The Brooklyn Rail

In April 2025, acting director of ICE Todd Lyons obscenely declared that the agency must handle deportations as Amazon does package delivery. This promise is becoming a reality. In early 2026, DHS purchased commercial warehouses in Arizona, Maryland, and Texas with the express purpose of refitting them as immigration detention centers.

The following attempts to situate José Antonio Kast’s victory within the long trajectory of Chile’s violent neoliberalisation

On the evening of Thursday, February 12, in Lyon, Quentin Deranque was hospitalized in critical condition. The twenty-three-year-old neofascist—euphemized by the press as an “extreme-right-nationalist-identitarian-militant”—had sustained serious brain and skull damage during a confrontation between fascists and anti-fascists earlier that day.

Most of this interview was conducted in Paris by members of Communisme Libertaire in September 2025; the last questions were posed by a Rail editor in late January 2026.

It can be argued that the public health implications of the second Trump administration pale in comparison to broader implications for freedom of speech, rule of law, and respect for human rights. But the impacts on public health offer a specific illustration of the ways in which this administration is threatening very basic aspects of our society fundamental to everyone’s health and well-being.

When we rely on cameras to document state violence, how much are we actually relying on other people to do something when they see those images? How do we preserve the potency of these images and direct their interpretation without manipulating or fabricating them, as the state has already demonstrated its willingness to do, and without dishonoring the people being assaulted, kidnapped, or killed?

The poor man’s air force has literally taken to the air: the drone as the new car bomb, the latest conduit in capitalist modernity’s self-destructive dialectic. Like the car bomb before it, the drone collapses the categories of production and extermination, leisure and war, citizen and soldier.

As Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, says outright, the only lasting future for the United States is the merging of tech and the state. He cites the Manhattan Project as a precedent: a model that is now to be applied to virtually every lever of power. While Karp may not know it, this idea has deep roots in American political culture.

If America had a brain, we could say it’s losing cortical tissue. The neocortex—the part of our brain that helps us plan, learn, and think beyond the moment—balances long-term planning against short-term reflex.

With disasters of multiple sorts unfurling daily, how not to enjoy the overturning of New York City’s political apple cart by Zohran Mamdani? This was the biggest upset in American politics since Donald Trump’s first victory in 2016, and it’s a lot more fun.

On September 8, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security announced Operation Midway Blitz, a “major enforcement surge” targeting what officials described as “criminal illegal aliens.” Within two weeks, hundreds of our neighbors had been kidnapped and detained.

In the days leading up to the Argentinian elections of October 26, Prime Minister Javier Milei’s fate seemed sealed. Among the reasons were the economy’s stagnation in the last two quarters; the government’s defeats in Parliament; complaints about corruption; the link with drug trafficking; (earlier) the $LIBRA scam; and the growing social discontent due to the fall in workers’ incomes and pensions.

“Populism” is a vague and nearly meaningless concept. What is real is the fact that the economic and social crisis—the social consequences of the liberal measures taken, the destruction of the old welfare state, the growing gap between wealth and poverty in society—has created a strong polarization of political life. 

Radical thought has lost one of its most corrosive voices. Gianfranco Sanguinetti, legendary member of the Situationist International (SI) and implacable critic of the society of the spectacle, died in Prague on October 3, at the age of seventy-seven.

In 2009, I lived for three months in the Tadamon neighborhood, in the suburbs of Damascus. In this suburb, regime control was less visible—a “periphery,” as sociologists call it, always careful to stay on the right side of the line. In 2011, gatherings began to form. 

What a puzzling picture the new fascism presents, a fascism of lawyers rather than paramilitaries. The lawyers’ specialty: finding loopholes and contradictions within the tens of thousands of administrative regulations that emanate from government agencies. A field day for critics of democratic bureaucracy!

Much has been written about the “gig economy” over the last decade. As more and more workers find themselves unwilling members of “the precariat,” Guy Standing’s prophetic 2011 term for the “dangerous class” of disempowered workers that has exploded in post-industrial economies rings truer than ever.

Outside my apartment building, a large box truck idles its engine uninterrupted for hours and hours, waiting to offload hundreds of smiling parcels. I suppose breathing in carcinogenic particulate matter is but one price you and I pay for the convenience of e-commerce.

The German assault on the Jews has remained “the” Holocaust. Hence the particular power of the example given by the Israel Defense Forces as they proceed methodically to the total destruction of Gaza and Palestinian-occupied areas of the West Bank.

