenable debt. Nevertheless, the narrative is mobilized to divert public anger away from state abandonment, the systemic withdrawal of resources for public goods, and toward a manufactured enemy.

Because the health sector has been a consistent site of resistance to neoliberal austerity, anti-trans attacks are also about disciplining health workers. Major work stoppages have occurred across the industry, including a 301-day strike at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, MA (2021), a Minnesota Nurses Association strike involving 15,000 workers (2022), a 75,000-member Kaiser Permanente strike across six states (2023), and a New York State Nurses Association strike involving 15,000 workers (2026). In fact, more than 100 nursing strikes have occurred between 2020 and 2026, involving at least 127 hospitals nationwide. Issuing subpoenas, passing legislation, and wielding threats of prosecution, the state seeks to break the relationship between patients and caregivers and to prevent broader demands for a more just and universal health system.

It is here that the entanglement of state violence and intimate violence is revealed. A state that declares trans youth should not exist, a state that undermines their care, and criminalizes their parents and providers, sets the terms for which lives are considered deserving and which become disposable. In a process that marks trans life as illegitimate, state disavowal grants permission, giving a wink and a nod to the Right’s vigilante terror.

As details about Juniper’s killer emerge, we may find that he does not neatly fit within the category of the Right. But even so, the residue of the Right’s vicious anti-gender politics continues to circulate, influencing the thinking of those even beyond the MAGA faithful. In fact, early reports suggest Juniper’s killer was stalking several women, both cis and trans, which also illustrates the way transmisogyny extends beyond trans women endangering cisgender women as well.

The same logic that seeks to prevent trans children from becoming trans adults leaves those adults vulnerable to unspeakable violence.

While we cannot claim that MAGA’s anti-gender movement murdered Juniper in a direct or immediate way, the regulation of trans youth, the effort to prevent transition, to surveil families, to criminalize care, also produces a world in which trans adulthood becomes precarious and exposed. The same logic that seeks to prevent trans children from becoming trans adults leaves those adults vulnerable to unspeakable violence.

If we want to confront this violence, we cannot see gender politics as separate from the wider resistance to Trumpism and the authoritarian Right. The same system that withdraws support, that redirects tax dollars from care infrastructures and towards militarization and war, creates the conditions for gendered violence. Indeed, the contemporary anti-trans turn is in many ways a reactionary political response to neoliberal crisis, mobilizing gender discipline to stabilize social reproduction, redirect economic grievance, and legitimate continued disinvestment in collective care. In this moment, gender violence functions as a coercive tool where a withered social safety net has driven a return to rigid gender norms. When the state abdicates responsibility, the family must fulfill the remaining need.

As news of Juniper’s death continues to move across the media landscape, they will simultaneously be portrayed as villain and victim, as an object of pity and a figure of blame. These are abstractions. In reality, trans individuals are ordinary people navigating a brutal and precarious moment, often with an extraordinary level of poise and restraint. Comrades, we need you. Juniper needs you.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

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Europe’s far right is on the rise. Right-wing populist movements have recently undergone an exponential growth in public support and a systematic rise to power within mainstream political platforms, securing about 25 percent of seats in the European parliament in 2024 (European Parliament, 2024). Despite their promotion of traditionalist views of gender and active opposition of feminism and “gender ideology,” right-wing conservative parties across Europe have been relying on a paradoxical weaponization of feminist ideas to defend the supposed superiority of Western values and target migrant communities (Vieten, 2025). This selective invocation of women’s rights, used to ostracize and alienate ethnic and religious minorities, was conceptualized by British sociologist Sara Farris as “femonationalism” (Farris, 2017). Farris argues that femonationalism reinforces negative stereotypes about Muslim immigrants and informs policies and laws, leading to systematic discrimination and hostility towards these communities that become a target for a hate campaign.

The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a political party founded in 2013, has become one of the most influential forces in contemporary German politics, despite being officially categorized as “right-wing extremist” in a report issued by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Notably, the AfD has one of the lowest proportions of female membership compared to its opponents, yet women still hold positions of power where they enjoy a certain degree of visibility and renown in its public image and political communication. This paradox raises a central question: How does the AfD actively shape the boundaries of women’s political representation while advancing anti-feminist and anti-immigrant agendas? More specifically, how does gender function as an integral element of the party’s nationalist project rather than a contradiction to it? The concept of femonationalism illuminates how the selective invocation of women’s rights becomes a mechanism for legitimizing xenophobic and exclusionary policies.

The stakes here are high. Populist far-right groups in Western Europe have been able to attain an enormous amount of power and political capital in recent years. Germany’s AfD has gained immense public support during the 2025 national elections, becoming the second-largest political force in the country. This marks a significant shift that suggests a resurging normalization of right-wing populism within the country’s parliamentary politics (Arzheimer, 2015). According to a 2025 report, the share of women among political party members in Germany as of December 2021 varied by party, with the Green Party having the highest number of female members at roughly 42 percent, followed by 37 percent in the Left party and 33 percent in the SPD (Statista, 2025). The AfD share of female members was the lowest at only 18.7 percent. Despite this severe gender imbalance, women continue to be strongly featured at the forefront of the AfD’s public image, embroidering a perceived sense of progress that sharply contradicts the party’s conservative agenda. Porzycki (2025) argues that radical-right parties often use their female members and leaders to portray themselves as modern and moderate in the public eye, a method that is commonly referred to as strategic image management. Yet at the heart of this strategy, there lies a clear irony: While women in the AfD are enabled and encouraged to acquire positions of power within the public political sphere, their presence in these spaces is leveraged to advance anti-feminist agendas. These women typically target female voters by appealing to their concerns about issues of safety and protection. As showcased by the concept of “the heartland” in populist German politics, radical-right parties equally appeal to nationalist fervor through a carefully curated vision of Germany that is partially fueled by a chronic idealization of the country’s problematic past (Porzycki et al., 2025), dismissing the inflammatory nature of such an ideal in the context of a “post-nazi” Germany.

As a language that makes it easy to create compound words, German has a surplus of derogatory terms used to refer to migrants and asylum seekers of ethnic descent. Terms like Überfremdung (Over-foreignization), Asylkriminalität (Asylum Criminality), Schuldkult (Cult of Guilt), and Parallelgesellschaften (Parallel Societies) are often used in political and online discourse to dehumanize migrants, criticize the nation’s culture of memory/remembrance, and generate panic within German society, thus creating further polarization in both official and unofficial public opinion. In fact, this misleading and offensive manipulation of language occurs so often that there is a German linguistic initiative that annually selects a word or a phrase deemed inappropriate and commonly misused, in order to raise awareness about inflammatory language posing a threat to democracy and human dignity. Unwort des Jahres (Non-word of the year) dates back to 1991, the year it was launched to draw attention to questionable use of loaded vernacular. In response to the resurgence of Germany’s far right, numerous “Unwörter” selected by the Unwort des Jahres’s independent panel have been linked to political actors such as the AfD, whose frequent use of populist neo-nazi lingo has left its permanent trace on contemporary trends in German slang. In 2024, Biodeutsch (Bio-German) was named “non-word” of the year, referring to people with German citizenship who do not have an ethnic German background. This further illustrates the importance of language in political discourse, particularly in the context of political mobilization. As exemplified by the German far right, language possesses a transformative capacity, enabling the establishment of a normalization of narratives previously considered extremist (Zajak et al., 2025).

The AfD utilizes a racialized ideal image of the “emancipated white woman” to frame Muslim women as inherently oppressed, unfree, and therefore incompatible with German society.

Doerr (2021) empirically investigates the construction of migrant Muslim communities as a “threat” to German society and to the supposed homogeneity of its native culture. The study emphasizes the role of the AfD in propagating a stereotypical image about these communities through physical street advertisements, digital platforms, mobile displays, and both national parliament elections and state-level campaigns. Doerr essentially argues that the AfD utilizes a racialized ideal image of the “emancipated white woman” to frame Muslim women as inherently oppressed, unfree, and therefore incompatible with German society. A primary example of this is the 2017 AfD campaign poster which exhibited an image of three white women in bikinis, accompanied by a slogan that reads: “Burkas? Wir steh’n auf Bikinis (Burkas? We prefer bikinis)” (Doerr, 2021). While the bikini is meant to symbolize freedom of choice and self-determination, Doerr (2021) argues that the AfD deploys a sexualizing chauvinistic male gaze that partially targets young male voters, portraying German women as governable subjects in need of protection from the likely dangers of Muslim invasion. Similar patterns emerge when we analyze speeches and press releases from the party, as its members consistently claim exclusive ownership of women’s rights and leverage gendered issues of public safety to amass voters and public supporters.

Women as victims of migration

One of the most assertively direct iterations of femonationalist ways of arguing is evident in Alice Weidel’s October 2025 press release titled: “More and more women live in fear—The AfD is ready to restore security” (Alternative für Deutschland, 2025). The title itself claims a causal chain before presenting any empirical data to support such a fallacious assertion: German women are unsafe in the public sphere and only the AfD is capable of reimposing order and security. Weidel states, “More than half of all women in Germany no longer feel safe in public spaces. This alarming figure from the representative Civey survey is further proof of the government’s failure in migration and security policy.” This statement proceeds without delay to pin the blame of a security issue on a particular ethnic minority: Syrians. She continues, “As the Federal Ministry of the Interior had to admit, between 2015 and 2024, according to official data, 135,668 Germans were victims of crimes committed by Syrian suspects.” The juxtaposition of women’s nocturnal fear with failure in border policy lacks empirical support from scholarly research. The primary objective of such a statement, however, is to evoke emotional responses rather than logical reasoning. According to Farris’s framework, this is a classic femonationalist move, as it reduces women to a quantifiable populace of nationalist subjects whose survival ostensibly counts on the AfD’s electoral victory. Weidel specifies that “the ones who suffer most are especially young women and children, who are often defenselessly exposed to violent assaults” (Alternative für Deutschland, 2025). Such word choices perform a crucial role, as they highlight the vulnerability of German women in the face of a persistent influx of migrants who are, in the eyes of Weidel and her fellow party members, the sole perpetrators and aggressors against such a precarious demographic. At the same time, these outlandish claims carry out the ideological work of concealing migrant and racialized women from the AfD’s ostensibly feminist narrative on women’s public safety issues. In a manner that can only be described as dehumanizing, these women are deemed unworthy of protection or dignity. The only presence that the ethnic/racialised woman is allowed in the AfD’s official pseudo-feminist discourse is one where she is depicted as a rhetorical device or an object with no agency, used only to advance the party’s xenophobic and racist agenda.

The AfD’s selective protective paternalistic narrative is deeply rooted in Samuel Huntington’s post-cold war “clash of civilizations” theory, which was subsequently adopted by contemporary political figures like Thilo Sarrazin whose essentialist views on migration and social integration have consistently contributed to the normalization of such exclusionary discourse within mainstream politics (Sprengholz, 2021). This view promotes a rigid concept of cultural identity, which is ultimately weaponized to exclude migrant communities deemed ‘incompatible’ with the host culture. Within this theoretical structure, gender is once again weaponized under the assumption that German society has already achieved absolute gender equality, thus instrumentalizing this flawed premise to draw racialized boundaries of citizenship and belonging that exclude all non-white Germans. The paradox herein is clear as day: Whereas anti-migration policies are presented as effective solutions to a gender-related issue, they often exacerbate gender inequalities by aggravating socioeconomic vulnerabilities among migrant women, with little regard to the consequences of such laws against non-constituent, non-white, non-Western —mostly Muslim—women.

Whereas anti-migration policies are presented as effective solutions to a gender-related issue, they often exacerbate gender inequalities by aggravating socioeconomic vulnerabilities among migrant women, with little regard to the consequences of such laws against non-constituent, non-white, non-Western —mostly Muslim—women.

This sentiment is reverberated in one of Alice Weidel’s most controversial press statements as she states: “The alarming scale and the high proportion of foreign suspects in sexual offenses against women are a warning signal. Since the Union opened the gates in 2015, especially to men from societies shaped by archaic and misogynistic norms, women have become fair game” (Weidel, 2024). The language used in this context is extremely offensive and dehumanizing, as the term Freiwild in German implies that women have been left unprotected and “available” for harassment and sexual violence due to the absence of stringent border measures. This kind of alarmist and sensitive language aligns with the AfD’s broader strategy of appropriating feminist rhetoric in the Bundestag —the federal parliament of Germany—to conceal its anti-feminist position and divert the public’s attention from its own conservative and traditionalist views of gender (Sprengholz, 2021). Analogously, internal conflicts within the AfD regarding the party’s stance on homosexuality are omitted from official statements (Arzheimer, 2015).

The racialization of sexism and male violence

The phrase “men from societies shaped by archaic and misogynistic norms” (Weidel, 2024) betrays a form of cultural essentialism that homogenizes entire societies and depicts them as inherently regressive and backwards, thus establishing a civilization hierarchy placing German culture and people above racialized migrant men and their cultures. In 2018, Alice Weidel used the term Messermänner auf Sozialhilfe or “Knife-wielding men on welfare” in reference to high-profile knife crimes that the country has witnessed, calling for waves of mass deportations of asylum seekers and refugees. In media coverage of stabbing crimes in Germany, systematic regularities seem to be permanently present across different outlets as reporting often emphasizes the ethnic background/origin of the perpetrators, thus constructing alarmist narratives that villainize and alienate migrant communities.

Similarly, AfD board member Dennis Hohloch claimed that “multiculturalism means a loss of traditions, a loss of identity, a loss of home, murder, killing, robbery and gang rape” (Baumgärtner et al., 2025). Scrinzi (2023) refers to a political and social process called “the racialization of sexism” through which misogyny is ascribed to racialized migrant communities and is therefore externalized and treated as an issue of foreign origins. While predominantly employed by right-wing political actors, racialized gender-based framings have also been passively endorsed by left-wing movements and secular groups. In France, for instance, the movement Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Subaltern), dubbed progressive, played a crucial role in detaching gender-based violence from “middle-class white masculinity” (Scrinzi, 2023, p. 48). Despite it being spearheaded by French women of North African origins, the movement’s framing of sexual violence against women as a problem associated with Islam and the nation’s immigrant population greatly helped construct a narrative positioning racialized men as the hypersexualized aggressors of white women and the inherent oppressors of racialized women (Scrinzi, 2023, p. 49). Such accounts revive the ideological frameworks that colonial powers once used to rationalize territorial conquest and economic extraction of goods from the Global South. By failing to address gendered suburban violence as a multifaceted systemic issue and choosing to pathologize Islam instead, the Ni Putes Ni Soumises movement engages in a form of “carceral feminism” used by the republic to justify state racism and fortify the racist apparatus of the prison-industrial complex. The NPNS’s call for banning the veil is a prominent example of how femonationalist movements, emerging from Western feminisms, often reproduce racist and neoliberal narratives that either victimize or pathologize Muslim women (Farris, 2017, p. 62).

Far-right pro-natalism and women as “breeding machines”

The racialization of sexism constitutes a key element of the AfD’s populist mobilization strategy, which allows it to adopt a feminism that claims to protect German women while actively supporting policies that undermine their basic rights, such as access to abortion. This dynamic is closely intertwined with far-right pro-natalist rhetoric, which treats women’s bodies as reproductive tools tasked with “resisting” demographic change that is seen as a direct consequence of migration, thereby reducing women to agents of national preservation rather than autonomous rights-bearing individuals.

A 2017 campaign poster for the AfD made a huge commotion nationwide due to its disturbing message; The poster features the image of a pregnant white woman lying in a field of flowers with a bold-fonted caption that reads: “Neue Deutsche? Machen wir selber (More Germans? We’ll make them ourselves).” Critics have argued that this slogan was entrenched in the xenophobic nativist rhetoric, which deliberately excludes racialized communities from Germany’s national fabric. However, few were able to point out the misogynistic undertones hidden in plain sight. Such language and imagery exposes a pattern within populist right-wing politics that reveals a strong commitment to a pro-natalism that treats women as “breeding machines” for the “right” kind of citizens.

AfD politician Mariana Harder-Kühnel shared an official statement as a response to the German government’s 2024 family report, criticizing its failure to address “a long-known demographic crisis” and its reverberations on the skilled-labor market which has been witnessing a severe shortage of domestic workers (Alternative für Deutschland, 2024). Harder-Kühnel argues in favor of kontrollierten Bevölkerungsentwicklung liegen (controlled population development), presenting it as a more potent cure for the country’s economic and demographic woes than immigration ever was. Within this particular statement, Mariana Harder-Kühnel strategically deploys a language of pseudo-feminist “choice” that conveniently and suspiciously aligns with her imperative. Despite her insistence on the implementation of pro-choice-in-parenting policies, she fails to admit the coercive nature of her proposed measures she is suggesting (for example, the ban on abortion, promotion of the traditional family, and opposition to children’s rights in the constitution).

The leveraging of traditionalist domestic ideals to nurture white supremacist and nativist agendas is inseparable from the gendered pro-natalist language that blames women for social decline, therefore coercing them into abandoning their natural right to reproductive choice.

The AfD’s documented efforts of promoting familialism – a state-driven ideology that treats the nuclear family as the foundation of the national community and the main mechanism for social cohesion and welfare – and mobilizing post-feminist common sense narratives (Sprengholz, 2021) suggest that its pro-natalist agenda is inherently ideological and ethnonationalist in nature. This problematic language has been linked to the party’s electoral success, particularly in East Germany which has experienced a dramatic long-term population decline since the 1990 reunification (Höhne et al., 2025). The party has been relentless in its efforts to advance traditionalism, fueled by a commitment to preventing demographic collapse and ensuring the dominance of the so called “Aryan” race, a term so commonly misused that it has become synonymous with Nordic racial grouping, despite historically referring to ancient Indo-Iranian peoples. The leveraging of traditionalist domestic ideals to nurture white supremacist and nativist agendas is inseparable from the gendered pro-natalist language that blames women for social decline, therefore coercing them into abandoning their natural right to reproductive choice. While online discourse around reproductive health seems to be primarily focused on the United States, pro-natalist ideas in Germany stem from the party’s proper ideological evolution and the country’s homegrown völkisch (folkish/ethnic) nationalism (Heinemann, 2022). Pro-natalism comprises political, religious, and socioeconomic pressures that undermine women’s reproductive autonomy and freedom of choice, often culminating in legislative restrictions on contraception and abortion access (Bajaj & Stade, 2022). It is no surprise therefore that right-wing factions often adopt the infamous alarmist “fertility crisis” narrative to push for more control on women’s bodies.

Conclusion

The AfD’s rhetoric and actions push the boundaries of Western democracy and free speech and confirm the significance of language in politics, yet femonationalism extends far beyond German populist politics. Radical-right populism heavily relies on antagonistic framing and the strategic invocation of gender, which allows politicians to align themselves ideologically with their target audience, or at the very least to shift public discourse, normalize racist rhetoric, and strongly dominate the media landscape.

