MAY 22, 2026

To Build the Anti-War Movement of the Future, We Must Learn From the Past
Internationalism must go beyond protests and resolutions. We should ask not only what kind of government we are demanding but what kind of foreign policy progressives intend to implement once achieving governing power.

“Both Donald Trump and the Iran War are deeply unpopular, so why has no mass movement emerged to fight this conflict? History may have caught up with us. The absence of any substantive attention to foreign policy in the progressive movements of the past 15 years — from Occupy to the Bernie Sanders campaigns to Black Lives Matter to the “resistance” of Trump’s first term — means that we are virtually back at square one. Neither of the two major national left formations in the present, Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party, nor the bigger and broader left-liberal organizations like Indivisible, have much to say about the US role in the world.” Van Gosse and Bill Fletcher Jr. in The Nation via Portside

The battle for democracy is the fight of a lifetime

The Supreme Court made the law an arm of Republican policy. It spat on the blood shed on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And it is doing all it can to nullify the 14th and 15th amendments. Alabama’s state officials no longer bother with the pretenses of democracy. Just look at how they greeted the news of the nation’s high court beclowning itself to allow the state Legislature to revert to a previous map and reduce the state’s Black congressional representation. “My job in this office was to put the Legislature in the best possible legal position to draw a congressional map that favors Republicans 7-0,” said Steve Marshall, apparently a private lawyer for the GOP and not Alabama’s attorney general. Alabama Reflector via News from the States

Why College Grads Are Booing Their Commencement Speakers

Yes, more about Artificial Intelligence — “increasingly a pop culture villain” that gets boos when commencement speakers hold it up as the future, a NYT columnist relates. “One reason Americans seem to despise A.I. more than people in other countries is that they know our government is too sclerotic to handle it. Researchers at Stanford University found that out of people in 30 countries, Americans had the least faith in their leaders’ ability to regulate A.I. Internationally, people tend to feel more positively about A.I. when the state tries to ensure that it benefits them.” New York Times

We Need to Move Beyond Robot Doomerism

So how does the US working class seek agency, not resignation, in the unmanaged age of AI? “At scale, improperly handled, the mass adoption of automation without a plan for what comes next for workers — and consumers — threatens economic decline. If no one is working, no one is getting paid. If no one is getting paid, no one is buying whatever the robots are selling, making, or servicing. […] doomerism in some left circles today risks missing the procedurally generated forest for the trees. Thinking through changes to the economy and work brought about by automation, we ought to ask ourselves who controls and benefits from these changes and could the public put such technologies to good use? […] And above all, can we responsibly plan for and control these developments in a way that maintains social, political, and cultural standards, expectations, and needs?” Jacobin via Portside

Service with a scowl: A review of Annie McClanahan’s Beneath The Wage: Tips, Tasks and Gigs in the Age of Service Work

It is rare that a book manages to pull off both a major intervention in Marxist theory and an important piece of cultural analysis. Beneath the Wage does just this. McClanahan’s first book, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture, looked at the cultural effects of the experience of deepening indebtedness, with its prevailing currents of unease, coercion, domination, and anxiety. Beyond the Wage engages, in a similar fashion, with the varied and complex ways that culture mediates contemporary service work — similar in that its point is not a dense theorization of the nature of aesthetics, but rather a crystalline description of the way that culture registers capitalist social relations. Spectre Journal via 5 Lefty Links