by Abayomi Azikiwe

Photo caption. A group of about 80 people, some carrying banners and waving South African flags, tries to push past South African Police officers during an anti-immigrant protest in Parklands, a suburb of Cape Town, on June 27. Rodger Bosch/AFP/Getty Images

Geopolitical Analysis

During the month of June, what is known as xenophobic and “afro-phobic” attacks have been occurring in the Republic of South Africa, a nation of 65 million which emerged from apartheid rule 32 years ago.

Five decades ago, the world became acutely aware of the brutal system of legalized racial oppression and settler-colonialism when hundreds of thousands of students walked out of their schools on June 16 to protest what was called “Bantu Education” which promoted notions of white supremacy and hostility towards Africans from other parts of the continent.

Under the apartheid system, the government told Africans who were oppressed by the minority white population that they were inferior to the Europeans occupying the country, yet superior to their Black counterparts across the continent. The liberation movements such as the African National Congress (ANC) were said to have been motivated by communism and therefore representing a danger to the well-being of all those living inside the apartheid state.

Consequently, since June 2026, the narrative emerging from the Republic of South Africa was not the 50-years commemoration of the role of youth and workers in the struggle against apartheid and settler-colonialism, it became the xenophobic and afro-phobic assaults on people from neighboring states such as Malawi, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Ghana, Nigeria, etc. The groups which have been projected as the leadership of this unrest in which thousands have been dislocated, attacked, robbed, killed and forced to flee are those who have no presence in the National Assembly and government.

Groups such as “Operation Dudula” and “March and March” are utilizing the same language as the Make America Great Again (MAGA) wing of the United States political establishment which dominates the White House and the Congress. Falsehoods which suggest that so-called “undocumented foreigners” are taking jobs away from “citizens” is not an idea which originated in South Africa. President Donald Trump of the U.S. utilized such rhetoric to win over millions of whites and others who are experiencing joblessness and economic distress.

A similar situation exists in the United Kingdom and other Western European states such as France and Germany. Political parties such as Reform UK, Restore Britain along with the National Rally of France and the Alternatives for Deutschland in Germany are carrying out similar demagogic efforts to ban migrants seeking asylum and economic opportunities.

In England and Northern Ireland, far right and neo-fascist elements have attacked Black, Asian and migrant communities burning cars, buses and homes. These communities are also being accused of engaging in criminal activity and taking jobs away from those considered citizens.

In the U.S., people from countries such as Haiti and Venezuela among others have had their temporary protective status revoked by the Trump administration. Unsubstantiated rumors suggesting that these nationalities engage in criminal activity are fostered to justify the overall racist atmosphere which exists in the U.S. This state-sponsored institutional racism is attempting to cover up actual crimes being committed by the government and corporate interests in the U.S.

There is vast self-enrichment on the part of the ruling capitalist class while the workers and nationally oppressed grow poorer. A recent report issued by the National Urban League (NUL) documents that African Americans are experiencing a recession while their rights to vote and participate in the labor market on an equal basis have been legally eliminated by the White House, the Supreme Court and many corporations.

Reports since late 2025 indicate that hundreds of thousands of African American women have been forced from their jobs. This is a direct outcome of the racist and sexist attacks on this sector of the population claiming they have no right to decent employment and official positions within government and corporate structures.

Whose is Behind the Attacks Against Continental Africans in South Africa?

Neither “Operation Dudula” or “March and March” have representation in the National Assembly which is the legislative body that creates laws for South Africa. Therefore, these groupings have no legal basis for ordering people to leave the country.

This is not the first attempt in recent years to destabilize the South African government and society. Under the previous administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, the South African government was accused of providing weapons to the Russian Federation in its Special Military Operation in Ukraine.

In December 2023, the ANC-dominated government in South Africa took the State of Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest judicial body within the United Nations, charging Tel Aviv with violations of the Genocide Convention. Thousands of Palestinians had already been killed and displaced in the aftermath of the Al Aqsa Flood emanating from Gaza which has been under extreme pressure from Tel Aviv for decades.

After Trump took office for the second non-consecutive term in 2025, the South African Government of National Unity under President Cyril Ramaphosa was accused of overseeing genocidal policies against the white population. Trump, who is expelling thousands of people every week, has granted refugee status to white South Africans wishing to migrate to the U.S. This racist immigration policy clearly exposes the character of U.S. capitalism and imperialism.

In regard to the current situation in South Africa, the Justice Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi said in an interview with a leading media outlet that:

Justice Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi has suggested that Israel may have had an interest in undermining South Africa through the recent March and March anti-illegal immigration protests, linking the issue to South Africa’s high-profile case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Speaking on the matter, Kubayi argued that South Africa’s decision to take Israel to the ICJ over allegations related to the war in Gaza has elevated the country’s international profile and placed it at the center of a wider geopolitical contest. While she stopped short of directly accusing Israel of organizing or funding the demonstrations, and did not provide evidence to support the allegation, Kubayi said it would be ‘naïve’ to assume that powerful global interests would not seek to weaken South Africa’s credibility on human rights issues. Her remarks come amid growing debate over the March and March protests, which have focused on illegal immigration and have drawn both support and criticism across the country. The demonstrations have also sparked concerns about xenophobia, social tensions and political mobilization.