Works Cited

Alternative für Deutschland. (2025, October 28). Alice Weidel: Immer mehr Frauen leben in Angst – Die AfD ist bereit Sicherheit wieder herzustellen. Alternative Für Deutschland. https://www.afd.de/alice-weidel-immer-mehr-frauen-leben-in-angst-die-afd-ist-bereit-sicherheit-wieder-herzustellen/

Alternative für Deutschland. (2024, May 15). Mariana Harder-Kühnel: Familienreport 2024 enthält kein Konzept zur Lösung des Geburtenmangels und der Demografie-Katastrophe. Alternative Für Deutschland. https://www.afd.de/mariana-harder-kuehnel-familienreport-2024-enthaelt-kein-konzept-zur-loesung-des-geburtenmangels-und-der-demografie-katastrophe/

Arzheimer, K. (2015). The AfD: Finally a Successful Right-Wing Populist Eurosceptic Party for Germany? West European Politics, 38(3), 535–556. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2015.1004230

Bajaj, N., & Stade, K. (2022). Challenging pronatalism is key to advancing reproductive rights and a sustainable population. The Journal of Population and Sustainability, 7(1), 39–70. https://doi.org/10.3197/jps.63799953906861

Baumgärtner, M., Müller, A., Siemens, A., & Wiedmann-Schmidt, W. (2025, May 14). Compendium of Extremism: A Look inside the Report Documenting the AfD’s Right-Wing Radicalism. DER SPIEGEL, Hamburg, Germany. https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/compendium-of-extremism-a-look-inside-the-report-documenting-the-afds-right-wing-radicalism-a-de2ab5b5-623e-4100-addb-d1e44c298305 b

Doerr, N. (2021). The Visual Politics of the Alternative for Germany (AfD): Anti-Islam, Ethno-Nationalism, and Gendered Images. Social Sciences, 10(1), 20. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10010020

European Parliament. (2024, September 13). 2024 European elections: 15 additional seats divided between 12 countries | News | European Parliament. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20230911IPR04910/2024-european-elections-15-additional-seats-divided-between-12-countries

Fangen, K., & Lichtenberg, L. (2021). Gender and family rhetoric on the German far right. Patterns of Prejudice, 55(1), 71–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2021.1898815

Farris, S. R. (2017). In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Duke University Press.

Heinemann, I. (2022). Volk and Family: National Socialist legacies and gender concepts in the rhetoric of the Alternative for Germany. Journal of Modern European History, 20(3), 371–388. https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221110713

Höhne, B., Kölzer, J., & Träger, H. (2025). Geography of Shrinkage: Local Population Decline and Electoral Support for the Anti-establishment Parties AfD and BSW in East German State Elections. German Politics, 34(3), 449–477. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2025.2489409

Porzycki, V., Oshri, O., & Shenhav, S. R. (2025). What you see is not what you get: The incorporation of women in radical right parties. European Union Politics, 26(3), 477–500. https://doi.org/10.1177/14651165251340336

Scrinzi, F. (2023). The Racialization of Sexism. Routledge. https://www.perlego.com/book/4270023

Sprengholz, M. (2021). Post-feminist German heartland: On the women’s rights narrative of the radical-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland in the Bundestag. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 28(4), 486-501. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505068211007509 (Original work published 2021)

Statista. (2025, November 29). Share of women among political party members in Germany 2021. https://www.statista.com/statistics/955972/women-share-political-party-members-germany/?srsltid=AfmBOooYDhCC25ugDxGodJBVoMKgVeAutFUSDA4IqRS4lnwnpqRK5Bd7

Törnberg, P., & Chueri, J. (2025). When Do Parties Lie? Misinformation and Radical-Right Populism Across 26 Countries. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612241311886

Vieten, U. M. (2025). The Far-Right, Gender In/Equalities and Liberal Feminism: Scrutinising EU Narratives of Gender Equality in Italy, France and Germany. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2025.2592306

Weidel, A. (2024, November 20). Alice Weidel: Migrationskrise macht Frauen zu Freiwild. presseportal.de. https://www.presseportal.de/pm/110332/5913293

Zajak, S., Meuth, A., & Best, F. (2025). The Dynamics of (De-)Normalization of the far Right: perceptions in the German population. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-025-09532-6

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Olaf Kosinsky; modified by Tempest.

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San Francisco/SFO Airport

Tempest members joined hundreds of workers and community members in support of SEIU-USWW SFO airport workers as they campaigned around raising minimum wages to $30/hr. The action blocked vehicle access to the International Terminal starting at 11 AM. As first vice president, Sanjay Garla reported, LAX workers recently won $30/hr minimum wage, and SFO workers deserve the same. Garla also emphasized that in order for SFO to be safe for workers and passengers, we must demand “ICE out of SFO.”

SEIU United worker Carlos Sabata, in their first ever public speech, emphasized the international character of airport workers in the context of the international history of May Day, rousing the crowd with chants of “we are not invisible” and “we are not replaceable.” The crowd marched inside the terminal before twenty-five people were arrested, blocking the road in a planned civil disobedience action, including local politicians and labor leaders.

A few thousand joined two afternoon demonstrations and marches along Market Street at Civic Center and Embarcadero. The demonstrations were not huge, but they were spirited and full of unions, community groups, and left organizations. Some students walked out at a few high schools, and some educators joined them. Downtown High School educators shut down the school with a wildcat strike.

Oakland/OAK Airport

Oakland witnessed an unprecedented commemoration of May Day today. The day started with a rally at the ILWU Local 6 union hall near the Oakland International Airport at 9 AM. Over 500 people packed the union hall and pledged to join the “joyous rebellion” at the airport. This event was cosponsored by several organizations, including ACCE, Bay Resistance, Indivisible East Bay, AROC, Palestinian Youth Movement, USPCN, East Bay DSA, etc. The coalition partners planned for this action months in advance. Along with the May Day demands of “Tax the rich,” “End US wars,” and “Abolish ICE,” the coalition agreed to uphold the demands of the Oakland Arms Embargo campaign to hold the Port of Oakland, which administers both the seaport and airport, accountable for sending weapons to Israel.

At the electrifying gathering at the ILWU Local 6, the protesters formed two groups. One group joined the car caravan and the other was bused to the airport. Around 300 participants, who were bused to the airport, formed a picket line at the entrance to the departure hall. Meanwhile, a caravan of about 30 cars started approaching the airport. The deliberately sluggish caravan blocked the incoming traffic to the airport and started honking in tandem as it reached the departure hall. The controlled frenzy garnered the attention of the passengers and law enforcement alike. A few on-foot protesters took to the street, risking arrest, leading the car-caravan, and holding banners that read “No work. No school. No shopping” and “ICE out of our streets. Israel out of OAK fleets.” The carefully orchestrated picket-caravan double whammy brought the departure terminal of the Oakland airport to a standstill for about 20 minutes. The protesters vowed to return as the picket line dispersed after the caravan passed.

The crowd reconvened at 3 PM in Fruitvale, a predominantly immigrant neighborhood of the city of Oakland, to hold another rally and march. Oakland Sin Fronteras (Oakland Without Borders) coalition organized this rally, followed by a resource fair. Several organizations, including Bay Area Cuba Solidarity Network, Black Organizing Project, Mujeres Unidas y Activas, Oakland Tenants Union, OEA Rapid Response Team, East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, etc., offered services and material support to the community at the resource fair. At a gathering of about a thousand people, the speakers voiced their strong disapproval of deportations, travel bans, and racial profiling of immigrants and refugees.

The day ended with several cultural events taking place in the different parts of the East Bay. La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley held a “Party for the Workers” concert featuring Bambu, Boots Riley, etc. In downtown Oakland at Fluid510, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff gave a talk on their newest publication, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.

Berkeley/UC Berkeley

The UC Berkeley Labor Coalition held a May Day rally in front of UC Berkeley’s California Hall (where the office of the UC Berkeley Chancellor, Rich Lyons, is located) in support of AFSCME’s open-ended strike that was scheduled to begin on May 14th. That strike has since been called off as a tentative agreement has been reached. In addition, the rally also called for support for the contract fight of UC-AFT 1474 (which represents lecturers, librarians, and archivists across the UCs). There were speakers from several unions, including UAW 4811 (the grad workers’ union), UC-AFT 1474, and UPTE-CWA 9119 (University Professional and Technical Employees), as well as campus organizations such as Blackstone Divestment and the ICE off-campus campaign. A big theme of the rally was connecting the funding of Zionism and genocide to labor struggles and the fight against ICE in the US. Soon after the rally began, chanting could be heard coming from another side of the campus, which turned out to be a large group of students from Berkeley High School who led a walkout and came to campus to join the rally. Two of the high school students (who were also members of the Sunrise Movement) spoke in support of their teachers and immigrant workers. The participation of the high school students, including their two speakers, was especially impressive and moving.

San Jose, CA

May Day 2026 in San Jose started with a Rally at the corner of Story and King, followed by a march to San Jose City Hall. Union members seemed to have the largest groups, and were supported by the South Bay Labor Council and Working Partnerships USA. There was a very strong presence of SEIU folks from various locals, along with Alphabet Workers and Flight Attendant union members. Students from 10 San Jose high schools walked out to join the event. Socialist organizations included FRSO, DSA, and PSL. The billionaire candidate for governor of California, Tom Steyer, made an appearance at the Rally.

The Rally was the largest grouping of folks at Story and King in the last ten years, and folks were still marching the three miles to City Hall three hours after they got started on the three-mile route. Some organizations tabled at City Hall, and the crowd was a pretty good size for San Jose.

San Diego, CA

In a new departure influenced by growing interest in general strikes as a means to defend threatened democracy, County employees in San Diego’s SEIU Local 221 joined International Workers’ Day festivities.  Militant workers phone-banked and organized co-workers for weeks, encouraging them to take either unpaid leave or vacation time. This falls short of full strike action as it does not involve direct defiance of the boss. But importantly, it did demonstrate–to ourselves, our co-workers, and our class rallying together for May 1–a willingness to collectively make an economic sacrifice for a cause.  And this day of skipping work and missing pay was done primarily under political slogans–ICE Out of San Diego, No War in Iran, Tax the Rich, and Protect Our Votes.

There was also one key economic demand–End Tier D. Tier D is the outrageous pension plan in place for all County employees hired since 2017, requiring them to postpone retirements late into old age. Members knew that the May 1 action would not accomplish this goal by itself. But by raising our own particular issue, alongside those important to the cause of social justice and our class as a whole, we took an opportunity to publicize it in a way that begins to knit it into a larger campaigning alliance.

Workers spent the whole day together, meeting at 9 AM at the Union hall, where two buses drove them first to the mid-day rally at Chicano Park, then to the action in support of janitors at the San Diego International Airport, and finally to the late afternoon action organized by the San Diego-Imperial Counties Central Labor Council.

About 50 county workers took part in the daylong action. 160 declared that they would not work. It is unknown whether fewer or more actually took the day off. This is a small fraction of the 11,000 represented County workers, but an unprecedented step while working under an unexpired contract.

Tony Ledezma, a worker at Agriculture, Weights, and Measures and a former Federal employee, said, “When Trump went to power, he illegally fired us. Because of the Union, I got my (Federal) job back.” But “Tier D is not working for people; it should be altered.”

“2026 has just been chaos and nonsense…I think there’s a bunch of people in high office that have an agenda that is taking power away from the people and benefitting corporations and the ultra-wealthy,” said Dan of Behavioral Health Services.  “We’re spending billions on war, cutting health care, cutting education, and separating families.”

“Laborers can step into a more powerful political role today… “I think we’re here today as a result of decades of organization by people of wealth.  We will only be able to confront that together.”

“Laborers can step into a more powerful political role today,” said 221 member Krista.  “I think we’re here today as a result of decades of organization by people of wealth.  We will only be able to confront that together…it’s a little bit of a mind shift to be in solidarity with people who are different.”

“I’m saying no to war; no to ICE; no to voter suppression,” said Jesse Gonzalez, Mental Health Worker at County Psychiatric Hospital.  “The worst part for me is when they blame immigrants…I just read horrific statements about pregnant women in detention facilities.”

In the words of Adult Protective Services Specialist Natasha, “it’s important to create community and interconnectedness.”  County employee Brian Lafferty said, “Workers will bring down fascism.”

APS worker Rodney argued, “The May Day event is important to honor those who fought for the rights of others and continue to fight for basic human rights for future generations. I believe people would place more value on their freedom/democracy if they learn about their history”.  And Brenda Nunez of the Union’s Black Caucus, AFRAM-Sankofa, said, “May Day is important to bring solidarity”.

Finally, Elena Long, President of 221’s newly launched Latino Caucus, spoke to some 500-1000 people at the central stage at Chicano Park. Speaking in Spanish, she said, “It is very important to support and protect our community. Our community has struggled much, has worked much, and has sacrificed much to be in this country. That’s why we cannot remain quiet when we see injustices. We cannot remain quiet when many families are living in fear.”

Thanks to Cecile Estelle for assistance with this article.

Burlington, Vermont

Around 1,000 people took part in a  spirited May Day march. The action was comprised of the Left, but with a bigger concentration of union members. The highlight of the day was when protestors took over the Hannaford grocery store’s parking lot and demanded that the chain join the farmworkers program Milk with Dignity. Noticeable was the absence of broader liberal forces, who are already orienting toward the election instead of more direct political activity. In a sign of that, all the politicians were angling to get on the stage and speak, but organizers did not allow it.

Madison, Wisconsin

In Madison, Wisconsin, the teachers’ union successfully pressured the school district to close public schools on May Day. Schools were also closed in Milwaukee. In Madison, thousands of people rallied at the University of Wisconsin campus in support of immigrant rights. Protestors marched to the State Capitol, where they were met by large contingents that marched from two of the city’s high schools.

New York, NY

May Day in New York City drew about ten thousand people for a vibrant rally and march. Some unions brought out large and multiracial contingents, especially notable the Laborers International Union of North America (LUINA), which bused workers in from every borough. LUINA represents 40,000 workers employed in the construction trades. Tempest marched with the Professional Staff Congress at CUNY, representing public college and university faculty and staff. PSC-CUNY  had a visible and lively contingent of a few hundred. Some unions that could have had big contingents had a poor showing, most notably the United Federation of Teachers, part of the American Federation of Teachers. The march overall was very multiracial with large contingents of immigrant workers and immigrant rights groups. The union mobilizations meant it was a much more racially diverse and working-class in composition compared to the No Kings protests and other recent demonstrations. Anti-Trump, anti-billionaire, and anti-ICE slogans were everywhere.

Ottawa, Ontario, CAN

Ottawa’s May Day event consisted of about 400 people from various single-issue campaigns and left groups on a march that stopped five or six times to highlight specific issues in the city. The event, organized by a local anarchist collective, only had flags from one union, a federal public service union.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: skuchamenz skuchamenz, Susan Ruggles, Fibonacci Blue; modified by Tempest.

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Muzan Alneel, in many ways, represented Sudan’s 2018 revolution, and the strong tradition and legacy of Sudan’s women revolutionaries.

Muzan was a clear-eyed revolutionary strategist. She was part of the revolutionary movement, analyzing its trajectory, while also acting as a spokesperson, communicating its importance to revolutionaries and activists around the world. Muzan participated in the Khartoum sit-in in early 2019, warning against leaving the sit-in and relinquishing power to the military. Understanding this, that the revolution could not be handed over to the military, that overthrowing Bashir and then Ibn Auf was not enough, was key to moving Sudan’s revolution to its next stage. It was one of the lessons that the Sudanese revolution learned from the failures of Egypt’s 2011 revolution, that overthrowing the figurehead of the regime was not enough, and one of the reasons Sudan’s revolution went so much further—and why so many of us held on to hope and optimism that Sudan provided a lesson that revolutionaries around the world must pay attention to.

Muzan was also prescient and aware of the dangers of the agreement between the transitional government and the military, and saw the 2021 coup by the military as expected and inevitable after this. There can be no agreement between a revolutionary movement and a counterrevolutionary military that does not end in bloodshed and counterrevolution. Muzan understood both the successes and the limitations of the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA), and of Hamdok and the transitional government. The SPA had accomplished what it could in the early phases of the revolution, galvanizing layers of workers and mass days of resistance, but now no longer represented a revolutionary alternative. Muzan highlighted the crucial importance of the neighborhood resistance committees, pointing out that they were ignored and overlooked by commentators and international media, but that they were key to the next stage of the struggle, and to moving the revolution forward. She analyzed both the potential of the resistance committees and their challenges and weaknesses, finding that in wealthy neighborhoods, the politics of the neighborhood committees were shaped by middle-class politics and thus less radical than in other areas.

Muzan had the analysis needed to navigate through the ups and downs of the revolutionary struggle. She, perhaps more than anyone, understood what elements are needed for a revolution to be successful. Our movements are in desperate need of revolutionary thinkers and strategists like Muzan, for them to have a chance at success.

Moreover, Muzan retained revolutionary optimism. She understood that revolutionary processes are long. Even when the war between the RSF and SAF began in 2023, she remained hopeful, while also realistic about what was needed at each moment on the ground. She knew that during the war, the resistance committees were providing needed aid, healthcare, and lifesaving services. She remained hopeful that once the war ended, the work of the revolution could continue, and the resistance committees could return to a political strategy that prioritizes the revolution.

And Muzan was not bitter, even though much of the world ignored Sudan’s revolution and counterrevolution. She was open to working with anyone who understood the gravity of the situation and who took Sudan’s revolution seriously.

The loss of Muzan is a horrific setback for not just the Sudanese revolutionary struggle but for the broader global struggle for liberation. Muzan understood that our liberation movements and revolutionary struggles are connected.

Muzan was one of many incredible Sudanese women I have been lucky enough to connect with in solidarity work with the revolution since 2018. Sudan’s revolutionary history, its history of left-wing activism and revolutions, has produced militant revolutionary women who are politically astute, who study revolutionary traditions and history, who note the crucial interconnections between liberation struggles like Sudan’s and Palestine’s. Muzan comes out of this tradition, a tradition that still deserves more attention, more solidarity, and more seriousness than it has been given. She represented its strongest edge. Our movements worldwide need to work hard to instill revolutionary seriousness, study of history, and political analysis that Muzan held and embodied.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

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Nobody thinks they’re doing the popular front

Here’s the problem with arguing against the popular front inside DSA: Nobody in this organization thinks they’re doing it. That’s not a rhetorical observation. It’s the actual difficulty. Nobody wakes up and says, “I think we should subordinate working-class politics to bourgeois democratic forces.” That’s not how popular frontism arrives. It doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates through a hundred individual decisions, each looking reasonable until, at some point, the organization’s political orientation has shifted into something that would have been recognizable as wrong if proposed directly.

This document is not an accusation. Calling something popular frontism in DSA’s context isn’t a charge of bad faith; it’s a structural observation about what happens to socialist organizations under conditions of intense conjunctural pressure. And the pressure right now is real. Trump’s second term has produced a genuine emergency for millions of people. Immigrants are being deported. Civil liberties are being dismantled. Democratic institutions are being hollowed out or captured outright. People responding to this with urgency are not wrong about the urgency.

Popular frontism doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates through a hundred individual decisions, each looking reasonable until, at some point, the organization’s political orientation has shifted into something that would have been recognizable as wrong if proposed directly.

The question is not whether to respond. The question is how, and specifically on what political basis. That question has a strategic answer and getting it wrong doesn’t just produce ineffective politics. It reproduces the conditions that got us here.

What the popular front actually is

Before making the argument, we need precision about the target. The popular front gets used loosely, and that looseness lets people slide past the critique.

The popular front is not coalition work. Socialists do coalition work all the time and should. It’s not working alongside people we disagree with, and it’s not even working in formations dominated by non-socialist forces. The popular front is specifically the subordination of working-class political independence to a cross-class coalition organized around bourgeois political goals. The test isn’t whether DSA maintains formal independence—whether we keep our name and publish our newsletter. The test is whether the political content of our work is determined by the coalition’s framework or by an independent working-class program.

The popular front is specifically the subordination of working-class political independence to a cross-class coalition organized around bourgeois political goals.

Leon Trotsky’s Struggle Against Fascism in Germany makes this case: In the 1930s, the popular front meant communist parties entering electoral alliances with “progressive” bourgeois parties, adopting their demands, deferring to their leadership, and bracketing socialist politics as divisive. The theory was that fascism posed such an extreme threat that the immediate task was to defend bourgeois democracy, with socialist demands to follow once the emergency had passed.1The standard account of the 1930s debates remains Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), which collects the key documents from popular front. For the consequences of the Popular Front turn, see Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1938).

The emergency never passed. Socialist demands never came back. The organizations that had disciplined themselves into becoming coalition partners emerged without the political independence they’d begun with, in cases where they emerged at all.