In an illuminating account of a recent Department of Homeland Security job fair, Yanis Varoufuckice relates an encounter with a gaggle of fresh Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recruits looking for a promising new gig in the deportation economy.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the decisions made across the world to shut down normal economic and social life to contain its spread were real enough. But the idea that the global recession of 2020 could be blamed on the virus also obscured other important realities.

There is a saying in Turkish politics: “This is Turkey, anything can happen.” Deployed at the coffee shop or amidst glasses of anise-infused rakı to cope with tragedy or farcical politics, this state-of-acceptance is less zen and more resignation.

These stories are excerpted from a longer work, We Wanted to Change Everything, an account of the author’s years as an activist and member of the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) from the early 1970s to 1983. 1976 was the year when STO shifted its focus away from the factories, because we perceived a lull—a temporary pause—in the sort of workplace struggles that had defined our early years, such as the national Independent Truckers Strike and the Farah garment workers strike in El Paso. None of us realized that we were on the cusp of the massive deindustrialization that would move those industries away for good and cut the heart from a project based on workers “united, disciplined, and organized by the mechanism of capitalist labor.” (Karl Marx) We turned our attention to providing support to national liberation, especially the Puerto Rican independence movement, then engaged in militant and effervescent struggles in Chicago, which appeared to offer more promise. That is another story.

The core argument of We Have Never Been Woke takes this contradiction as its entry point: namely, the appropriation of egalitarian social justice rhetoric by elites to serve their own ends. What’s more, not only do these elites view themselves as sincere champions of social justice causes (i.e., “true believers”), many go so far as to portray themselves as erstwhile victims of the prevailing order—no different than the marginalized communities they support. Victimhood, especially as it relates to trauma, plays a particularly important role in the mystification of social relations and the status obsession of elites.

I was supposed to fly to Vancouver the day of Trump’s military parade in Washington, but after he warned that any protesters in D.C. would “be met with very big force,” leaving for Canada suddenly felt like a dodge. It was only my vacation, after all, but it was his birthday. I have become so used to Trump imposing on my leisure time that what was one more Saturday? And I was eager to see what “No Kings Day” had in store for the nation’s capital. If the demonstrators really were to be “met with very big force,” I thought I should meet it with them—for love of country, I’m tempted to say, though it wasn’t quite that.

Late on the night of June 14, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass sent out a triumphant post on X that summed up the volatile situation in the city, at least from her vantage point.

Appeasement and accommodation, while regrettable within the academic community because of the retreat from sacrosanct ideas such as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, nonetheless set the stage for developments that followed the national elections at the end of last year. Martin Niemöller’s self-confession about his support for the German fascists during the 1930s captures nicely the corner into which the higher education community had boxed itself: "When they came for me, there was no one left who could protest."

For five months now, following the collapse of a train station canopy in Belgrade, Serbs have been protesting against corruption and therefore against the government. On Saturday, March 15, more than 300,000 people took to the streets of Belgrade. This article explores the form of organization adopted by the movement: “plenums”—local, horizontal, autonomous, and self-organized assemblies. It has been translated from the French publication in lundimatin, March 21, 2025.

On April 18, the student blockade of RTS (Radio Television of Serbia, state owned public radio and TV broadcaster), had already been ongoing for five days. On the street before the TV headquarters, people milled about happily, talking and enjoying the sunshine. In the leafy streets surrounding, people sipped coffees, and cats slept on top of Yugos. It was Good Friday, so the Orthodox church around the corner was packed.

Among the 1921 Speech, the Grundprinzipien, and the revolution they emerged from, Bernes finds the essence of his new book, The Future of Revolution. In it he answers at length the question, what ideas are both novel and enduring in the history of communist struggle since Marx? Responding in various registers and investigating up to the present, he names a single overarching one, the workers’ councils.

While we look in today’s ephemeral and fragmented struggles for the signs of a new force of opposition to capitalism, now a destructive global system, it is stimulating to discover the interest that certain people have in the new ideas that emerged from that defeat, emphasizing that “what is new is only the workers’ council, the soviet, born in 1905 in Russia from the fires of the mass strike.”

The Future of Revolution is a brave and daring book with an original angle. It is not a publication to be expected at the current moment, with its increasingly reactionary political and social relations. This is a time of prohibitions. Politicians often no longer try to convince citizens, preferring to impose their will on people. A book about the future of revolution therefore is unexpected but a pleasant surprise. In discussing it, I will focus on what in my view are some of the most important issues it raises, because I cannot touch on all of them.