FEBRUARY 20, 2026

Whistling at the edge of law
In a tribute to Renee Macklin Good, her wife, Rebecca Good, wrote of her final encounter with ICE: “On Wednesday, January 7th, we stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns.” Good’s observation has become a well-known shorthand for the situation unfolding in Minnesota. To anyone in South Minneapolis, the asymmetry between the protestors and immigration authorities is hard to miss. They have guns. And batons. And pepperballs. And tasers. And chemical weapons. And FlexCuffs. And more than $165,000,000,000. Law and Political Economy Project blog

Abolition Is Still the Only Way Out of This — Forget the useless so-called “reforms” to ICE and policing currently on offer. We need much more fundamental change. “Hopes placed in Democrats to save us by finally recognizing that the police state they have helped build is the vehicle through which authoritarianism is being consolidated are repeatedly dashed.The proposed ‘reforms’ advanced in the face of mounting calls to defund and abolish ICE are simply a rogue’s gallery of the usual suspects trotted out whenever the violence of law enforcement shocks the public conscience.” The Nation

Does populism mean anything useful any more?
“The difficulty of separating the real nature of populism from the fraught discourse that surrounds it is telling, because among the only confident claims we can make about the populist phenomenon is that it places an enormous stress on language. Indelible slogans, silver-tongued leaders, a direct address to ‘the people:’ these were common elements in the otherwise disparate range of electoral projects that surged after the great recession of 2007-2009, rejecting bromides about ‘unity’ and ‘consensus’ for the hard semantic distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ For all the problems with the populist label, it was at least able to capture this highly rhetorical mode of politics. It turned out [however] that when the left and right battled on the terrain of discourse, with politics often reduced to a series of sales pitches, the odds were in favour of the right.” The Guardian

Genuine workers’ inquiry needed as the algorithm invades
This recent work by the Capacitor Collective “emphasizes that digital workers’ inquiry is ‘not a research method but rather a political approach to the production of knowledge.’” Knowledge production is a load-bearing element of tech organizing campaigns, because “an inability to understand the ‘calculative logics’ that underpin algorithmic systems is a defining feature of the conditions faced by the digital workforce and of its technical composition.” An MDC DSA comrade examines a recent revival of worker-based inquiry in Cosmonaut

Municipal Socialism’s “YIMBY” Problem: The Housing Crisis and Zohran — which way forward?
Events in Mamdani’s New York are disclosing a larger and more longstanding political and strategic divergences within the socialist and tenant movements. On the housing question, most socialists agree on the end goal: decommodified, publicly owned, democratically controlled housing for all — that is, dignity, safety, comfort. However, there is significant disagreement on the means and actualization of those ends. What tactics, strategies, and organizations — what politics, in both theory and practice — are necessary to build the requisite power to reach our end goals? On these questions, for us, the means are the ends. What we do now and how we do it inform what will be possible for us to accomplish in the future. There are no shortcuts. The stakes are high. This is in part because of the scope and severity of the crisis facing tenants and the unhoused in New York City. Spectre Journal