What is being proposed and, in some cases, practiced within DSA today has the same structural features, even if it goes by different names. Coalition partners are the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, liberal NGOs, and civil society organizations. The bracketed demands are socialist ones. The logic is identical: The emergency–framed as either authoritarianism or fascism–is too severe for the luxury of political independence.

How you get there without deciding to

Coalition gravity is real. It’s not a character flaw–it’s a structural problem that operates on organizations, not just individuals.

The Democratic-Party-aligned liberal-left is large, active, and well-resourced. When a crisis hits, that infrastructure mobilizes first and fastest. The coalitions form around it. The demands, the slogans, the framing, and the action calendar are set before socialist organizations have finished their internal discussions.

For example, a DSA member shows up at an immigrant defense meeting. The meeting is mostly liberals, a few DSA members, and some NGO staff. The immediate task of supporting people facing deportation is urgent and correct. Nobody is going to walk out because politics aren’t pure enough. That would be sectarian and wrong. So, you participate. You agree with the common statement. The common statement is framed around “defending American values” and “the rule of law”—not around class power, not around the system that produces both Trump and the deportation regime he’s intensifying. You table that argument because the meeting isn’t the time. Next meeting, same dynamic.

Over months of such activity, DSA’s public face becomes indistinguishable from that of the progressive liberal opposition. The people being recruited come in through that political framework. New members’ understanding of what this organization is gets shaped by what it visibly does, which is to background the socialist politics of working class power from below.

There is nothing explicitly stated requiring anyone to abandon socialist politics. The abandonment happens through accumulation, through the logic of each individual situation. This is what conjunctural pressure does to small organizations without a consciously held, collectively maintained, regularly reasserted strategic orientation.

The antidote isn’t sectarian abstention. It’s deliberate political clarity about what we’re doing and why it’s maintained actively, not assumed.

The fascism question is doing all the work

The strategic argument for popular front practice in the current moment always rests, explicitly or implicitly, on a characterization of Trump as fascist. That characterization is doing more work than it should be trusted to do.

In contrast to the popular front, Trotsky developed the united front strategy, which is often invoked imprecisely to justify current coalition practices, particularly in response to fascism. His argument was that fascism threatened to physically destroy working-class organizations, which required those organizations to act in common, despite political differences, to survive. Even then, he insisted on a united front among labor organizations, not a cross-class coalition with bourgeois democratic forces.2Trotsky, “For a Workers’ United Front Against Fascism” (1931) and “What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat” (1932), both in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. The key formulation: the united front is “a practical agreement for struggle” between organizations “that base themselves on the working class”—not with bourgeois parties.

If Trump’s second term represents a Bonapartist conjuncture rather than a fascist one, the entire strategic logic should shift. Bonapartism, in the classical Marxist sense, describes a regime in which the state achieves relative autonomy because the ruling class is politically paralyzed—no fraction can establish stable hegemony—while the working class lacks independent political expression to fill the vacuum. The executive floats above class conflict, presenting itself as a national solution to a political impasse. This describes the current situation with considerable precision.3The Bonapartism framework originates in Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). For its theoretical elaboration and relation to fascism, see Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (London: New Left Books, 1974) and State, Power, Socialism (London: New Left Books, 1978). Poulantzas’s critique of instrumentalist accounts of the state is particularly relevant to the question of regime characterization.

The distinction matters because Bonapartism and fascism call for different strategic responses. Fascism requires defensive mobilization to protect existing working-class organizational infrastructure from physical destruction. Bonapartism requires something harder: building independent working-class political capacity to fill the vacuum currently occupied by the Bonapartist solution.

The “no kings” framing … is the ideological form of the popular front.

The popular front’s response to Bonapartism doesn’t just fail strategically. It actively worsens the underlying condition. Bonapartism arises from two simultaneous problems: bourgeois political fragmentation and working-class political subordination to bourgeois politics. The popular front deepens the second problem by re-subordinating working-class politics to bourgeois democratic forces. You defeat this Bonaparte—if you defeat him—only to have reproduced exactly the conditions that made him possible.

The “no kings” framing that dominates current opposition politics is not accidental. It is the ideological form of the popular front: The enemy is personal despotism, the solution is constitutional democracy, and the agent of change is a broad cross-class coalition of people who love freedom. Working-class power doesn’t appear in this picture as a distinct force with distinct interests. It appears as part of the democratic people, whose political expression is progressive liberalism. Socialists who adopt this framing aren’t just making a rhetorical concession. They’re accepting a framework that makes independent working-class politics invisible by definition.

Trotsky against the Trotskyists

It’s worth being direct about the theoretical tradition being invoked to justify current practice because the invocation is wrong, and demonstrating that it’s wrong matters for the internal argument.

When comrades say, “united front, not popular front,” they’re invoking a real and important distinction from Trotsky’s work in the early 1930s. The problem is that what’s being practiced in many cases is the popular front, not the united front—and the distinction between them is precisely what Trotsky spent years insisting on.

Trotsky’s united front was between working-class organizations: German socialist and communist formations, acting in common against the Nazi threat, maintaining their distinct political programs and organizational independence, and striking together on specific, defined objectives. Political independence wasn’t incidental to the strategy—it was the whole point. A united front dissolves the moment participating organizations can no longer advance their own politics within it.4Trotsky, “The United Front for Defense” (1933), in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. The “march separately, strike together” formulation appears in several documents from this period. Its precondition—that independent organizations capable of marching separately actually exist—is rarely emphasized in contemporary invocations.

“March separately, strike together” is frequently quoted. What’s less frequently noted is that marching separately requires that you be marching and that there be an independent working-class political formation capable of entering a united front as a distinct pole. DSA joining a Democratic Party-led coalition isn’t a united front. There is no independent march. There is a large march that has absorbed us.

The Comintern’s move to the popular front in 1935 was not an abandonment of the united front in favor of something obviously different. It was a collapse of the united front into a cross-class coalition, dressed in the language of anti-fascist necessity. Dimitrov’s Congress speeches don’t read like a capitulation—they read like a strategic adaptation to overwhelming circumstances.5Georgi Dimitrov, “The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International,” report to the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International (1935), in The United Front: The Struggle Against Fascism and War (New York: International Publishers, 1938). The rhetorical sophistication of the popular front turn is worth attending to: it was presented as a creative application of united front principles, not an abandonment of them.

The people who built the popular front thought they were being realistic, flexible, and responsive to conditions. They were wrong. The popular front delivered the Spanish Republic to Franco and the French Left to paralysis. The lesson isn’t that unity is bad. It’s that unity organized on bourgeois-democratic terms—with socialist politics bracketed as divisive, and its socialist demands deferred as premature—produces defeat even when it yields votes.

What independent politics actually looks like

The case against popular frontism is not a case for abstention, and saying so directly matters because the charge of sectarianism is always the first response.

DSA members should be in immigrant defense work. We should be in the streets around May Day and every moment of mass mobilization. We should be in coalition with whoever is organizing working-class people. None of that is in question. What’s in question is the political basis on which we’re there and the organizational form we maintain within it.

Independent politics in practice means several difficult things. It means being visibly, publicly socialist in coalition spaces, not as a condition of participation but as a contribution to it. The people being radicalized at this moment need to find a distinct pole. If DSA’s presence is indistinguishable from progressive liberalism, we’re not offering them an alternative; we’re delivering them to the Democratic Party’s orbit.

It means framing every attack as class politics, not democratic politics. Deportations are not an assault on American values. They are an assault on working people by a capitalist state that serves ruling-class interests—interests that the Democratic Party also represents, differently but genuinely. The distinction matters because it points toward a different solution. “Restore democracy” points toward the Democratic Party. “Build working-class power” points to something that doesn’t yet exist at the required scale, which means the task is to build it.

Independent politics … means treating the conjuncture as a radicalization opportunity, which requires having a distinct socialist pole for people to find.

It means doing genuine united-front work where it is actually possible, with DSA’s left currents, with socialist labor militants, with other genuine working-class formations, on terms that maintain political independence rather than dissolving into the lowest common denominator of anti-authoritarianism.

And it means treating the conjuncture as a radicalization opportunity, which requires having a distinct socialist pole for people to find. People are moving right now. The question is where they move to. If socialist organizations are invisible as a distinct political force, if our public presence is liberal coalition work, then the people being radicalized by Trump’s attacks get absorbed into the Democratic Party opposition. That is a long-term failure with consequences that will outlast the current crisis.

The organizational honesty problem

One more thing deserves to be said, even though it’s uncomfortable.

Organizations under pressure tend toward popular frontism in part because it solves an immediate organizational problem: isolation. Coalition work provides activity, visibility, a sense of mass connection, and recruiting opportunities that independent socialist politics can’t provide. This is a real organizational need being met in a politically costly way. Naming it isn’t an accusation of bad faith. It’s an attempt at honesty about the pressures that drive political drift.

The solution is not to pretend that the isolation problem doesn’t exist; it does, and it’s serious. The solution is to refuse to solve it through absorption into formations whose political gravity we need to escape. That means accepting that independent politics is harder, slower, and less immediately satisfying than coalition work. It has always been true. The organizations that maintained independence through the 1930s conjuncture were the ones that came out the other side with something to offer. The ones that dissolved into the popular front came out as smaller versions of the liberal parties, they’d subordinated themselves to—in the cases where they came out at all.

Conclusion: We’ve been here before

The argument of this document is not that DSA should disengage from the current moment of political crisis. It is precisely the crisis’s intensity that makes it necessary to be as clear as possible about our political orientation, not the reason to defer clarity until conditions are easier.

Bonapartism won’t fall to the Left that currently exists in the United States. The socialist movement is too small, too organizationally fragmented, and too politically subordinated to bourgeois parties for that. The question the conjuncture poses is not whether we can defeat Trump’s regime directly. It is whether we can use this moment to build the organizational and political infrastructure that might, eventually, constitute a genuine working-class political force, or whether we will spend it as the left wing of a liberal coalition that will absorb our energy, recruit our cadre into its own formations, and leave us smaller and less politically distinct than we started.

The popular front has always promised the second option while selling the first. We have enough history now to know how that story ends. The question is whether we’ve learned from it.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: OsannaChil; modified by Tempest.

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We are disabled, crip, mad, debilitated, and disability activists, advocates, scholars, workers, and home care recipients.

We proclaim our full support for the struggle of the home care workers of New York City who are currently engaged in the “No More 24” campaign. We specifically support their immediate demand for enactment of the No More 24 bill (City Council bill, Intro. 303), and we support the broader struggle of the Ain’t I A Woman?! coalition against the hyper-exploitation of home care workers.

Presently, tens of thousands of New York City home care workers are compelled to labor for 24-hour shifts at only 13-hours pay. These workers are predominantly immigrant women of color, subjected to systematic precarity, vulnerability, under-valuation, overwork, debility, and disablement. They have been unfairly made to shoulder the failings of medical insurance, corporate home care, and municipal and state political systems.

Home care workers deserve far better than the intolerable status quo. So, too, do disabled people and other recipients of home care. Disabled people in New York City and nationwide face disproportionately high rates of poverty, houselessness, unemployment, violence, neglect, discrimination, incarceration, and institutionalization. All disabled people deserve to live dignified, autonomous, well-resourced lives as full members of society in their own homes and communities.

While sympathetic to the concerns expressed by some disabled people about the No More 24 bill, we think it is horribly mistaken that some leaders of disability NGOs and legacy advocacy organizations have publicly framed the No More 24 workers’ struggle as counterposed to the interests of the “disability community.” We know well that disabled people have much to lose (and potentially gain) in the outcome of this fight. But we know, too, that the battle lines in this fight are not primarily between disabled people and the home care workers.

We are further disappointed that some supposed allies of disabled people – including the officialdoms of certain unions, and the Democratic Party state governor and city mayor, Kathy Hochul and Zohran Mamdani – have lent their efforts to stymieing or otherwise slow-walking the No More 24 campaign, citing in part their “concern” for the disabled. We reject this as a hollow alibi for refusal to act on the just demands of the home care workers.

In sum, we endorse the home care workers’ demand for an immediate end to 24-hour shifts at 13-hours pay. We further emphasize what to us is an inextricably linked demand, namely, that disabled people should continue to have the option of receiving care in their own homes and communities, with no reduction in the number of care hours received. We view the home care corporations, “managed care” insurers, and city and state government officials – that is, the most powerful entities in this many-sided relationship – as being squarely responsible for effecting this latter demand by way of their access to ample funding sources (this is, after all, the richest city in the richest country in the history of the world).

This is a crisis of the ruling class’s making. It is the fault of neither the exploited home care workers nor the predominantly poor recipients of home care. Consequently, we believe that the joining of the struggles and demands for both workers’ justice and disability justice will strengthen each in a powerful mutualistic coalition. Thus, we appeal to the home care workers, the No More 24 campaign, and the Ain’t I A Woman?! coalition, as well as to all disability advocacy organizations, to explicitly advance our respective interests in tandem. We say: “No More 24!”, “Put People First!”, and “Universal Home Care Access is a Right!”

Add your signature.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Ain’t I A Woman Campaign; modified by Tempest.

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“The lust and the avarice
The bottomless, the cavernous
greed”
– Natalie Merchant (‘Motherland’).

“One thing about us wise guys, the hustle never ends.” – Tony Soprano. 

Overview

This article takes as its starting point the U.S. attacks on Venezuela and Iran in early 2026. Both attacks, it is argued, demonstrated distinguishing characteristics of the Trump administration: greed, short-termism, incompetence, and an obsession with violent, egotistical gestures rather than strategic calculation. Trump does not pursue any version of the U.S. national interest. Nor does he consistently pursue the long-term interests of the U.S. ruling class and its empire, though the regime is backed by members of the ruling class who share its penchants for short-term gain and narcissistic gratification. The upshot is a decline in U.S. hegemony in the world and a boost to the ambitions of China and other powers.

Introduction

The U.S. government launched two unprovoked acts of military aggression in early 2026. The first, in January, saw U.S. forces violently kidnap Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and first lady Celia Flores and bring them to the U.S. to face spurious charges of drug trafficking; the new head of state (the former vice-president) accepted the Trump administration’s demands to open Venezuela up to U.S. capital, assume liability for past corporate claims made against the state, and bow to U.S. oversight of how the country’s oil revenues would be managed. The action was protested worldwide but sparked no serious retaliation from other governments. On its own terms, this seemed a clear victory for the U.S. empire.

The second act of aggression, begun in February, saw the U.S. and Israel launch a massive military campaign against Iran, a war that quickly escalated into a colossally expensive catastrophe in human, environmental and financial terms. Despite the current impasse in negotiations following a ceasefire, it is hard to dispute Owen Jones’ verdict when he describes Trump’s “excursion” as “the biggest strategic defeat suffered by the U.S. since its emergence as a superpower”. This assessment is widely held. Ryan Cooper calls it “an immense strategic defeat – and one that knocks the legs out from under the entire American system of power projection and global predominance”. Iran proved its ability to wreak military and economic havoc on the U.S. and its allies.

Current fragile ceasefire negotiations are based on U.S. willingness to at least discuss Iranian proposals: these include the removal of U.S. military bases from the Middle East and continued Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, possibly including tolls continuing to be imposed on ships transiting through the marine passageway. The very fact that such issues are even on the table – they would not have been up for discussion before the war – represents a decisive advance for Iran and a huge blow to the U.S. Veteran US diplomat Richard Haass concedes that in strategic terms the US is losing the war,

This article will argue that, despite their seemingly different outcomes, the two aggressions shared certain characteristics associated with the Trump presidency: greed, narcissism, short-termism, limited ambition (in terms of regime change or even resource access), incompetence and incoherence. Not all of these characteristics are unique to this presidency but the salience and intensity of the regime’s avarice and egomania – its hustle and hubris – distinguish it from past U.S. regimes while undermining long-term U.S. imperial ambitions.

Few dispute that the attack on Iran starkly illustrated the limits of the U.S. empire (at least in its current Trumpian incarnation) but so also, in a different way, did the attack on Venezuela. Because Venezuela is more likely to be seen as a relative success for U.S. imperialism, greater space is devoted here to that intervention to argue that, contrary to initial appearances, this was a strictly limited and globally insignificant “triumph”. This is followed with a discussion of the broader pattern of greed and ego now undermining U.S. empire and of how that has worked to the benefit of China in particular. But we begin with an outline of why both mainstream and left-wing commentators typically misunderstand the nature of Trump’s presidency.

Category errors and kleptocracy The Trumpian state

Explanations for why the U.S. administration chose to wage its war on Iran include: a strategic desire to eliminate or weaken the main supposed rival to U.S. control of the Middle East and its oil, and to control or limit the supply of that oil to China especially; deference to Israel’s quest for total domination of the region (a quest that is continuing as Israel seeks to sabotage the ceasefire and continues aggressions in Palestine and Lebanon); and Trump’s wish to distract from the Epstein files and the cost of living crisis in the U.S. (though of course the war worsened that crisis).

All these factors may have played some role. However, writing in the U.S. establishment insider journal Foreign Affairs before this latest assault on Iran, a distinctive, simple and useful frame for viewing the actions of the Trump regime is proposed by Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nixon:

“Trump has… wielded U.S. foreign policy principally to increase his own wealth, bolster his status, and personally benefit a small circle of his family members, friends, and loyalists. U.S. foreign policy is now largely subordinate to the private interests of the president and his retainers.”

Cooley and Nixon criticize other scholars for committing a “category error” (assigning to something a quality it does not possess) and continuing to believe that Trump 2.0 is pursuing (even if poorly) anything resembling the U.S. national interest or that his regime is adopting a classically realist approach to foreign affairs to which his blatant corruption is merely a sideshow.

On the contrary, they argue, in a kleptocratic system like that of Trump, “corruption is the end; the point of holding and keeping office is to enrich a ruler and his inner circle. Regulation, law enforcement, public procurement, and even diplomacy all become means of self-dealing – of extracting resources, controlling streams of income, and diverting wealth to family, friends, and allies”. Cooley and Nixon urge their fellow academics to “stop obfuscating the reality of Trump’s foreign policy by calling it realism… [or] great-power competition.”

Paul Heideman makes a similar case from a different political perspective, one that is not nostalgic for prior periods of U.S. foreign policy (he references the “bloodbaths in Vietnam and Iraq”) but that also recognizes the distinctiveness of Trump’s regime. Heideman locates Trump within the longstanding trend of the Republican Party (and perhaps U.S. party politics more broadly) becoming “unmoored from the control of America’s capitalist class as a whole”. While individual capitalists and sectors exert influence, there is no longer “the kind of class-wide oversight that the foreign policy planning network was designed to provide” – to both Republican and Democrat administrations.

Dismantling the foreign policy network

This planning network, Heideman outlines, operated through corporate-sponsored think tanks that produced advisory reports for U.S. governments and supplied many of the personnel who staffed those governments’ foreign policy departments. The classic example is the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR, which publishes Foreign Affairs): for example, Condoleezza Rice, George W Bush’s national security advisor, was a CFR fellow while Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State under Biden, was a CFR member; there are myriad other examples. Crucially, the boards of such think tanks bring together representatives of different corporations from different economic sectors, thereby facilitating, in theory at least, the forging of a shared ruling class perspective that has been operationalized through the deployment of think tank personnel within successive administrations. The think tanks thus constitute what Alex Callinicos defines as fora in which “collective [class] actors constitute themselves and articulate their claims”.

Some such personnel (albeit fewer than under previous administrations) continued to occupy key positions under Trump 1.0, but Trump 2.0 has changed that radically: there has been, in Susan Watkins’ words, a “gutting [of] the senior levels of the National Security Council and State Department”, with critical foreign policy roles now more likely to be occupied by people drawn from the worlds of TV and real estate. A military studies professor visiting Washington in March 2026 and nostalgic for the old order has written despairingly:

“It is hard to convey the gloom that has overtaken Washington. All the structures that are vital to crisis management [read: war planning] have either been attenuated or disbanded. There is hardly anyone left on the National Security Council staff. A friend described an empty State Department where you could hear your own footsteps.”

