This Thursday at 3pm, Against the Stream podcast will be going live with a very special episode. Just two days after the results of the US election come in, Hamid Alizadeh and Alan Woods from the International Secretariat of the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI) will discuss the implications of these results and what they mean to communists. Alan is the editor of marxist.com, the author of numerous books on Marxist theory and the lead theoretician of the RCI.

Americans are used to hearing that every election is “the most important in our lifetime.” This year, both candidates have taken it a step further, arguing that it’s the most important election in the history of the United States. “For or against Trump?!” This is the alleged existential question posed by both major parties. But what exactly is Trumpism in the first place? Confusion abounds on this question, and yet, it is impossible to understand where US society is headed without a correct diagnosis of this disease.

This week, Jorge and Hamid sat down to discuss three flashpoints in the world crisis of capitalism: the floods that are devastating Spain, the spiralling conflict in the Middle East, and the impending US election.

With both candidates neck-and-neck in the run-up to election day, you can sense the anxiety of the ruling class, who mostly oppose the maverick Trump. But why has his anti-establishment message struck a chord with a section of American society?

The American Civil War, unlike the conflicts that plague the world today, was just and historically progressive. The Union north smashed the Confederacy of southern slave states and carried out the biggest expropriation of private property in history at the time, with the emancipation of 4 million enslaved people. The Union cause was praised by Karl Marx, who said Lincoln’s battle cry should be: “death to slavery!” With elections in the US just a few weeks away, the American bourgeoisie once again has civil war on its mind…. 

University administrations, under intense pressure from their billionaire donors, are cracking down on pro-Palestine students and faculty on campuses across America. They’ve introduced draconian measures aimed at extinguishing the embers of last spring’s Palestine solidarity encampment movement, which sought to force colleges and universities to divest from Israel and the American imperialist war machine.

Two weeks after being slammed by Hurricane Helene—the strongest storm to make landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region in 150 years—the Southeast is now bracing for a potentially worse “monster storm,” Hurricane Milton. It’s the latest in a series of humanitarian disasters across the region, which have wrought destruction far beyond anything seen in living memory.

Two weeks ago, the US Department of Commerce put forward a bill proposing to ban car parts and software linked to China or Russia. The White House held a press briefing and published a fact sheet justifying this, with implications that this was a measure to prevent terrorist attacks. The irony of such measures coming so soon after the US-sanctioned Israeli terror attack that was carried out using technological sabotage appears to have been lost on them.

For the first time since 1977, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) has gone on strike. At midnight on October 1, 47,000 dockworkers walked off the job at 36 ports from Maine to Texas, including important logistical centers like Baltimore; Boston; Charleston, South Carolina; Houston; Jacksonville; Miami; Mobile, Alabama; New Orleans; New York/New Jersey; Norfolk, Virginia; Philadelphia; Savannah, Georgia; Tampa, Florida; and Wilmington, Delaware.

One minute after midnight on September 13, thirty-three thousand members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Districts 751 and W24 walked off the job and set up picket lines. It’s the first strike since 2008 at Boeing, the aerospace behemoth employing 66,000 workers throughout Washington state and over 171,000 nationwide.

Once again, Donald Trump appears to have been the target of an assassination attempt. More than four decades elapsed between the shootings of Ronald Reagan in 1981 and Donald Trump in July of this year. Now, in the span of just two months, there have been two attempts on a presidential life. Such is the political polarization and social decline in the United States—a country that could once boast being the most stable haven of world capitalism.

As the 2024 election heads into its final stretch, the newly founded Revolutionary Communists of America has launched a coast-to-coast campaign to counter the cynical cesspool of bourgeois politics by injecting a much needed class-struggle perspective.

Since Kamala Harris entered the 2024 presidential race, the media has highlighted the alleged differences between her and Joe Biden’s rhetoric around Gaza, speculating about how she might differ from her current boss when it comes to the war on Gaza. They have noted a more “empathetic” tone toward Palestinians and a more “forceful” tone toward Israel.

History has produced a generation of communists in the United States. Now, a new political party has been officially founded to unite them under a common banner: the Revolutionary Communists of America.

In yet another dramatic twist in the tragicomic soap opera of American politics, Joe Biden has ended his reelection campaign. Coming just 108 days before the election, this is the latest a one-term president has ever made such a decision. The closest historical analogy was in 1968 when Lyndon Johnson declined to seek a second term under pressure from anti-Vietnam War protests. Genocide Joe’s stay at the White House has been marked by inflation and war, and he will end his tenure with an unfavorability rating of around 56%.