Those foreign policy think tanks that are now influential, unlike the CFR, tend to be aggressively focused ones of recent creation, such as the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, an Israeli lobbying body with which Secretary of State Marco Rubio is particularly associated, and the equally pro-Israeli Vandenberg Coalition that lobbied hard for attacking Iran. Much has been made of the radical conservative Heritage Foundation’s influence on Trump through its Project 2025 agenda for his presidency. That influence is indeed evident in a number of policy areas, including: centralizing power within the Executive; working against Trans rights, ‘gender ideology’, and ‘wokeness’ more generally; attacking public service media, university and judicial independence; oppression and deportation of anyone deemed undesirable; the attempted limitation of citizenship and voting rights; and shredding the civil service, especially as regards corporate regulation and workers’ rights. But its influence over foreign policy is open to debate.

Heritage did support the weeding out of the network of foreign policy “professionals” that had previously dominated in this area (a former Obama speechwriter called them the “blob”). High-ranking military officers are also being purged, with nine 4- and 5-star military personnel fired during Trump 2.0 – compared to eleven over the entire previous 160 years. Those fired include: the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Staff of the Army, the Chief of Staff of the Navy, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, the Commandant of the Coast Guard, the Secretary of the Navy, and the leaders of intelligence agencies. One result is that decisions now get made by, as Heideman contends, a “staggeringly incompetent policy team”, with the particular ignorance and ineptitude of Trump golf buddy and ubiquitous special representative Steve Witkoff singled out by some. Witkoff has been central to deliberations concerning Israel/Palestine, Ukraine, Iran and elsewhere.

Incompetence is certainly evident in the ongoing debacle of the U.S. assault on Iran, characterized as it is by: unclear and shifting goals; failure to rally, or even prepare to rally, external support; insufficient stockpiles of military assets and of the raw materials necessary to replace them; and the prior decommissioning of minesweepers. The Trump regime’s underestimation of the strength of Iranian resistance is an acute symptom of this incompetence – especially Iran’s willingness and capacity to attack Gulf states (and U.S. bases therein, as well as data centers) and to close the Strait of Hormuz, throwing the global economy into chaos and peril, not just through pushing up oil and gas prices but also through wider commodity price shocks and impacts on global supply chains. Within the region itself, thirty to forty percent of Gulf refining capacity has been damaged or destroyed and it may take up to three years to fully restore it. Experienced military leaders’ words of caution on some or all of these matters continue to be ignored or overridden.

Left misconceptions The ruling class and the state

The category error identified by Cooley and Nixon, and implied by Heideman, can also apply to left-wing writers, who tend to look to Trump as espousing, not the interests of the U.S. as a whole, but the interests of the U.S. ruling class and US imperialism. A common variant is to see Trump as a representative of an aspirant unilateral, muscular new order (in line with Heritage’s Project 2025 agenda), shedding the constraints of the old, multilateral, rules-based system (I’ve gone some way down that road myself in the past). The military assault on Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president and first lady, together with the transformation of the rump Venezuelan regime into a U.S. vassal state, might seem, at first glance, a good example of this unilateral approach in successful action but, as will be shown, this is not really the case.

What I term left-wing category errors, with particular but not exclusive reference to Venezuela, include the following:

• Brian O’Boyle stating that “Trump’s MAGA project is designed to reassert the power of a declining hegemon… to make the world “great again” for the U.S. ruling class”. Vis-à-vis the attack on Venezuela, the U.S. ruling class, O’Boyle writes, has made a “calculation that the U.S. can reassert control over an important continent [South America], capture some much needed resources and weaken the role of China in the region.” O’Boyle concludes that Trump’s programme “represents a brutal ruling class turning to ever more brutal tactics to secure their own interests.”
• Referring to continental policy more generally, Susan Watkins concurring: “In Latin America [Trump] is defending and extending the capitalist system against hold-out leftist regimes, and so advancing American economic, political and ideological interests.“
• William Camarco and Frederick Mills crediting the Trump regime with “a strategic project whose assault on Venezuela has broader geopolitical implications”.
• Logan McMillen going so far as to attribute to Trump “a coherent project of global enclosure” in relation to both Venezuela and Iran.
• Charlie Lywood attributing Trump’s (now perhaps paused) drive to take over Greenland to the U.S.’s desire, in the context of imperial rivalry with China in particular, to access rare earths (minerals vital for large swatches of industry, discussed further below) and to assure domination of new navigation routes opened up by shrinking Arctic ice.
• Guy Laron interpreting Trump’s attacks on Venezuela and Iran as strategic responses to China’s near-monopoly of rare earths, creating countervailing leverage over China by controlling its access to the discounted, sanctions-busting oil previously supplied to China by both Venezuela and Iran (though he concedes that, taken together, the two countries only accounted for 17-18 per cent of Chinese oil imports in 2025).

These claims rest on two assumptions: first, that there is a cohesive U.S. ruling capitalist class capable of making such calculations and agreeing on such tactics and, second, that the U.S. state serves as the agent of that class. Both assumptions are questionable.

On the issue of class cohesion, Doug Henwood (writing in 2021) has documented the growing fractures and frictions within U.S. capital, leading to what Salar Mohandesi describes as a lack of a “coherent global vision” on the part of the ruling class. In his book Rogue Elephant, Heideman documents how the U.S. ruling class only adopted a substantively common policy in the 1970s and 1980s when the labor movement was winning concessions from capital amidst falling rates of profit and a concerted fightback was seen as essential, the fightback becoming the global turn to neoliberalism. Once neoliberalism had done its job of disciplining labor and restoring or extending capital’s privileges, Heideman argues, U.S. corporations regressed to individual and sectoral lobbying.

The kleptocratic state

On the issue of who the state serves, Trump, to a greater extent than any U.S. president in the modern era, clearly pursues policies (and Cooley and Nixon are right about this) that are of direct, personal benefit to himself – primarily materially, but also in the sense of feeding a narcissistic ego (Melvin Goodman refers to his “extreme obsession with power, wealth, and self-importance”). This applies most recently to the war on Iran: there is strong circumstantial evidence that regime insiders were making stock and commodity market killings, as well as profiteering through event prediction platforms, by virtue of advance access to Trump’s market-shifting statements on the war. For example, a suspicious number of one-way bets on falling oil prices were made just before Trump claimed negotiations to end the war had been initiated, while large bets on a ceasefire were being made just before Trump announced it on April 7, 2026.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy (himself a blowhard warmonger) decries this as “mind-blowing corruption”, while economist Paul Krugman baldly states that people “close to Trump are trading based on national secrets” and that this amounts to treason. Trump is not alone in this: the Financial Times reports that a financial broker for Secretary of War Pete Hegseth sought to buy shares worth millions of dollars in armaments companies before the war commenced. The war may not have been started to facilitate such shenanigans but it was gleefully exploited for those ends. (Oil companies also made windfall gains from higher prices, a topic we will return to).

David Kirkpatrick estimates that this presidency has already been leveraged to ensure that Trump and his family have grossed over $4 billion. (There is an irony in the fact that a man whose business acumen was always a myth has finally found a sure-fire way of making vast amounts of money). That he does not always achieve his more ego-based goals (even when he thinks he has, as has proven the case in Iran) is not the point, which is that neither he nor the regime he dominates is a reliable representative of any fraction of U.S. capital beyond his own business interests and, to an extent, those of the “patronage system of oligarchs” (John Feffer’s phrase) assembled for the purposes of tribute extraction in return for governmental favors (such as rolling back regulation of AI and crypto).

One can interpret the resistance on the part of the US Supreme Court to Trump’s attacks on the independence of the Federal Reserve as an attempt to re-impose some unified ruling class interests on the presidency – a central bank that is independent of democratic oversight but attentive to the needs of neoliberal financial capital serves the needs of the overall capitalist order, not just particular electoral ambitions or regime cronies at a point in time. Trump’s hostility to that independence reflects his lack of concern for the welfare and stability of the system as a whole when it conflicts with his personal agenda

Of course the actions of previous U.S. regimes were also partly driven by the corrupt motivations of key actors (Cooley and Nixon elide this history). To take just one example, Vice-President Dick Cheney, serving under President George W. Bush, spearheaded the 2003 invasion of Iraq and saw a firm in which he had substantial interests – Halliburton – profit enormously, as Jeffrey St. Clair has documented, from no-bid, billion-dollar government contracts (rife with fraud and overcharging) for the supposed reconstruction of Iraq.

But Cheney’s greed and graft can be argued to have largely overlapped with the objectives of U.S. imperialism in controlling Middle East oil and the region more generally – U.S. and other Western oil companies previously shut out of the Iraqi market were able to re-enter (they are still there, albeit non-US companies now dominate), launch major new fields and reap massive profits. This happened at a time before the U.S. itself was transformed, through the exploitation of shale oil and liquefied natural gas, into a much more significant oil and gas producer.. This does not mean the Iraq war was a simple “war for oil” – Matt Huber highlights other factors, especially the perceived and straightforward need to demonstrate US capacity for hard power projection after 9/11 – but the initiation of new oil projects was, at the very least, a bonus.

No such convergence of interests can be assumed in the case of Trump and Venezuela. This argument may seem counterintuitive: does not Trump’s seizure of Venezuela’s president and its oil mark a logical and successful (for now) strengthening of U.S. corporate profits and imperial power? It can even be seen as a counter-example to the Iran war debacle. The issue is given added force by the claim that Venezuela possesses the world’s largest untapped oil reserves, potentially making it even more strategically significant than Iraq.

It is true that there is far more continuity in U.S. foreign policy than is sometimes acknowledged (again, the insistence of Cooley and Nixon on Trump’s claimed uniqueness in this regard is misplaced), especially when it comes to brutal military interventions abroad. But whether the control of Venezuelan oil is or was of particular value to U.S. capital, even to U.S. oil companies, is moot – it is certainly of limited value in the United States’ imperial rivalry with China or anyone else.

Venezuela and limited U.S. ambitions in Latin America The Venezuela heist

Venezuela presents an important test case for the argument that Trump does not seriously promote the interests of U.S. capital and empire. The intervention there is so commonly seen as advancing precisely those interests, whereas the aggression on Iran is already widely seen (including by many Foreign Affairs contributors) to have been a stupid and counterproductive failure, as well as a human and environmental catastrophe. In fact, far from demonstrating a rational, clear-eyed and successful resolve on the part of the U.S. ruling class and the U.S. state to shed multilateral constraints and directly achieve their core objectives, Venezuela reveals a pattern (equally evident vis-à-vis Iran) of short-term thinking, exaggerated claims, kleptocracy and the prioritization of violent photo-opportunities over substance.

In the first place John Ganz argues that Trump’s demands for U.S. companies to invest in Venezuela are unlikely to yield much return:

“Most oil companies today are not inclined toward large-scale production investments; they prefer to hoard cash and limit exposure. There are also internal tensions within the industry: the United States is now a major oil producer, and domestic producers have little incentive to finance projects that would undercut their own prices. Asking US oil interests to invest capital in Venezuela in order to depress global prices is, from their perspective, an irrational proposition.”

High oil and gas prices are good for fossil fuel companies, as was seen in 2022 as the outbreak of the war in Ukraine constricted supplies and the companies’ profits rose substantially. They also made windfall profits from the price rises engendered by the war on Iran. Why then did the share prices of those firms rise after the assault on Venezuela, the exploitation of whose largely untapped reserves might have been expected to depress prices? Most likely, Matt Huber suggests, because there was an expectation that a new (or newly disciplined) Venezuelan government would finally deliver to the companies compensation for property and investments expropriated or stymied due to past nationalizations and state restrictions.

There is certainly money to be made here, largely because the system of investor-state dispute settlement courts privileges corporate claims against governments. To take just one of many examples, oil company ConocoPhillips won nearly $9 billion in a World Bank arbitration court ruling against the Venezuelan government in 2019 (the company claims to be owed a total of $12 billion) with Trump reportedly promising that they would get much (if perhaps not all) of “their” money back.

These are non-trivial sums (and it would be surprising if Trump was not seeking a cut from any such payouts), but they do not presage large-scale investment in, and rehabilitation of, the Venezuelan oil industry. Low investment over past decades and associated infrastructural decay, partly the result of U.S. sanctions (these extend well beyond the oil sector alone), has left the industry in a sorry state. Bringing production back up to historical highs, even if it suited U.S. companies to do so, would demand at least a decade of large and steady investment, as well as overcoming the constraints posed by a shortage of essential dilutants. (If the ruinous environmental cost of all this was to be properly priced in then the bill would be even higher, but we can assume the oil industry is unconcerned with that).

Chris Morlock forecasts that:

“What’s actually lined up for Venezuela is not extraction, but asset stripping.  The firms positioned to “re-enter”Venezuela are overwhelmingly financial, not productive. Asset managers like BlackRock are positioned to absorb distressed sovereign and PDVSA [Venezuelan state oil company]-linked debt, restructure it, and turn future production into collateral streams rather than national revenue. U.S. and European oil majors are waiting not to build capacity but for production-sharing agreements, arbitration rulings, and debt-for-equity swaps that cap output and guarantee rents.”

An output cap would avert the threat of lowered prices reducing the profitability of existing production, especially in the U.S. Trump may, as Brian O’Boyle argues, want “cheap energy to bring down the costs for ordinary Americans” (though his Iran war did the opposite), but it is not what the oil industry wants and it is likely not what consumers are going to get. And it is not as if Trump cares that much for U.S. consumers: his tariffs cost the average household $1,000 last year. This is all, of course, an outrageous rip-off of Venezuelans: the US has stolen stocks of Venezuelan oil, is selling it and placing the returns in Qatari bank accounts, while telling Venezuela what it can and cannot do with its share.

But this thievery does not equate to the transformational investment and output surge Trump has bloviated about, and, from the point of view of geopolitical rivalry, it does not give the U.S. any substantial new leverage over China, which has limited dependence on Venezuelan oil – just 4 per cent of Chinese oil imports last year came from Venezuela (albeit that was 61 per cent of all Venezuelan oil). Likewise Trump’s claim that India will substitute Venezuelan for Russian energy is probably hype.

Shields, caveats and cinematic action

Cuba is severely threatened by the U.S. blocking its access to existing Venezuelan production, and by fresh US sanctions, and this constitutes another crime, but it is, sadly, of limited geopolitical significance (despite the potential political win it offers to the anti-Cuba zealots within the U.S. administration). If, as Susan Watkins suggests, “Cuba is the prize” then that only betrays the U.S. regime’s limited geopolitical ambitions. Trump’s new Shield of the Americas grouping of right-wing Latin American and Caribbean leaders, seemingly an indication of wider ambitions, got off to an inauspicious start at the inaugural summit in March 2026 when Trump told the leaders that he did not have time to learn their “damn language” while Secretary of War Hegseth proclaimed that he only spoke “American”. These leaders can swallow the insults and have no problem backing regime change in Caracas and Havana, and facilitating the gung-ho U.S. mass murder of people on fishing boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific by claiming they were targeting narco cartels, especially when they serve to bolster the authoritarian reach of regimes like that of Ecuador. But that is as far as it goes.

Limited measures like forcing a Chinese port company out of the Panama Canal and restrictions on Chinese firms operating in Venezuela itself notwithstanding, the odds are long that most Latin American countries will significantly limit Chinese influence in their countries when Chinese trade and investment is crucial for even the hard right governments of Argentina and El Salvador. The so-called ‘Donroe Doctrine’, a supposed update of the Monroe Doctrine that sought to block rival powers to the U.S. from enjoying influence in the Western hemisphere, is accurately described by Jared O Bell as “foreign policy as performance, driven by spectacle and attention rather than strategy or governance”. It is not, in other words, a serious imperialist project.

Is geopolitical significance rescued by the fact that seizing Venezuelan oil ensures its sale (in whatever quantities) will be denominated in dollars? Since 2018 Venezuela had been selling oil to China denominated in renminbi, thus arguably threatening the dollar’s seigniorage position in the global economy, which obliges other countries to fund the U.S. trade deficits and debt by acquiring dollars. The attack on Venezuela might be seen as an attempt to nip such threats in the bud. But, again, this makes little sense as an erratic and aggressive U.S. is only encouraging countries, including those in the EU, to hedge against the dollar and transact more business in other currencies, as well as to hold a greater proportion of their reserves in non-dollar form. Ironically, Trump’s own promotion of crypto currencies potentially further erodes dollar hegemony

The dollar, as Costas Lapavitsas shows, remains the dominant world currency but the assault on Venezuela did that dominance no favors. The war on Iran has done it even fewer favors – as Iran accepted payment in renminbi/yuan for passage of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, the Bloomberg financial news agency first posited the rise of the petroyuan as a serious alternative to the petrodollar, while later concluding even more dramatically that “The Iran war just broke the petrodollar”.

Caveats with regard to Venezuela are, to be fair, in order. One is that critical raw materials other than oil (including rare earths, 17 metallic elements that are deployed in everything from smartphones and wind turbines to military hardware) that lie underneath Venezuelan soil are of interest to the U.S., though access to these could easily have been negotiated with the Venezuelan government without the need for military intervention.

A second caveat is that Chevron, of all the oil majors, might well boost its production and launch new ventures in Venezuela because it is the one U.S. company that still has significant capital and infrastructure already embedded in the country.

A third caveat is that the industry players may be protesting too much, exaggerating the difficulty of operating in Venezuela in order to build a stronger case for government support. The U.S. Export-Import Bank (EXIM) is in the process of being tapped for such support in the form of export credit guarantees that would minimize the risk for oil companies entering or re-entering Venezuela. The risk, as per the neoliberal playbook, would be transferred to the U.S. taxpayer. Still, even extensive state incentives are unlikely to prompt the companies to produce in such quantities as to undercut their prices and profit margins.

It is, in summary, difficult to see the assault on Venezuela as a truly serious attempt to open up new investment opportunities and substantively combat rivals such as China. What then did drive Trump’s actions? Greed, as Cooley and Nixon would predict, surely plays a key role. Some of the proceeds of Venezuelan oil sales will doubtless flow into Trump Inc’s pockets (funneling the revenues through Qatar hardly instils hope of transparency), and so, in all probability, will pay-offs from those corporations that succeed in collecting arbitration judgements against the Venezuelan state. Even if it were fully feasible, the development of Venezuela’s massive oil reserves is a long-term project that would be of little interest to a president obsessed with quick, large paybacks and immediate, lavish praise.

As Robert Kuttner observes, “Trump’s trademark is abrupt violent action that plays well on TV” (he probably thought that would also apply when attacking Iran). Or, in the words of John Ganz again:

“Ultimately, I think it’s worth looking at the whole episode from a propaganda standpoint. As Trump himself would likely put it, the invasion of Venezuela looked cinematic: clean, tactically impressive, and visually compelling. This is the model they seem intent on repeating – producing discrete tactical vignettes that look powerful and decisive to their audience. This is precisely what many American reactionaries fantasize about.”

Is it what members of the U.S. ruling class (however unified or fractured) fantasize about? At a personal level doubtless some of them do, but is this type of regime behavior in their interests as a class? What Trump has done in Venezuela certainly does not run contrary to their short-term interests – some (financial vulture funds, the oil majors at the margin) will make money, others (like the powerful tech barons) will be more or less unaffected. But it hardly represents a serious class project i.e., part of a concerted attempt to advance the long-term interests of U.S. capital over and against rival powers and interests. Cooley and Nixon are right to characterise Trump’s regime as kleptocratic, not strategic.

What Trump has done in Venezuela certainly does not run contrary to their short-term interests…But it hardly represents a serious class project i.e., part of a concerted attempt to advance the long-term interests of U.S. capital over and against rival powers and interests. Greed, grievance and perversity Loot and narcissism

The reality of Trump 2.0 is that, in all probability and for the most part, there is no strategy – at least not a national one, and not a coherent class one either. Rather, there is just a scatter-gun set of actions, many reversed or abandoned, designed to immediately gratify, materially and psychologically. What we have, in the words of Farrel Corcoran, is “a massive agglomeration of rackets and scams led by a racketeer-in-chief”, who also wildly pursues ego-boosting adventures. One glaring example of the rackets in action is Trump’s decision to allow Japanese Nippon Steel take over U.S. Steel, in exchange for Trump being granted a so-called golden share, allowing him veto power over investment plans and other board decisions; to be clear, this share went to Trump personally, not to the US government.

Of course within the administration there are factions pursuing different agendas – from a return to “sensible” liberal imperialism, to a sustained focus on combatting China (see below), to full-blown fascism (which some in the leadership lean towards but hopefully lack the coherence and ambition to thoroughly implement). But the overarching theme and the bottom line are best characterized as corruption and egomania.

Trump prizes loot, fawning tributes (witness the way in which cabinet members and visiting foreign leaders have to feed what Goodman terms his “pathological narcissism” by lavishing praise upon him, his obsession with the Nobel Peace Prize, and his placing his own image and signature on newly issued currency), and the settling of personal grudges. From the point of view of the empire, the approach is almost certainly perverse; Ryan Cooper goes so far as to christen Trump the “wrecker of American empire”. Or, as Rafael Behr puts it, “Making Trump feel great is the undoing of American greatness” (though greatness is not really the right word).

Trump has unnecessarily alienated Western allies (even some on the far right, who have noted how Trump’s endorsement did Orban no favors in the Hungarian election ), themselves hypocrites who drew the line at threats to Greenland but backed the genocide in Gaza. They were still mostly prepared, initially at least, to back the U.S. attack on Iran before retreating when their help was demanded reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s push to acquire Greenland may have itself been driven by greed – long-time crony Ronald Lauder has extensive business interests there, with Bezos and Zuckerberg amongst the many others with eyes on what wealth can be extracted from the territory, as well as dreams of establishing libertarian techno-cities.

As mentioned earlier, left-wing writers tend to attribute the Greenland gambit to an imperial desire to access rare earths and other critical minerals, and to take advantage of navigation routes newly developed by diminishing Arctic ice. These are understandable goals from the point of view of U.S. imperialism, and a global race for critical raw materials is certainly ongoing, but was Trump’s petulant demand for ownership a rational means of pursuing those goals? The resources and the routes could have been secured through negotiations that would not have so alienated hitherto staunch allies, indeed in a way that could have wrung concessions from them. The negotiated option may now have been turned to, but the damage is done.

If Greenland (on top of already chaotic and unpredictable trade tariff attacks) represented an alarm bell for Western elites, as (belatedly at least) did the destabilization of the global economy brought about by the war on Iran, for many ordinary people across the world the slaughter in Gaza has become the red line issue of our age, albeit a slaughter backed by U.S. policy that Trump inherited rather than initiated. In 2023, the Financial Times quoted a senior G7 diplomat regarding Gaza: “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South … Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.” Trump’s innovation has been to turn the criminal tragedy into a grisly real estate opportunity, with the very real prospect of billions of “reconstruction” dollars being siphoned off to he and his cronies, exemplifying again his malignant penchant for graft and self-aggrandizement.

Unhinged elites

It is quite possible that Trump’s mindset is shared by some members of the ruling class itself who can no longer think beyond violent short–term gratification: to quote Doug Henwood again, much of this class seems consumed by “wanton money lust” at the expense of strategic consideration of their longer-term interests. Salar Mohandesi suggests that in previous eras, “The fractions that made up the U.S. ruling bloc did not simply wish to enrich themselves” – that they probably, on average, thought about more than immediate gratification. Paul Heideman makes the point that the briefly cohesive U.S. ruling class of the 1970s and 1980s was willing to absorb some pain (such as higher interest rates) in order to achieve their longer-term goals of rolling back gains made by workers.

Where a longer-term perspective does now exist it is one, in some important cases, in which outright lunacy has been embraced and ignorance celebrated. Peter Thiel – Silicon Valley multi-billionaire; head of military-technology behemoth and genocide-enabler Palantir (whose software was responsible for the bombing of a school in the first day of the war on Iran, causing the death of over 175 people, most of them young girls); close friend of Jeffrey Epstein; mentor to JD Vance – raves about Armageddon and the Antichrist, whom he thinks might be Greta Thunberg. Thiel protégés are running Trump’s policy towards AI, which amounts to the abolition of regulation and ethical oversight. (Thiel himself is determined to live forever and finances research into anti-ageing medicines, including the potential of transfusing young people’s blood into his veins.)

Where a longer-term perspective does now exist it is one, in some important cases, in which outright lunacy has been embraced and ignorance celebrated.

White supremacist Elon Musk, after a stint wreaking havoc upon the U.S. public service, posits madcap plans to establish colonies on Mars and the moon. At a more mundane, but still startlingly ignorant, level Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist billionaire and Trump advisor, prattles idiotically about how introspection (seemingly invented by Freud) is the enemy of progress – Musk thinks empathy plays that role. Matt McManus asks: “How did people so deeply unethical, so opposed to basic human ideas that they view empathy as a social evil and introspection as a waste of time, come to wield power and influence over American society?”

That they wield such power is indeed alarming, but it is not necessarily in the best interests of empire – even imperialists can benefit from occasional empathy and introspection, at least in the sense of working out what others might be thinking and pausing for thought before taking action.

Trump is driving established guardians and defenders of empire (Foreign Affairs is their house journal) to the edge of reason with his rapacity, fecklessness and petulance. Robert Kagan, a neoconservative who has a long record of supporting US militarism, laments that “Washington’s conduct in the Iran war is accelerating global chaos and deepening America’s dangerous isolation”. Israel, however, is pleased that its reckless and genocidal drive for land-grabbing and regional hegemony is supported (spurred on by an influential Christian Zionist lobby, some of whose dingbats see Middle East war as a means of hastening the “end times” and the return of Christ). This is so long as Trump can share the credit for vicious stunts, however ill thought-through, like attacking Iran – a short bombing campaign in 2025 and the large-scale disaster of 2026.

There is, however, a potentially sharp tension here between Trump’s preening and pillaging proclivities: Trump wants to continue leeching money and toys for himself off the Gulf monarchies. But they are, with the exception of the seemingly more belligerent Saudi Arabia, unhappy with how his ego-slaking antics vis-à-vis Iran endangered their security and prosperity together with their images as safe sites for investment and tourism.They are also displeased with their past mediation efforts (in the case of Qatar and Oman) having been duplicitously used as cover for U.S. and Israeli war plans. They may have been accepting of attacks on Iran once the die was cast, but this war has been a catastrophe for them, with potentially serious long-term implications for their relationships not only with Trump but with the U.S. as a whole. They may not be the only countries that end up wondering whether hosting U.S. bases is, as advertised, a security guarantee or, rather, a dangerous liability.

Previous presidents have been stupid and suffused with greed, have even suffered mental instability or cognitive decline (Reagan springs to mind), but, to take the most recent example, Biden’s senility probably mattered little because his regime was staffed with long-term and loyal servants of empire drawn from what Heideman calls “the corporate foreign policy planning network”. Trump, who is himself showing signs of derangement (St. Clair diagnoses “hubristic madness” in reference to the Iran aggression), is surrounded by a plethora of grifters, lackeys, frat boys, religious wackos who wish to construct a theocratic state, delusional ethno-nationalists and obvious idiots. (Some of these chancers were reportedly keeping him ‘informed’ about the war on Iran through 2-minute daily videos of US strikes, omitting any mention of Iranian responses). Such people have always sought to influence governments but their path is significantly smoothed when the heart of the government itself is concerned only with greed and ego i.e., when there is little or no coherent project to advance the greater good of the ruling class.

The turn to China and the fate of empire Stable partners

Confronted with Trump’s unpredictable and erratic shakedowns and smash-and-grabs, countries increasingly look more favorably on powers that are more capable of strategic thought and action, China especially, because they are seen as more stable and reliable partners. To give just one example, China appears to have played a behind-the-scenes role in negotiating the U.S.-Iran ceasefire. There is the added bonus that China is unlikely to come out with bizarre accusations of white genocide in South Africa, the description of other countries as ‘shit holes’, and the like – trivial issues in their own right but indicative of the contrast between the U.S. and China when it comes to sensible diplomacy.

China’s emerging leadership in many areas of cutting edge technology and in the shift to renewable energy enhances its attractiveness to partner countries. For example, China makes 80 percent of the world’s solar panels and its offer to Cuba provides that country a possible lifeline in the face of the U.S. energy embargo. China has also taken a decisive lead in the electric vehicle market. In a period where the dangers of fossil fuel dependency have been starkly illustrated, the advantages of this model (and of working with it) are obvious. Chinese green technology manufacturing investments now span 54 countries and are growing exponentially. (Unfortunately, a short-term consequence of the war on Iran has been a resurgence of coal usage across Asia).

A poll, carried out by Politico in February 2026 of 2000 respondents in each of France, Germany, Canada and the UK, found majorities heavily favoring cooperation with China over the U.S. Any such poll in the Global South would undoubtedly find even larger majorities leaning towards China. An article in Foreign Affairs, written in a tone of now-typical melancholy for this pro-imperialist journal, is headlined “America Has Lost the Arab World: Wars in Gaza, Iran, and Elsewhere Have Sunk Washington’s Reputation – Maybe for Good”.

The claim by Ross Babbage that Trump is “displaying a surprisingly deep strategic logic… [by] working to isolate Beijing and Moscow from their international partners” is risible. John Feffer is much closer to the truth when he laments that “If the Chinese had managed to install a real Manchurian Candidate [a brainwashed stooge secretly serving Chinese interests] in the White House, it couldn’t have done a better job than Donald Trump”. (supporters of Ukraine commonly prefer to depict Trump as a stooge of Russia). A disconsolate (is there any other sort now?) A CFR researcher writes that “Chinese President Xi Jinping is getting the United States he always wanted”.

The truth is that Trump seeks to serve no interests but his own… But it is also true that he is less consistently bellicose towards China than many U.S. anti-China elements would like…

The truth is that Trump seeks to serve no interests but his own, closely following Tony Soprano’s dictum on the endless hustle, though with even less of a long-term vision than a typical mafia boss. But it is also true that he is less consistently bellicose towards China than many U.S. anti-China elements would like, not least the notoriously hawkish Heritage Foundation, which illustrates the limits of that body’s over-hyped influence when it comes to foreign policy. Trump’s massively increased U.S. military budget does not address the structural weaknesses of that bloated military (a military that started running out of missiles after a few days bombing Iran).

The U.S. military’s reliance on Chinese rare earth minerals is strategically crucial. Building an F35 fighter jet demands some 400 kilograms of rare earths, a nuclear submarine 4,200 kilograms; rare earths are vital also for the manufacture of Tomahawk missiles (of the sort deployed against Iranian schoolgirls) and various other military assets.  China accounts for an estimated 60 percent of all the world’s rare earth deposits and for 90 percent of the separation and refining capacity necessary to transform them into usable product. Western companies lag far behind in this regard. While there is a concerted U.S. drive to secure access to non-Chinese rare earths and other critical raw materials—an unusually long-term project inherited and sustained by the Trump administration—the challenge of closing the gap is substantial.

Imperial rivalry?

The latest U.S. National Security Strategy (correctly described by Juan Cole as exhibiting “crackpot logic” on issues like the claimed “civilizational erasure” of Europe) does not depict China as a military rival at all, and the same is true for Russia, which welcomed the new U.S. strategy. Russia also welcomed the potential diversion of U.S. military resources from Ukraine to Iran as well as the extra $10 billion per month it (Russia) earned courtesy of oil prices jacked up by the Iran war as the U.S. lifted its sanctions on those Russian exports. The war also saw the U.S. drawing some military resources away from eastern Asia, thereby weakening the U.S.military’s stance towards China at the same time as China’s own military power is growing apace.

China is certainly seen as a rival in many respects, as the feverish chase for critical minerals and other resources demonstrates. However, even on the economic front, Trump has typically backed down on tariffs and other issues, such as allowing the sale of advanced AI components to China, in response to Chinese pushback, including China’s blocking the supply of those rare earths. China, in short, does not lend itself to the bullying, blackmail and photo-op aggression Trump has sought to wield against other countries, and a cautiously cooperative modus vivendi may now be emerging.

History cannot be reduced to the strengths and weaknesses of individual leaders, but conjunctural factors…matter within the context of underlying, structural forces and trends. That the U.S. has a fractured and partially unhinged ruling class matters.

History cannot be reduced to the strengths and weaknesses of individual leaders, but conjunctural factors (such as the state of a country’s ruling class, and the nature of its leadership) matter within the context of underlying, structural forces and trends. That the U.S. has a fractured and partially unhinged ruling class matters. Trump also matters: that is bad news for people living in the U.S. and those at the receiving end of bombs and missiles in Iran, Lebanon and elsewhere, as well as for the 45 million extra people around the world that the World Food Programme estimated were being driven into acute hunger as a result of rising energy and fertilizer costs caused by the war on Iran (and subsequent blockades).

But it is not as if Trump has taken over and transformed a hitherto peaceful and benign U.S. state apparatus, and it is likely that an alternative U.S. government (had Kamala Harris won the 2024 election, for example) would be pursuing a more consistently hostile and confrontational approach towards Russia and China. What Cooley and Nixon fear most is that the best interests of the U.S. empire are not being well served by the current kleptocracy, indeed that they are being actively undermined, not least by that relative lack of belligerence towards what they see as the main enemies based in Moscow and Beijing. That the U.S. empire is being weakened by a profoundly corrupt and narcissistic regime, and that the world is (for now at least) being spared a concerted U.S. drive to war with Russia and/or China, are sources of consolation in otherwise bleak times. The chaos, crudity and violence of the empire under Trump 2.0 has significantly contributed to the erosion of U.S. hegemony in the world and it will be difficult for subsequent administrations to reverse that.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Trump White House; modified by Tempest.

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We have entered a new epoch of global capitalism. It is characterized by crisis, imperial rivalry, authoritarian nationalism, and episodic, explosive resistance from below. The Trump administration’s brief year of misrule has brought all these to a head, particularly with its war on Iran. That war has put a definitive end to Washington’s imperial order of free trade globalization that it constructed within its bloc after World War II and expanded globally after the Cold War. Now the U.S. is a predatory imperialist state out for its own interests against nominal allies, rivals, regional powers, and subject nations.

Trump’s rise to power, like that of other authoritarian nationalists, did not come out of the blue. The electoral successes of the Right are the product of capitalism’s multiple crises and the establishment parties’ inability to overcome them. Their failure has triggered political polarization to the right and left. Given the revolutionary Left’s decline and reformist parties’ incapacity to deliver when in power, the new Right, in the form of authoritarian nationalism, has been the principal beneficiary. But their program of austerity, bigotry, and scapegoating has also failed to address capitalism’s systemic crises, undercutting their ability to secure hegemony and impose stable rule. As a result, political instability is the order of the day throughout the world.

These conditions have triggered wave after wave of resistance from below. But so far this resistance has been episodic and unable to win, largely because of the decomposition of class, social, and political organizations to sustain struggle and pose an alternative to the establishment parties and the Right. Nonetheless, these struggles open opportunities to rebuild the infrastructure of resistance, cohere a militant minority, and reconstruct a revolutionary Left for the 21st century.

Capitalism’s global slump

Capitalism is beset by multiple systemic crises from climate change to mass migration and pandemics like COVID. The other two, which are the most important ones for shaping our new epoch, are the global economic slump and the return of inter-imperial rivalry. The 2008 economic crisis triggered the Great Recession, which brought an end to the long neoliberal boom that began in the 1980s.

While capitalism survived, its recovery has been characterized by low profitability and slow growth, punctuated by recessions and weak recoveries. The heartlands of the system, from the U.S. to Europe and Japan, are either growing at a modest rate or are stagnant. As far as the U.S. is concerned, only the high-tech companies’ massive investment in AI data centers and the accompanying stock market bubble have kept the economy growing. But that is now in jeopardy as a result of the war with Iran. Even China, which was key to the global recovery after the Great Recession, has seen its growth drop from 10 percent a year in the 2000s to under 5 percent today.

As far as the U.S. is concerned, only the high-tech companies’ massive investment in AI data centers and the accompanying stock market bubble have kept the economy growing. But that is now in jeopardy as a result of the war with  Iran.

Inflation in the wake of the COVID recession has forced the U.S. and Europe to maintain relatively high interest rates, hampering investment and growth. On the other hand, overinvestment, cutthroat competition, and low profitability have fueled deflation in China, forcing its corporations to seek out profitable sites for investment internationally through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), while exporting their surplus products and in the process undercutting their competition everywhere.

The combination of U.S. high interest rates and Chinese dumping has triggered a double crisis in the Global South. First, high interest rates have hammered indebted countries, which are now facing the prospect of another debt crisis like the one they suffered in the 1980s. Already, creditors are demanding austerity measures from governments in the Global South. Second, Beijing’s exports have undermined the Global South’s domestic manufacturing base, reducing it to exporting raw materials to China for China’s ongoing expansion.

Thus, we are in a global slump. It will continue until a deeper crisis clears out all the uncompetitive capital in the world economy. Up to today, the main capitalist states have stopped this from happening. They have bailed out corporations they consider too big to fail, fearing mass bankruptcies and a 1930s-style depression. That has propped up the so-called zombie corporations. These are so unprofitable that they are forced to take out ever more loans to repay interest on their existing loans. As a result, the system limps along.

By contrast, ruling classes have imposed austerity measures on their workers, cutting social welfare spending and attacking wages and benefits. As a result, class inequality has deepened throughout the world. At the same time, states have turned to protectionism and other beggar-thy-neighbor policies to protect their capitals against other states and their capitals.

The return of inter-imperial rivalry

Thus, the global slump is intensifying the second key crisis—inter-imperial rivalry, especially between the two biggest economies in the world, the U.S. and China. Washington no longer oversees the unipolar world order as it did after the Cold War. The long neoliberal boom produced new centers of capital accumulation from China to Russia and a host of regional powers.

Washington no longer oversees the unipolar world order as it did after the Cold War. The long neoliberal boom produced new centers of capital accumulation from China to Russia and a host of regional powers.

The U.S. attempt to defend its increasingly challenged hegemony through wars in Afghanistan and Iraq backfired, leading to disastrous defeats. On top of that, the Great Recession hammered the U.S., Europe, and Japan, in contrast to China, which used massive state investment to keep its economy booming, and with that, all its tributary economies expanding from Russia to Australia and Brazil.

These developments led to the relative decline of the U.S. against its rivals, especially China, ushering in today’s asymmetric multipolar world order. The U.S. remains the largest economy with the biggest military and greatest geopolitical influence. Its dollar remains the world’s reserve currency, it oversees an empire of 800 military overseas bases, and uses that power to bully allies, rivals, and so-called rogue states.

But it is no longer unrivaled. China is now a potential peer competitor, while Russia, with its vast nuclear stockpile and fossil capitalist economy, is an outsized regional power with global pretensions. In this context, regional powers exploit conflicts between the great powers to pursue their own interests. Iran, for instance, oversaw the so-called Axis of Resistance, which it used to build regional imperial influence against the U.S., the Arab states, and Israel.

Faced with this new order, successive U.S. administrations have abandoned Washington’s post-Cold War strategy of superintending capitalism by incorporating all states into a neoliberal world order of free trade globalization. Obama initiated a shift toward great power competition with China through his Pivot to Asia.

In his first term, Trump enshrined great power rivalry as Washington’s new grand strategy, naming specifically China and Russia. His America First foreign policy put what he perceived to be U.S. interests over and above those of both friends and foes. He began to abandon free trade for protectionism, particularly by raising tariffs on China. But his administration’s internal divisions, hostility to traditional allies, propensity to make transactional deals with rivals, and general incompetence prevented its coherent implementation.

The Biden administration retained Trump’s focus on great power but abandoned his unilateralism. Instead, it tried to rebuild Washington’s alliance structure, especially NATO, and unite its vassals against China and Russia in defense of the so-called rules-based international order. It paired that with strategic protectionism against Beijing and an industrial policy to ensure U.S. dominance in high-tech industries, especially microchips, which it wanted to onshore from Taiwan.

Biden capitalized on Russia’s imperialist war on Ukraine to rally NATO behind Kyiv’s national liberation struggle. His aim was not to defend Ukraine’s right to self-determination but to weaken Russia. However, his administration fatally discredited its claims to support international law, human rights, and oppressed nations by championing, bankrolling, and arming Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

Waves of resistance

The global slump, growing inter-imperial rivalries, and capitalism’s other systemic crises have combined to destabilize societies around the world. These conditions have set off waves of resistance from below by various classes, from the petty bourgeoisie to the working class and peasantry. The movements have been politically heterogeneous, spanning the gamut from right-wing small business revolts to uprisings of workers and the oppressed.

Most important for the Left have been the progressive class and social struggles throughout the world from the Arab Spring revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa to the Red State Teachers Revolt, Black Lives Matter, and Palestine solidarity in the U.S. These movements have been the largest since the 1960s and have a class content more like that of the 1930s, expressing rage against the deep economic and social inequalities of our epoch.

But they all have been hampered by the weaknesses inherited from the previous period of defeat and retreat. These include everything from the collapse of the revolutionary Left to the dramatic drop in trade union density and retreat of social movements from membership-based groups to grant-funded NGOs with all their golden chains.

As a result, workers and the oppressed have gone into struggle bereft of class, social, and political infrastructures of dissent. That has impacted the character of movements today. They tend to seemingly come out of nowhere and explode in size, challenging capital and the state. Their demands are usually negative in character, like the slogan of the Arab Spring, which was “the people want the fall of the regime,” and lack a positive alternative. In the words of one analyst, they are revolutions without revolutionaries.

That makes them vulnerable in all sorts of ways. The states and capitals can crush them with brute force as the regimes succeeded in doing throughout the Middle East and North Africa. They can also co-opt them as the Ford Foundation did with key leaders of Black Lives Matter. Reformist parties can also channel uprisings into the dead-end of electoral attempts to use the capitalist state to overcome systemic crises and inequalities. The movements can also dissipate in demoralization over the difficulties of winning victories faced with the intransigence of the state and capital.

That said, more and more activists have drawn lessons from these experiences that it’s necessary to build more serious class, social, and political organizations capable of sustaining struggles for positive demands and reforms on the way to systemic change.

Political polarization to the right and left

Global capitalism’s crises and the waves of resistance have intensified political polarization to the right and to the left. The various regimes and parties of the capitalist classes offer no solutions either to the system’s intractable problems or popular grievances. Undemocratic regimes have turned to increasing authoritarianism to enforce their rule in countries like China and Russia. In bourgeois democracies, angry electorates have voted out capital’s traditional parties, searching for alternatives on the right and the left.

The chief beneficiary of this polarization has been the Right for obvious reasons. The revolutionary Left is far too weak to offer an alternative. The reformist Left has ridden the resistance to win elected office in various countries, but constrained by capitalism’s crisis and the intransigence of the capitalist class, their electoral strategy has been unable to deliver reforms to improve people’s lives. They have, at best, administered neoliberal capitalism with a human face or, worse, broken their promises and turned on their working-class base. The examples of this are legion, from Syriza’s betrayal of Greek workers to the collapse of the Pink Tide in Latin America.

The authoritarian nationalist politicians have reaped the rewards of disappointment with establishment and reformist parties. The Right’s parties represent at best a minority of capital but are mainly an expression of petty bourgeois radicalization. They have found a base in the atomized, defeated, and demoralized sections of the working class. As a result, authoritarian nationalist regimes have multiplied throughout the world, from Putin in Russia to Modi in India, Orban in Hungary, Kast in Chile, Milei in Argentina, and, of course, Trump in the United States.

But their “solutions” of class war, bigotry, and scapegoating, especially of migrants, have also failed to solve the system’s crises and address mass popular grievances from their own petty bourgeois base to the much larger popular classes. So, they too have not been able to establish stable regimes and have even been driven out of power. For instance, Hungarian voters recently voted Orban out of office. Authoritarian states also have faced resistance from below as well as other forces. President Xi Jinping faced a mass uprising against his brutal Zero-COVID policy, and Vladimir Putin faced a coup attempt by the Wagner Group.

In bourgeois democracies, when the new Right has faced governmental crises, some have been tempted to turn to authoritarian rule, like Brazil’s Bolsonaro, who tried to organize a coup after he lost the election to stay in power. He failed. In reality, few democracies have yet fallen to such seizures of power. Instead, the old capitalist parties have exploited the failure of the reformists and the Right to return to power, often by adopting elements of the authoritarian nationalists’ program, especially its attacks on migrants.

But such triangulation only confirms the arguments of the Right, giving them a new lease on life. With bourgeois rule unstable, states across the board are becoming more authoritarian, enforcing rule through coercion, not consent. At the same time, they are becoming more aggressive internationally, the great imperial powers in particular.

With bourgeois rule unstable, states across the board are becoming more authoritarian, enforcing rule through coercion, not consent. At the same time, they are becoming more aggressive internationally, the great imperial powers in particular. Trump’s authoritarian nationalism

The Trump administration is part of this global pattern of the rise of a new Right. Trump’s victory in the 2024 election was entirely the fault of the Democratic Party and its commitment to capitalism and imperialism. The Biden administration failed to address the system’s crises, oversaw the immiseration of workers through inflation, and carried out mass deportations. Abroad, it ramped up inter-imperial conflict and backed Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

Trump exploited disappointment with the Democrats, but still only managed to squeak out a narrow victory over Harris, winning around half of those who bothered to vote, only about 33 percent of the overall electorate. Like other authoritarian nationalists, he does not represent a capitalist consensus, but a rogue clique of billionaires and the radicalized petty bourgeoisie. And, at best, he won a weak mandate in the 2024 election.

But that does not make his administration any less vicious. Unlike his first term, Trump now has a coherent program in Project 2025 and a unified cabinet of sycophants that, despite their differences, support their leader, including his wildest impulses and without question. They are aggressively implementing their authoritarian nationalist project.

In the U.S., they have launched a class war, cutting taxes on the rich, firing government workers, stripping the rest of union rights, gutting social welfare, and deregulating the economy. They are carrying this out through classic divide-and-rule tactics, blaming the oppressed and scapegoating them, especially immigrants, for the system’s failures. He has poured $85 billion into ICE’s budget over the next four years to hire and unleash thousands of new agents to occupy cities and arrest hundreds of thousands of migrants, detain them in new concentration camps, and deport them back to their countries of origin

In a fit of irrationalism, Trump is also carrying out revenge on the deep state, slashing entire parts of the government bureaucracy essential for reproducing U.S. capitalism, like the National Institute of Health, and managing U.S. imperialism like the State Department. In place of professional managers, he is appointing right-wing hacks, ideologues,  and lackeys.

He’s extended this assault into the private sphere as well, targeting, for example, elite higher education, which trains future CEOs, scientists, professionals, and state managers, all personnel essential for U.S. capitalism and its state. He really seems to want to Make America Stupid Again.

Ripping up the imperial order

Abroad, largely in defiance of the capitalist class and state managers, Trump has ripped up the entire order that the U.S. built after World War II and expanded globally after the Cold War. His administration’s project is not isolationist, but one of predatory dominance in pursuit of its conception of U.S. interests against both allies and rivals. Trump’s representatives laid out this in their National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, and a series of speeches by JD Vance and Marco Rubio.

Their stated goal is to Make America Great Again by putting America First, definitively abandoning all their predecessors’ project of superintending global capitalism. In geopolitics, they are withdrawing from multilateral bodies like the UN and World Health Organization that the U.S. set up to oversee the world. Trump has even gutted funding for humanitarian aid programs like USAID that used to garner support from countries in the Global South. He dismissed those as corrupt welfare schemes, essentially abandoning any use of soft power.

In economics, he has abandoned free trade globalization, establishing a protectionist trade regime against both allies and rivals. But he has run into international and domestic opposition. China, unlike most other states, stood toe to toe with his administration, imposed crippling restrictions on its exports of processed rare earths, and left Trump no choice but to lower his tariffs.

In the U.S., the capitalist class and Trump’s own petty bourgeois base of farmers forced him to grant them carve-outs. And the Supreme Court ruled against his use of the International Emergency Powers Act to impose his tariffs, forcing the administration back to the drawing board to use other powers to maintain the new protectionism.

Finally, on the military front, the administration has doubled down on hard power, jacking up the Pentagon’s budget to over $1 trillion. And now Trump is proposing to raise it to $1.5 trillion. At the same time, his regime has retreated from enforcing global order. It is demanding that its nominal allies in Europe and Asia shoulder the burden of their own security so that the U.S. can focus on carving out a sphere of influence in Latin America through crude gunboat diplomacy for naked economic gain.

The goal of its new “Donroe Doctrine” is to lock the region under its dominion, crushing opponents, and pushing out China. Already, Trump bullied Panama into withdrawing from China’s BRI, carried out a coup in Venezuela to seize control of its oil, threatened to take over Greenland to establish bases and stake claim to the Arctic’s resources, and has imposed a brutal blockade on Cuba, threatening it with regime change to open it up for U.S. real estate capital.

While that sphere of influence is Trump’s top priority, he has three others—Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. In Europe, he is supporting the far Right to restore “white civilization” and imperialist pride, pressuring the EU to deregulate, and bullying NATO to increase its military spending and manage its own security, including against Russia. He has all but sold Ukraine down the river, conceding to Moscow its old sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.

In Asia, he has stated that he intends to maintain the status quo standoff with China, but he’s also hinted that he might cut a deal with Beijing to concede it a sphere of influence. And in the Middle East, he backs Israel to finish off Hamas in Gaza, impose a predatory “peace” there, and dismantle the rest of the so-called Axis of Resistance, including its headquarters in Iran. After that, Trump wants to expand the so-called Abraham Accords to normalize relations between Israel and the region’s regimes, all under the thumb of the U.S., not China and Russia.

Survival of the most vicious

With this project, the Trump administration has put the world on notice that it has abandoned the so-called rules-based order to advance its narrow economic interests without disguise. It is establishing a new world disorder where might makes right, the great powers struggle for dominance, and the weak, in the words of Thucydides, “suffer what they must.”

While other powers like the EU may pine for the rules-based order, they have no choice but to adapt to the pressure from the U.S. and other great powers to abide by their dog-eat-dog rules. In a stunning speech at the World Economic Forum, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney laid out the new global disorder in stark terms. He eulogized the old rules-based order. While he recognized that it was always a sham, he argued that at least there were some political and economic restraints on great powers.

But Trump, he noted, has laid waste to it and so-called middle powers like Canada must recognize that fact and respond accordingly, otherwise they “won’t be at the table but on the menu.” Whether he liked it or not, Carney argued, Canada has to put its imperial interests first. Already, he is advancing that project, increasing his state’s military budget, staking claims to the Arctic, and cutting economic deals with U.S. rivals like China. Other U.S. allies are doing the same. In a shocking example, Denmark actually made plans to deploy its troops to Greenland and blow up its airport runways to stop a U.S. invasion.

All states are adapting to Trump’s contest for the survival of the most vicious. The EU, NATO, and individual states, especially France and Germany, do not trust the U.S. and recognize that they have no choice but to stake out their own path. The European powers are cutting trade deals with China and Latin America in defiance of the U.S., jacking up their military budgets, and imposing austerity on workers with cuts to social welfare spending, wages, and benefits. Russia has already established a war economy to fuel its imperialist invasion of Ukraine. In Asia, Japan is doing the same. So is China, Washington’s key rival. We are thus in the midst of a new global arms race.

Iran—A turning point in world history

The so-called rules-based order was already in tatters in the wake of Russia’s imperialist war in Ukraine and the U.S. and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. And now with his war on Iran, Trump destroyed what remained of it. Flush with success after kidnapping Maduro in Venezuela and turning the remnants of his regime into a servant of U.S. imperialism, Trump thought he and Israel could do the same in Iran. Instead, it has blown up in his face with Tehran launching a regional war in response.

While the U.S. and Israel started this war together, they have different war aims. Trump had sought a Venezuela-style solution; he wanted to find a figure in the regime that would play the role Delcy Rodriguez did in Caracas and cut a deal to survive on the condition of obeying U.S. dictates. He hoped a reconfigured Iranian regime would then join the Abraham Accords along with the Arab states and normalize relations with Israel.

By contrast, Netanyahu intends to destroy the entire regime, balkanize the country, and wipe out its allies to ensure that none can pose any challenge to Israel’s regional hegemony. Thus, as Trump admitted, Israel undermined Washington’s goal by killing the Iranian leaders Washington hoped to cut a deal with. Unsurprisingly, Israel has paired its blitzkrieg in Iran with a new offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon to go with its ongoing genocide in Gaza and settlement expansion in the West Bank. It aims to carve out its own mini-empire—Greater Israel.

Of course, Israel pressured Trump to launch the war, but it did not sucker him into doing it. The tail does not wag the dog. Even Netanyahu ridiculed that idea in an interview with Sean Hannity. When Hannity said, “There are people that say, ‘Wow, the prime minister of Israel dragged him into it,” Netanyahu laughed. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Donald Trump is the strongest leader in the world. He does what he thinks is right for America.”

Thus, Trump launched the war for his own stupid reasons. He is no puppet of Israel. But he catastrophically miscalculated. Iran is not Venezuela; it is a battle-tested, theocratic regime with a loyal base in a minority of the population. It has carried out a regional war and repeatedly crushed every democratic uprising of its workers and the oppressed peoples. And it had been elaborately prepared not only to survive a U.S. and Israeli war but also to launch a devastating counter-attack.

Catastrophic consequences

So, when Trump started this war, Iran withstood the assault and responded by firing missiles and drones at Israel, all the Arab states, and even NATO powers. It attacked Turkey and  British bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia. And they shut down the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off shipment of oil and natural gas to the world. That sent fossil fuel prices spiraling upwards, threatening global economic growth and setting off inflation—the capitalist nightmare of stagflation.

And the danger to the world economy could get far worse if the conflict escalates. Already, when Israel struck Iran’s natural gas field, Tehran responded by attacking Qatar’s liquid natural gas (LNG)  processing plant in Ras Laffan, which supplies Asia with much of its LNG. That provoked Trump to tell Israel to refrain from further strikes. But the damage may have already been done. Qatar reports that it will take 3 to 5 years to repair its massive plant. One analyst said this will lead to the Armageddon scenario—the biggest oil and natural gas shock in history.

But the impact of the war will be even greater than that. Contrary to stereotypes, the importance of the region’s economy to the world extends far beyond fossil fuels. The Gulf states have transformed themselves into centers of industry, international travel, commercial shipping, and finance capital. The disruption of all this will be devastating for the system and, more importantly, for the working class and peasants of the world.

The war and the closure of the Strait are blocking the export of the region’s fertilizer industry. That will lead to shortages and drive up prices of fertilizer right as planting season starts over the next few months across the world. Farmers in the Global North may be able to stomach the costs and gobble up the bulk of the supply, but farmers in the Global South will be priced out of the market, suffer shortages, and produce lower crop yields. The combination of increased fertilizer and fuel costs will trigger a spike in food prices in the Global North and famine in the Global South.

The war is also blocking the region’s export of all sorts of fossil fuel byproducts that are essential for the global economy. For example, its plants produce naphtha, one of the key components for the global manufacturing of plastic, which corporations use for almost everything from packaging to cars and fighter jets. Another example is helium. It is essential for the manufacture of microchips, without which today’s high-tech economy can’t function.

Moreover, the region’s ports and airports are essential hubs for both international travel and commercial transit. Their disruption is causing all sorts of problems in the world economy. Even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens along with the airports, corporations will now distrust them as reliable hubs for transport and commerce, throwing into question their vast investments, infrastructure, and trade and travel routes.

Finally, the Gulf states like the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have turned themselves into major centers of international finance capital. They have used their funds to invest in all sorts of things, but especially AI data centers, not only in their region, but also in the United States. Now, companies will doubt the security of data centers in the Gulf states. And the Gulf states will have to pull back from their international investment and use their capital to rebuild their own infrastructure. Such a drawback will undercut the U.S. data center boom and could pop the high-tech bubble, the main prop for U.S. capitalism’s growth. Thus, the war is disrupting the whole system.

The logic of escalation

Trump has thereby stumbled into the biggest imperialist crisis since Iraq and potentially a far worse one. The U.S., Israel, and Iran, up until the ceasefire, were locked in a logic of escalation with no clear end in sight. The Iranian regime faced an existential threat and will fight to its death. It therefore expanded the war to force states throughout the region and world to compel the U.S. and Israel to stop it and prevent another one. No doubt they will be determined to build nuclear weapons after the war to deter any future attack.

Trump has thereby stumbled into the biggest imperialist crisis since Iraq and potentially a far worse one.

Iran’s counterattacks forced the U.S. and Israel to respond, prolonging what Trump had hoped would be a quick victory. Thus, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, Trump lost control of a spiraling war. And his decision to stage his own blockade of the Strait of Hormuz to cut off Iranian exports has intensified the conflict’s damage to the world economy.

Faced with this crisis, Trump relented, agreeing to a ceasefire with none of his goals achieved. Iran’s regime remains in power, it still has nuclear stockpiles, it retains significant missile and drone capacity to threaten attacks on the region, and it has promised to continue support for its regional allies in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen.

At this point, the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked, the talks are at stand still, and the world economy stands at the precipice of an even greater crisis. The Iranian regime clearly believes it can weather the standoff longer than the U.S.. While Trump clearly wants to cut a deal, he cannot accept one that further humiliates the U.S. Meanwhile, Israel is braying for more war in Iran and Lebanon.

Regardless of what happens, the U.S. is in the midst of a metastasizing economic, geopolitical, and military crisis. The world economy has been hammered. No one in the region can now trust the United States. All its military bases and defense systems have not protected its vassals like Saudi Arabia but have made them targets for attack. And no regime will risk normalizing relations with Israel against the wishes of the masses of the population in the region, who are now furious with the U.S. and Israel. That puts Trump’s Abraham Accords in jeopardy.

Trump has thoroughly alienated all of Washington’s allies, whom he kept in the dark about his plans to launch the war. Now, with the U.S. in crisis, none of them has agreed to bail Trump out. They all have refused to join his war and send ships to open the Strait of Hormuz. At this point, they want to keep out of it and have become increasingly critical of it. The German chancellor’s remark that Iran had humiliated the U.S. drove Trump in a fit of rage to threaten to withdraw all of Washington’s troops from Europe, threatening the entire NATO alliance.

Even worse for the U.S., Trump’s war has benefited Washington’s main rivals, Russia and China. In a desperate attempt to lower fossil fuel prices, Trump lowered sanctions on Russia’s oil exports. Putin has thus scored a victory, securing desperately needed funds to aid his ailing economy. That will enable him to escalate his imperialist war on Ukraine. Trump lowered sanctions on Russia even though it is aiding Iran by giving it military intelligence. Sensing his advantage, Putin even offered to suspend its intelligence sharing if the U.S. stops doing the same for Ukraine.

China is happy to see the U.S. bogged down in yet another catastrophic war. While it has lost oil and natural gas from Iran, it can, for now, draw on its huge fossil fuel reserves and can expand contracts for more supplies from Russia, further consolidating their “friendship without limits.” But China is not immune to the war’s consequences. It will find difficulties securing key materials for its manufacturing, the global slump will weaken its export markets that are its main engine of continued growth, and countries in its debt will find it ever more difficult to repay their loans, putting Chinese financial capital in jeopardy.

Trump’s intensifying domestic crisis

Trump’s war will intensify his domestic political crisis. Already deeply unpopular, he now faces splits in his MAGA leadership with figures like Tucker Carlson opposing the war. He has also alienated sections of his base that voted for him, believing naively that Trump would keep the U.S. out of “forever wars.” With no end in sight, this war dooms the Republican Party to defeat in the upcoming midterm elections, if they are free and fair. The Democrats will take the House, possibly the Senate, tie Congress up in hearings, block all legislation, and try to impeach Trump and members of his cabinet.

Trump knows that. So, he is turning to more and more authoritarian means to maintain power. He is trying to rig the election through gerrymandering and voter suppression, most recently with the Save America Act, which would effectively disenfranchise millions. The Supreme Court also helped Trump in its recent ruling that overturned Louisiana’s congressional map that afforded Black voters a majority in two districts. Their decision effectively guts the Voting Rights Act, risking a return to electoral white supremacy not seen since the Jim Crow era. Already, in a dangerous precedent, Louisiana has suspended the primary election to enable redistricting to the advantage of the GOP.

In an even more ominous sign, some on the right, like Bannon, have argued for Trump to deploy ICE at polling locations. Trump has already tested the water by deploying ICE to the airports across the country. Thus, U.S. norms of bourgeois democracy hang in the balance. Lest anyone think this to be an exaggeration, three new studies found that the U.S. is slipping toward an autocracy at astonishing speed.

Faced with this spiraling crisis, the Democratic Party spent the last year practically in hiding. They adopted James Carville’s “possum strategy”—literally playing dead when faced with a predator. While outliers like Bernie Sanders and AOC agitated for action against the billionaire class, the establishment Democrats bided their time, hoping Trump would punch himself out and discredit the GOP so that they could sweep the midterms. Then they could find some new corporate standard bearer like Gavin Newsom or JB Pritzker or even worse turn back to genocidaire, Kamala Harris, to win back the White House in 2028 and restore the status quo ante.

Truth be told, the Democratic Party did next to nothing to resist Trump until the Minneapolis mass strike against ICE. Only then did they challenge the funding of ICE and Homeland Security. But just like they have done with police, their demand was not for the abolition of ICE’s racist goon squad, but that its agents wear body cameras, get more training, and stop wearing masks. With those “reforms,” they have promised to grant ICE more funding! That should surprise no one since the Democrats have bankrolled DHS and ICE with billions since their creation in 2003. And, under Obama and Biden, they used ICE and Border Patrol to deport millions of people.

Their supposed opposition to Trump’s catastrophic war on Iran has been even more pathetic. Why? Because they share with the GOP U.S. imperialism’s determination since Iran’s 1979 revolution to topple the Islamic Republic. So, their initial objections were procedural—that Trump had not made the case for war, had not secured support from Congress under the War Powers Act, and had no plan or clearly stated goals. And their main concern is that Trump’s idiotic war has weakened U.S. imperialism and its capacity to fight China and Russia.

While some reformists in the party have denounced the war, they remain trapped in an imperialist party, which is both reactionary and incapacitated in a moment of emergency. As a result, despite the fact that the Democrats are likely to win the midterms, if the elections happen in any normal fashion, they remain deeply unpopular and offer no solutions to the system’s crises and popular grievances.

In resistance, there is hope

Unlike the Democratic Party, workers and the oppressed have risen up against Trump, producing a mass heterogeneous resistance. Some of its currents predate Trump’s presidency, like the Palestine solidarity movement, which persists despite state repression and hostility from liberal and Zionist forces. Most other currents have been galvanized by Trump’s unrelenting class and social attacks, particularly on ICE’s war on immigrants. All these converged in Minneapolis, culminating in a mass strike and protest that forced Trump to retreat, fire his commander of the Border Patrol, Greg Bovino, demote Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, and withdraw hundreds of ICE and Border Patrol agents.

That uprising against ICE was based on a developed infrastructure of resistance forged over the last couple of decades. That included the George Floyd uprising against police brutality, union organizing and strikes, immigrant rights struggles, and indigenous-led climate justice campaigns. But most parts of the country lack this infrastructure of resistance. And even there, the militant minority and revolutionary Left remain small as elsewhere. These hamper the organization and politics of the resistance.

Nevertheless, the struggle is forging new organizations and a new Left. The two main organized currents of the national resistance are Indivisible and May Day Strong. Indivisible was formed by two Democratic Party organizers who explicitly conceived the project as a means to galvanize its base in struggle and then turn it to elections to defeat Trump and Republicans. It is thus a popular front formation, wedding workers and the oppressed to a capitalist party in the hopes of securing liberal reforms.

It has staged three massive No Kings rallies. But, because of its ties to the Democratic Party, it has tended to exclude Palestine solidarity activists and has proved reluctant to even include opposition to the war on Iran. Its strategy is to turn the millions on its demonstrations into campaigners for the Democrats in the midterms and 2028 presidential elections. But, as we know from bitter experience, the Democrats are no alternative for the vast majority. Nevertheless, the people at those demonstrations are open to much more radical ideas and strategies.

The other formation, May Day Strong, was spearheaded by the Chicago Teachers Union. It has brought together unions, immigrant rights groups, other social movement organizations, and NGOs in a potential united front of working-class forces. It does include Indivisible and another liberal formation, 5051, and it is limited by the horizons of the left union bureaucracy. Nevertheless, it has put May Day back on the map, encouraged solidarity schools to prepare unions to stage political strikes against Trump, and pushed the slogan, “no work, no school, no shopping,” for this year’s May Day.

May Day Strong offers the Left a national vehicle to advance the argument for a general strike to challenge Trump’s increasingly authoritarian regime. Its explicit model is the South Korean strike that blocked a coup and toppled the government. That said, it does not exist in all cities and towns. It is also not immune from co-optation by the Democrats through the trade union officialdom’s alliance with the party’s reformist wing. And it is an ominous sign that Indivisible plays such a prominent role in its midst. Nonetheless, May Day Strong is an important strategic orientation for the revolutionary left in building the resistance. Our challenge is how to forge similar local formations aligned with the national coalition. It is our best shot to agitate for mass, independent working-class action to topple the Trump regime.

Rebirth of the revolutionary Left

This new epoch of crisis, imperialist rivalry, authoritarianism, and resistance is opening up space for the construction of a new socialist Left. Indeed, all political organizations are now growing from reformism to neo-Stalinism and revolutionary socialism. The struggle is on to shape a new generation’s politics, strategies, and tactics for an epoch of crisis and class struggle.

Tempest argues that the tradition of socialism from below offers the best way to fight here and now on the road to international socialism. We aim to embody these politics in an organization with branches that avoid the traps of the micro party that has paralyzed our forebears—ideological uniformity, sectarianism, ultraleftism, and organization building in isolation from the living struggle. Join us to build a socialist organization, forge new infrastructures of resistance, cohere a militant minority, and eventually found a revolutionary party. These are tall tasks, but necessary ones in our apocalyptic times.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

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Iran is passing through a phase of exceptional violence and intensity. In the wake of the genocide in Palestine and the large-scale destruction inflicted on Lebanon, the United States and Israel are also participating in the devastation of lives, bodies, territories, and vital infrastructures in Iran.There they have been targeting not only refineries and fuel depots, but also health facilities, water resources, energy systems, oil installations, schools, and other civilian spaces. In Minab, a girls’ school was obliterated and more than 168 were killed, among them Baloch children. This war has disrupted the very conditions of social reproduction, further deepened the vulnerability of the working classes. It has undermined the material basis of social autonomy, pushing struggles from below several steps backward, and reinforcing forms of state or social-driven ethno-nationalism. The rapid shift, within the space of a month, from Trump’s promise to “make Iran great again” to the threat of reducing the country to the “stone age” dispelled any remaining ambiguity about the imperial logic at work—a formula that unmistakably recalls the language of the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq.

This imperialist “external” violence, however, cannot be understood apart from the internal crisis through which the Islamic Republic has been attempting to reconstitute its authority. Since the 2022 uprising, following the police murder of the young Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini, the Islamic Republic has continuously sought, in every war and geopolitical crisis, ways to restore some of the authority and respectability it has lost.

The paradox of imperialist assault and regime legitimacy

The war waged by the genocidal Israeli colonial power against the Palestinians after October 7, 2023, followed by the first Israeli-U.S. attack on Iran in June 2025, offered the Islamic Republic an initial framework for rehabilitation. However, the January 2026 massacre, during which thousands of Iranian demonstrators were killed in just two days by the forces of the theocratic state, simply for protesting against the economic crisis and political dictatorship, reopened an acute crisis of legitimacy, domestically and internationally, for Tehran.

When Iranians were still in mourning, and while many families had not even been able to recover the bodies of their loved ones killed in January, the United States and Israel launched a new imperialist invasion on February 28, 2026, one even more violent than previous assaults. Paradoxically, the attacks have so far helped the Islamic Republic regain some of the credibility it had lost through the bloody repression of the previous month.

These two events, massacre and war, do not constitute either separate sequences or two opposing forms of violence—one repressive and the other supposedly liberatory—but rather successive, even asymmetric, moments of an interconnected counter-revolutionary process. The “external” war prolongs and deepens the internal counter-revolution, enabling the Iranian state to tighten internal cohesion and, once again, stifle popular dissent.

Recognizing this in no way minimizes the fact that Iran has been, and remains, the target of imperialist and colonial aggression carried out with impunity. On the contrary, it requires us to read this assault in terms of its deeper political function: first, as a murderous enterprise of destruction targeting civilian lives, bodies, infrastructure, and territories, carried out under false pretexts and extending the genocidal enterprise pursued in Gaza, as well as in the West bank and Lebanon; and, second, as the provision of new resources to the Islamic Republic for its own reconstitution.

What is campism?

Israeli-U.S. aggression is reinforcing Iran’s militarization, repression, and the crushing of uprisings from below. It is also intensifying a deadly political polarization. On one side, part of the opposition, especially monarchists, welcomed the imperialist bombings in the name of their hostility to the theocratic state. On the other side, other political forces have fallen back into the orbit of the Islamic Republic in the name of anti-imperialism and opposition to war. While the reactionary nature of the first current—pro-Israel, pro-U.S., and pro-genocide—has been readily opposed based on a relative consensus among the progressive and leftist forces, the second current has unfortunately captured parts of the Left and  is every bit as significant.

It is within this impasse that the question of campism re-emerges with particular urgency. By campism I mean a range of positions and tendencies that support any force or state  based on its opposition to Western imperialism regardless of its reactionary or progressive nature.

A legacy of the Cold War, campism, as articulated by self-proclaimed anti-imperialists and supporters of the so-called resistance camp, often reduces the world based on a binary logic of two “camps”: imperialism (the United States, NATO, Israel, and their allies) versus “the resistance” (Iran, Russia, China, Assad’s Syria, and so on). The democratic and subversive uprisings against the latter states, such as Rojava, are thereby dismissed as inherently suspect or as a”” Trojan Horse” of the enemy. Any criticism of dictators is immediately disqualified as “complicity with imperialism”.

Popular mobilizations are reduced to mere “Western relays”, or else instrumentalized whenever they can serve one camp. The logic of “the enemy of my enemy” becomes an alibi: it becomes an excuse for overlooking internal repression and the protests that follow,  as nothing more than parts of a larger geopolitical conflict.

The result is that internationalist, mutual solidarity based on the shared experiences and destinities of the oppressed classes becomes paralyzed, incapable of holding anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism together. Under the pretext of preventing any “imperialist exploitation” of revolutions, campists tend to privilege a structurally marginalized, “prudent” Left, at times condemned to perpetual defeat.

This “identity-based anti-imperialism” privileges loyalty to “anti-Western” states over an analysis of global capitalism. In so doing, it justifies repression, patriarchy, homophobia, and internal colonialism in the name of “resistance.” Absolute priority is given to the struggle against Western imperialism, and victims of these “anti-imperialist” states become “collateral damage.” .

The Irish essayist Fred Halliday described this type of thinking as “the anti-imperialism of fools.” In the name of hostility to the United States, this posture violently reinforces, in practice, a theocratic state that represses the Left, national minorities, feminists, and popular councils. The concept was later taken up by the Syrian activist Leila Al-Shami in her book Burning Country to designate supporters of Bashar al-Assad during the Arab revolution of the 2010s. From the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising in Budapest in 1956 to the present, this anti-imperialism of fools has masked state violence and the crushing of revolts.

Such a tendency can be observed within certain segments of the white Western left, but also within decolonial modes of thinking. It belongs to what one might call “anti-imperialism-washing,” the strategic use of anti-imperialist rhetoric to conceal, justify, or minimize forms of authoritarianism and fascistic violence exercised within national borders, especially when these states are presented as adversaries of Western hegemonic power. While these figures denounce the colonialism of Western powers, they remain largely blind, and even complicit, when it comes to “internal colonialism,” that is, the way minoritized peoples, such as the Kurds and Baluchs, describe their relationship to Iranian state power.

This practice is also often accompanied by a form of racial gaslighting. “Gaslighting” originally referred to the manipulation of women by systematically casting doubt on their word and mental state. Having become a key term in psychology and later a critical tool of feminism, it now encompasses a form of deceitful, violent, even denialist political language more broadly. Communities that have historically been subjected both to imperial domination and to internal repression are “taught,” from positions of relative privilege, the “correct” interpretation of imperialism and resistance. This condescending posture does not merely reinscribe colonial hierarchies of knowledge; it delegitimizes the ideas and lived experiences—the very agency— of those subjected to entangled systems of violence.

The consequences are all too tangible. The Islamic Republic of Iran instrumentalizes this decolonial discourse to label demonstrators as “terrorists” and harden its coercive apparatus. This logic also helps justify the discriminatory policies directed against Afghan migrants in Iran: by portraying them as an internal threat, the state shifts onto them responsibility for difficulties that in fact stem from its own political, social, and economic regime.

No struggle should be consigned to the “waiting-room of history” in the name of a linear conception of liberation, or sacrificed to a hierarchy of supposedly more urgent causes. The counterrevolutionary logic of campism

After the genocide in Gaza and the war waged by Israel and the United States against Iran in June 2025, campism has once again  come to dominate part of the global radical Left in the West, as well as in Latin America, Africa, and the Arab world. It reduces Iranian politics to a duel between “Iran” and the “U.S.-Israeli axis.” Popular uprisings, repressed in blood since 2017, are either passed over in silence or recast through the state’s official discourse: “Mossad infiltration,” “color revolution,” “Western plot,” and so on. This framework turns social movements into a security threat and legitimizes repression—from street violence to executions—under the pretext of a “state of emergency” or an “untimely moment”. By treating insurgent people as the principal enemy, it is, in fact, profoundly counterrevolutionary.

Under the expanding regime of permanent war, people in  struggle are repeatedly told to stand down, to defer themselves for the sake of a higher urgency. Even those who recognize the repressive nature of these forces often set aside emancipatory struggles in the name of strategy. This is what Morteza Samanpour and Amir Kianpour have called “strategic campism.” Feminist struggles have long been trapped in precisely this logic: they are always asked to wait, first for class, now for anti-imperialism. But feminist politics has named the truth of this postponement with clarity: later too often means never. No struggle should be consigned to the “waiting-room of history” in the name of a linear conception of liberation, or sacrificed to a hierarchy of supposedly more urgent causes.

Recent geopolitical developments have given campists even greater room for maneuver. During Israel’s war against Iran in June 2025, often referred to as the “Twelve-Day War,” the concrete experience of destruction strengthened anti-war tendencies inside Iran. However, after the bloody massacre perpetrated by the state in January 2026, part of society, exhausted and confronted with a dead end, came to falsely view foreign intervention as a means of overthrowing the government, other internal avenues having been tried unsuccessfully and with the state not yielding to pressure. A prominent doctor reported that “at least a thousand” patients (protesters) with severe eye injuries had presented at a single hospital in Tehran following the January protests, all requiring urgent treatment in an attempt to save their eyesight.

It is precisely here that campism collapses. To condemn external war while remaining silent about internal state violence is not a principled anti-war position, but a form of relativism that effaces crucial differences between regimes and modalities of violence. This is not a claim of Iranian exceptionalism invoked to legitimize military attack, as some Trumpist and monarchist currents have done. It is, rather, the insistence that a theocratic dictatorship, in which an unelected leader exercises extralegal power over ninety million people through social terror, executions, torture, political imprisonment, digital isolation, misogynistic religious rule, and racist-colonial policies toward national minorities and Afghan migrants, cannot be treated as equivalent to states where civil and legal freedoms, however limited, still exist, and where violence operates at a structurally different scale and form. .

To condemn the external war or imperialist intervention without explicitly denouncing this internal violences, the massacre of its own population, as campists do, is both a complete political misreading of dynamics in Iran, and means siding with the state against the people it is killing. States rule by dividing people and crushing uprisings. Campists do not resist this logic; they follow it. By taking states and their geopolitical alignments as their primary point of reference, they reproduce and legitimize the divisions imposed from above, substituting allegiance to state camps for solidarities forged from below among people in struggle.

By taking states and their geopolitical alignments as their primary point of reference, they reproduce and legitimize the divisions imposed from above, substituting allegiance to state camps for solidarities forged from below among people in struggle. A betrayal of the memories of the Global South

Since the Islamic counterrevolution against the genuine 1979 revolution, part of the national and international left has subordinated class and gender analysis to its one-sided interpretation of anti-imperialism. Women’s protests against compulsory veiling, for example, were marginalized, inadvertently contributing to the consolidation of the religious and patriarchal order, and came to be presented as a guarantee of “cultural authenticity,” a sign of distinction from the West, and a marker of national independence. A dominant narrative thus took shape, one that views the Iranian Revolution exclusively through the prism of anti-Westernism and, in so doing, erases secular, feminist, queer, Kurdish, socialist, and other progressist forces. This ideology is structurally incapable of recognizing the legitimacy of internal struggles within anti-Western states. Non-Western peoples are recognized only as objects of Western imperialism, the lived experiences, collective memories, and political subjectivities of subaltern groups—women/queer communities, ethnic minorities, and the popular classes—are systematically dismissed as insignificant distractions or as being inventions of the West.

After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, this orientation persisted in the form of statist Third Worldism: the loyalty of populations was transferred to “anti-American” states, and the rights of women, queer people, and minorities were subordinated to “anti-imperialist unity.” This approach, at once Eurocentric and Orientalist, ignores the subjectivity of non-Western peoples. It treats violence as serious only when it emanates from the U.S. camp and refuses to acknowledge that populations of the Global South may genuinely struggle for democratic rights and freedoms.

“Anti-colonial unity” is thus transformed into nationalist authoritarianism. And it accepts the logic of a seemingly permanent “state of emergency”: priority is given to state power, security, and geopolitical leverage (for example: “We fight in Syria so that we do not have to fight in Tehran”).

Campism turns anti-colonial memory into an instrument for legitimizing authoritarian postcolonial states. It makes the state the agent of resistance and strips peoples of both their legitimacy and their political subjectivity. In doing so, it betrays subaltern memories that were often constituted against the state itself. Paradoxically, states such as Iran are presented as “independent from global capitalism,” even as they remain machines of internal exploitation and militarism, concerned precisely with integrating themselves into and competing with other states on the stage of global capitalism.

It is precisely in its relation to Iran’s colonized margins that this logic most clearly reveals its violence. Campism does not only erase the plurality of Iranian opposition forces. Rooted in a quasi-colonial and securitized conception of sovereignty and borders, it also reproduces internal hierarchies by relegating Kurdish and other non-Persian ethnic struggles to the background, or even disqualifying them. In this respect, from the 1980 jihad against Kurdistan to 100+ recent attacks on exiled Iranian Kurdish parties in Iraqi Kurdistan during the war, campists have often shown themselves even more hostile to the Kurds than the Iranian government, minimizing or marginalizing the legitimacy of their resistance.

These violences form part of a longer history, aggravated by the active support—or the silence—of some actors in the Arab world and of certain segments of the Left. The Al-Anfal genocide carried out by Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, costing the lives of around 180,000 Kurds simply because of their identity, illustrates this dynamic. The trauma of the murderous repression was compounded by the support of part of the Arab world and the denial of the genocide on the part of intellectuals.

More recently, in 2018, the occupation of Afrin in Rojava by the Turkish army brought systematic violence, displacement, and destruction. In response, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, stated, “ victory in Afrin is a symbol of Turkey[’s] will. If God wills, we will submit great epics to help our people,” before praising the leadership of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his party, the Justice and Development Party, which has been in power for more than twenty years.

These events have unfortunately produced a lasting rupture in the ties between Kurdish struggles and those of the Arab or Persian worlds, as well as with certain parts of the self-proclaimed anti-imperialist left, which have too often failed to recognize and support the Kurdish struggle.

State instrumentalization of Western sanctions

The recent war against Iran did not emerge suddenly; it was long in the making through a sanctions regime that operates as an imperial technology for producing social vulnerability, as Iraq had already shown. Sanctions have not merely impoverished the population, fueled inflation, eroded healthcare and employment, and weakened collective capacities for resistance; they have also helped generate the very conditions for military escalation. By locking the country into a protracted siege economy, they have normalized the state of exception, consolidated the state’s rentier and security apparatuses, and displaced the costs of the crisis onto the popular classes. In doing so, they have prepared both the material and ideological terrain of war: a society exhausted, fragmented, and reduced to the struggle for survival becomes more exposed to external projects of militarization. Sanctions thus appear for what they are: not an alternative to war, but one of its preparatory forms.

Yet while sanctions are real and devastating, they do not alone account for the conditions of undignified life in a resource-rich country like Iran. Against campist readings that reduce all forms of social inequality in Iran to Western sanctions, analysis must also confront Iran’s own political economy: a capitalist order marked by harsh privatization, widespread labor precarity—with more than 90 percent of contracts reportedly temporary—and an internally organized regime of domination and deprivation, sustained in part through the extreme exploitation and expropriation of racialised and undocumented workers, especially Afghanis and Baluches. For campists, popular protests in Iran are interpreted as economic discontent, caused entirely by sanctions, thereby obscuring the central role of the state’s own policies. One implication of this campist logic is that, by minimizing the actual dynamics of the domestic opposition to Islamic Republic, it draws a false equivalence based on the mistaken notion that such “economic discontent” is consonant with the reactionary Pahlavist project of regime change from above. Contrary to the campist claims, opposing imperialist regime change does not require dismissing or delegitimizing domestic revolt against the Islamic Republic.

Widespread poverty in Iran is not attributable to sanctions alone; it is also rooted in a rentier political economy and in the monopolization of imports, both of which the Islamic Republic has instrumentalized. Its security and regional policies are not simply reactions to outside pressure. Rather, these policies are integral to the state’s logic of survival, channeling resources toward coercive institutions and ideological-military projects, while the population is left exhausted and impoverished. As Kayhan Valadbaigi argues, sanctions help intensify the concentration of wealth within the oligarchy while consolidating structures of power. They shift the costs onto the most vulnerable, justify repression, and further enrich the oligarchy. Economic shock policies—fluctuations in the dollar, the removal of the preferential exchange rate—appear as calculated measures of “survival” in a context of vulnerability.

In addition, campists erase the Islamic Republic’s violence against the people. Murders, torture, executions, the shooting of wounded people in hospitals, and attacks on mourning ceremonies are ignored or denied, and thus legitimized. This support for an authoritarian and anti-imperialist theocracy empties the language of emancipation of any real content.

Stop judging a cause by the way it is coopted

The spread of authoritarian campism takes place largely through social media. There, the legitimization of authoritarian states intertwines with a reductive anti-Westernism and, in some cases, with antisemitism and conspiratorial patterns of thought.

Despite the objective asymmetries between Israel (backed by the West) and the Islamic Republic (under Western sanctions), similar political and symbolic mechanisms are at work: U.S. and Israeli flags at certain “pro-Iran” rallies; Iranian state flags (or the Islamic Republic flags) and portraits of Ali Khamenei at certain pro-Palestinian mobilizations. These are all gestures liable to turn legitimate struggles into justifications for violence, while at the same time discrediting both the Iranian and Palestinian resistance. The same logic applies to the now-famous slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” (Jin, Jiyan, Azadî). Appropriated by the Western far right, the Iranian far right in the diaspora, and pro-genocide currents, it has been instrumentalized in support of militarized violence.

This logic is not specific to Iran. As David Brophy has argued  in relation to Xinjiang, parts of the international Left have treated the repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples less as a question of national rights and state violence than as a problem of Western propaganda, funding, or geopolitical manipulation; in the case of Vijay Prashad and Tings Chak, this apologetic posture has even relied on fabricated, apparently AI-generated sources. But the cynical instrumentalization of human rights by Western states does not make the suffering to which that language refers any less real.

We know all too well how progressive and radical movements from the Global South often end up being appropriated by the right once they are relayed in the West. But this process cannot lead us to abandon the duty of solidarity. The case of the queer movement illustrates this well: pinkwashing by states such as Israel cancels neither the emancipatory force of queerness nor the necessity of solidarity with queers who face repression in any context. The legitimacy of a resistance depends only on its emancipatory content and on its rootedness among the oppressed, never on its appropriation.

Campism contributes in very concrete ways to the perpetuation of historical and contemporary injustices. It creates a political vacuum through dispersal and fragmentation, a vacuum gradually filled by the right and the far right, both in the region and across the world. The Iranian far right in the diaspora occupies this vacuum by simplifying the revolution and demonizing “anti-imperialism.” It can thereby present itself as the only force for change. By artificially homogenizing entire populations (“All Ukrainians resisting Russia are Nazis.” “All Syrian revolutionaries are jihadists.” “All Iranians in revolt support Israel or the monarchists.”), campism becomes an accomplice in the rise of imperialist and reactionary forces.

By artificially homogenizing entire populations (“All Ukrainians resisting Russia are Nazis.” “All Syrian revolutionaries are jihadists.” “All Iranians in revolt support Israel or the monarchists.”), campism becomes an accomplice in the rise of imperialist and reactionary forces. The far right is the far right everywhere

In Europe, no consistent Left would accept rallying under the flags of the far right on the grounds that an enemy power was attacking the country. Yet when it comes to Iran, some consider it acceptable to demand that Iranians efface themselves and rally behind reactionary, nationalist, fanatical, even fascistic forces. Such an asymmetry implies, in effect, that the peoples of the Global South should be satisfied with a choice between imperial domination and internal barbarism. And yet the Islamic Republic is precisely a state that must be named for what it is: a fascistic formation, a non-Western far right, especially when it comes to ethnic-national minorities and Afghan immigrants.

The recent “anti-war” statement on Iran exposes the political impasse of campism: an anti-war discourse that enables certain segments of the Left to converge with fascist, antisemitic, neo-Nazi, and conspiracist milieus. The statement brought together signatories from  seemingly opposed political milieus: on the one hand, decolonial-campist anti-war figures such as Vijay Prashad, Sandew Hira, Ramón Grosfoguel, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Munyaradzi Mushonga, Ajamu Baraka, Nordine Saïdi and Paulina Aroch Fugellie; and, on the other, a range of figures—including Dieudonné, Alain de Benoist, Thomas Werlet, Jean-Michel Vernochet, Christian Bouchet, Marion Sigaut, Jacob Cohen, Pierre-Antoine Plaquevent, and Arnaud Develay—as well as organisations such as the RN, Égalité & Réconciliation, L’Œuvre française, and the Mouvement France Résistance, all associated with conservative , far-right, nationalist, or fascist currents. This juxtaposition illustrates how a purely geopolitical form of anti-imperialism can become compatible with far-right politics. Within this framework, the Iranian regime and its criminal Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, are recast as “a voice against arrogance and terrorism” while a deeply troubling tolerance toward the violence of post-colonial states against their own populations is being normalized under the banner of anti-war politics.

Political consistency requires refusing, for Iranians as for any other people, any injunction to accommodate fascism in the name of a geopolitical “lesser evil.” We should not ask Iranians to accept politically any reality that the Left would refuse to accept for themselves elsewhere. We neither march with fascists nor under their banners: we fight them, including when they appropriate the lexicon of freedom in order to invert its meaning.

Much like Stalinism, which did so much to discredit socialism, campism in Iran weakens the Left and strengthens the far right. At the same time, it deepens the North-South divide and legitimizes the repression of anti-tyrannical movements in the South. The result is the isolation of emancipatory forces, the distrust of exiles toward the Left in the North (including decolonial currents), and the collapse of international solidarity.

We should not ask Iranians to accept politically any reality that the Left would refuse to accept for themselves elsewhere. We neither march with fascists nor under their banners: we fight them, including when they appropriate the lexicon of freedom in order to invert its meaning.

While Kurdish feminist prisoners sentenced to death in Evin prison are capable of expressing their solidarity with the Palestinian resistance—even at the risk of losing part of their support in Iran—authoritarian and identity-based anti-imperialists, speaking from the comfort of the West or elsewhere, prove incapable of showing comparable solidarity with popular struggles in Iran. At times, and even more gravely, the full extent of those sufferings is denied or called into question.

It is urgent to move beyond campism. Otherwise, will not succeed in rebuilding a genuinely emancipatory left or in revitalizing a truly popular internationalism that networks such as “Peoples Want” attempt to do. Anti-imperialism is authentic only if it fights all forms of domination, everywhere and for everyone.

Parts of this text was originally published in French  -Eds.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

Featured Image credit: C.Suthorn; modified by Tempest.

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In February, the Department of Homeland Security purchased an idle 250,000 square foot warehouse.

Romulus, Michigan is a city of 25,000 people 23 miles outside of Detroit and home to the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. In February,  the Department of Homeland Security purchased an idle 250,000 square foot warehouse in Romulus for $34.7 million. City leaders and the community were kept in the dark as rumors circulated about the sale, including that it was sold at 56 percent more than the previous purchase price. After initial reporting on this sale, 300 Romulus High School students walked out and a thousand people gathered outside Romulus City Hall in late February when the reports were confirmed. On No Kings Day, March 28, another 350 to 400 people gathered for the Romulus No Kings at the warehouse. On Saturday, April 25, hundreds more gathered there for the Communities Not Cages National Day of Action.

A Coalition to Shut the Camps has developed out of weekly pickets at the planned detention center location. This coalition has produced a regulatory punch list and a package of letters sent to various state and local agencies demanding full transparency on all proposals and the opportunity for public meetings. The coalition has been leafleting homes and schools in the area, encouraging people to join weekly meetings and protests. Thirty-three organizations have signed onto the letters, and some are becoming partners in “Solidarity Saturdays,” collaborative events co-hosted by coalition members and other community organizations.

The National Day of Action on April 25 was called by the national coalition Detention Watch Network and involved the participation of other national organizations like Indivisible, Workers Circle, Public Citizen, MoveOn and many others. More than 200 events around the nation transpired as a result. The core campaign demands are to cancel the warehouse detention plan and stop conversions immediately; reject all public funding, approvals, and local resources for detention expansion; and require transparency and community consent before any federal detention action. In Romulus, the Metro Detroit Democratic Socialists of America, No Detention Centers in Michigan (NDCM), the People’s Assembly of Detroit, Southfield Neighborhood Action Committee (SNAC), and Community Aid for Empowerment (CAFE) from Pontiac came together with the Coalition to Shut the Camps to center the experiences of those at risk of being detained and those detained or recently released from detention.

The day of action in Romulus coincided with a hunger strike and work stoppage that began April 20 at the GEO Group owned-and-operated North Lake Processing Facility in the Village of Baldwin, Michigan (population < 1,000). The hunger strike and work stoppage were responses to the intensification of abuse in ICE detention, reflected by deaths in ICE detention entering a record high, and a continuation of unrest at the isolated Northern Michigan facility. From 2019-2022, there were multiple deaths and six separate hunger strikes at this immigrant-only federal prison.

Built in 1999 as the Michigan Youth Correctional Facility, North Lake has closed and reopened four times. Since reopening in June 2025 as the largest ICE detention center in the Midwest, North Lake has consistently imprisoned over a thousand people, many found by federal judges to be unlawfully detained. In recent months, a combination of reports of an increasingly unsafe environment, medical issues going unaddressed, and a steep decline in judicial approval of bonds has brought the North Lake detention center into the international spotlight. Following the death last December of Nenko Gantchev, an immigrant from Bulgaria who lived in the US for over 30 years, and the sharp increase in incidents requiring an EMS response, immigrants detained in Baldwin are demanding better medical care, adequate food, and their constitutional right to timely due process. They are also demanding conditions that allow for adequate sleep and an end to arbitrary rules.

No Detention Centers in Michigan (NDCM) has recently organized multiple protests and is calling for additional actions outside the Baldwin facility in solidarity with those incarcerated, such as blasting song requests from detainees with a loudspeaker to the inside. The strike has spurred calls from the ACLU of Michigan and Michigan Immigrant Rights Center for Congress to conduct formal independent investigations into neglectful and abusive conditions at North Lake.

The strike had been renewed as of April 27, despite claims by ICE denying any such assertion of the rights and dignity of those confined. A statement from a recently released immigrant affirming the courageous act of collective resistance by hundreds of immigrant men across multiple units in North Lake was read at the action in Romulus on April 25. A statement was also read there from Women’s Collective Civil Action, a group of women from another unit at North Lake who filed a joint habeas corpus petition earlier in the month. Many attendees of the Romulus demonstration made the 3.5 hour trek across the state to Baldwin the following day to express solidarity with those kidnapped from the broader region and subjected to the brutality of the state.

As Ale Rojas of NDCM put it, “This courageous collective action is a response to the dehumanization and abuse that are endemic to ICE detention, where immigrants are used as scapegoats so corporations like the GEO Group may continue to build their profits unchecked. Centering our humanity and the humanity of every person who has been kidnapped by ICE is the only way forward.”

Worsening conditions of confinement around the country and the expansion of ICE presence in Michigan with the purchase of the warehouse in Romulus has given rise to a deepened sense of alarm and more community opposition. The Ban Warehouse Detention Act would prohibit DHS from establishing, operating, expanding, converting, or renovating any warehouse or similar building for the purpose of detaining people. Congressmember Rashida Tlaib’s announcement of the bill on April 23 was a direct response to ICE’s expansion in Romulus and Southfield. She herself attended the Romulus No Kings demonstration organized by the Coalition to Shut the Camps on March 28 as well as demonstrations in Southfield opposing the leasing of office space to ICE. Her bill also addresses ICE’s plans to convert 23 such warehouses nationwide into new immigration detention and processing facilities, a plan that would expand the federal agency’s detention capacity significantly.

This legislation was drafted in partnership with Detention Watch Network and cites the likelihood that confining large amounts of people to spaces not meant for human habitation will increase the spread of illness and put people’s health at risk, increasing the chance for abuse and death in ICE custody. The group also suggests that such expansion normalizes mass confinement and will result in an increase in unlawful arrests, violations of due process rights and widespread family separation.

On April 25 in Romulus, the tenth demonstration since the end of February occurred in the city against the purchase of the warehouse by the federal government. The City of Romulus unanimously passed a resolution opposing the sale, citing proximity to nearby elementary and middle schools; negative impacts on the health, safety and welfare of Romulus residents; and negative impacts on economic development. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has also joined with the City of Romulus in a lawsuit against DHS and ICE, alleging the federal agency failed to complete necessary environmental reviews and to consider alternatives.

The Communities Not Cages demonstration featured a teach-in with speakers from No Detention Centers in Michigan, the Coalition to Shut the Camps, Detroit DSA, People’s Assembly, CAFE, and SNAC. Organizers discussed the work they have been doing to address ICE activity in Michigan, the needs for future work, how to keep building out the organizing, and how different organizations can work together effectively.

Another demonstration and march occurred earlier in the day organized by local Indivisible groups. Between the two events, roughly 500 people demonstrated throughout the day against the plans for a detention warehouse in metro Detroit.

As in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis, the potential for social upheaval has led to action, in this case Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s suit against the DHS. The lesson taken from experiences around the country has been that local officials respond to organized mass pressure from below. With May Day following the day of action against warehouse detention, there was an opportunity to deepen the involvement of organized workers. The Metro Detroit AFL-CIO recognized International Workers’ Day for the first time in decade. Members organized a post-rally march to the Detroit ICE office, with a contingent for immigrants’ rights and against wars abroad.

Union support against immigrant detentions is crucial. For example, in the nearby city of Wayne, the No Kings Day event was held at UAW Local 900, a major Ford production complex not far from the Romulus detention center project. That No Kings Day was largely focused on the movement against ICE. At a March 16 demonstration outside the Romulus warehouse, a member of UAW Local 900 expressed opposition to the warehouse detention plans. Ron Lare, a retired Ford worker and member of UAW Local 600 at the Ford Rouge plant, held a sign that read, “UAW members and leaders –– join the resistance in the streets!” Lare urged UAW members and leaders to come out to the protests at the detention center project in Romulus. “The union is supposed to stand for the principle that ‘An injury to one is an injury to all.’ It is inevitable that if this detention center opens, some UAW members will be detained inside.”

Ron Lare, a retired Ford worker and member of UAW Local 600 at the Ford Rouge plant, held this sign at the March 16 demonstration.

Against the violence and brutality of the state, there is space for exposing connections to attacks by the ruling class on people throughout the world. It is possible to deepen bonds of international solidarity that pose an alternative to the reactionary ethno-nationalism of the ruling class. The emergence of a detention state with a renewed focus on borders and exclusion is the latest phase of a long history of racialized criminalization essential to stratifying and regulating the labor-market that produces the wealth of capitalist society. Immigration enforcement is a tool of capitalist exploitation that creates a tiered labor market, providing employers with a pool of cheap, exploitable labor and exerting a downward pressure on wages and working conditions, limiting the bargaining power of the working class.

The creation of ICE in 2003, following the post-9/11 reorganization of immigration services, consolidated and militarized longstanding practices rooted in history. The struggle for immigrants’ rights must be rooted in multiracial solidarity that shatters the myth of American exceptionalism and exposes the violent foundations of capitalism and US imperial dominance. Only a united working class has the power to reorganize society on the basis of real democratic control and defend against the inevitable disappointment entailed by elite cooptation.

We must reject any hollow attempt to paint over the historical existence of racial capitalism and recognize it as the key task for socialists to actively strengthen and learn from the struggle for abolition. We must understand, as CLR James did, that those most oppressed in the class struggle “carry the hatred of bourgeois society and the readiness to destroy it” to a greater degree than other sections of the population. It is an essential question of strategy and power to center and uplift such voices in a bottom-up struggle that targets the foundations of capitalism.

The struggle against oppression is the prerequisite for organizing a democratic mass movement capable of confronting the ruling class. A socialist vision for immigration recognizes freedom of movement as a fundamental human right. Only such a vision can address global inequities that drive migration and fuel the fight to extend full labor rights to all workers, removing the incentive for employers to exploit undocumented labor. A genuinely internationalist solidarity can unite workers across borders and advance the global struggle against exploitation.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Ben Solis/Michigan Advance; modified by Tempest.

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