The State of Israel would not exist without the financial, military and diplomatic support of the U.S. The war against Iran is a joint operation between Tel Aviv and Washington.

Although there is widespread opposition to the policies of zionism, leaders within the U.S. and other allied imperialist states continue to provide money and military resources to Tel Aviv in their genocidal campaigns against the Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Yemenis, Iraqis and others in the West Asia region.

No other NATO country would enter the recent war against Iran and Lebanon since it realized the project was a losing battle which would only further destabilize the world economy. Trump and previous U.S. leaders have been hellbent on preserving imperialism and therefore they are committed to stifling any form of independent foreign policy and economic development.

Impact of the Situation in South Africa on Continental Unity

Over the last two decades or more, the 55 member-states of the African Union (AU) based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, have passed numerous resolutions calling for greater unity. The African continent has been subjected to centuries of enslavement, colonialism, neo-colonialism which is responsible for the contemporary underdevelopment and divisions.

South Africa has been considered a leader within the AU due to its origins as a democratic nation-state and for the pioneering work related to the Palestine solidarity movement along with its involvement in the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa plus summit (BRICS+). BRICS is committed to alternative forms of development which are independent of the domination of U.S. imperialism.

Projects such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) which is designed to bring together various states to foster genuine development in the region cannot be implemented with the largest industrialized state being viewed as an impediment to Pan-African unification. The African Center for Disease Control and Prevention (ACDC), whose Chinese-built headquarters is located in Addis Ababa, will not be able to combat preventable and treatable diseases in light of the counter-revolutionary elements which the corporate media has projected as being representative of mass sentiment in South Africa.

Consequently, the ANC-led Government of National Unity must put an end to the destabilization efforts by “March and March” and “Operation Dudula”. The antics of these groups will only worsen the economic downturn in South Africa and the continent as a whole.

The only real solution to the African crisis is continental unification based on anti-imperialism and socialist reconstruction. U.S. imperialist tropes rooted in racist propaganda and psychological warfare can only bring harm to the African people on the continent and around the world.

by Kim Scipes

I was asked to speak to a group in the San Francisco Bay Area about the war on the US working class and the war on Iran, which I did on March 29 (2026)  (See video at https://icssmarx.org/trumps-war-on-iran-and-the-us-working-class-kim-scipes-sunday-march-29-1030-am-pacific-time/.)

To do this, I went back to an article I published in 2009, detailing the war on working people in the US.  This article had been published in an Indian academic journal (Indian Journal of Politics and International Relations, and my article—you must scroll down—is in the issue at https://sirp.mgu.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/IJPAIR-Vol.2.-1-January-June-2009.pdf) and was partially republished by Z Net. It wasn’t published in several US publications to which I had submitted, and I have never seen it utilized by academics or activists in the United States, so it is all-but-unknown.  However, the material is increasingly important and arguably should be revisited.  It looks at changes in the US economy and the affects on workers between 1947 and 2005.

What my article shows is that this period is divided into two parts.  The first, from 1947-1973, shows the US economy growing, doubling real incomes after inflation was removed.  Not only that, but after dividing US income levels by fifths (quintiles), which is a standard tactic for sociologists, we can see that this growth level was distributed fairly equally across all five quintiles.  (Note:  all quintiles are 20% of the US income distribution except for the top level; the US Census Bureau does NOT show data for the 96-100^th percentiles, so the top category only shows 15% of the income distribution.  Nonetheless, my data is comparable since this is true across all time periods included herein.)  Anyway, the main point is true:  US incomes basically doubled over the period, and this held true for all five quintiles.  This is the period where the “American dream” was based on real economic growth and was distributed fairly equally.

However, the second part of the data, 1973 to 2005, we see radical change.  First, economic growth was much, much less, and incomes were unequally distributed.  In the first sub-part, 1973-2001, we see some growth at all levels—although far less than that of the 1947-73 period—but it became very unequal as one goes up the income level:  the lowest quintile (1^st) saw 14% growth, while the fifth , quintile saw 58% growth.

The second sub-part of the second part of the data—2001-2005, or W’s first term—we see things worsen drastically:  not only is their less growth—only 1.94% for the fifth (top) quintile!—but the bottom 80% (no misprint) LOST income during this period!  The top 5% captured whatever economic growth there was, not sharing it with the bottom 95%.

But what has happened since 2005?  To be honest, I don’t have the data to be able to present concretely.  The Census Bureau quit presenting it in ways that I could combine with that data that I had assembled earlier.  However, we had the Great Recession in 2008-09, and we know how well that went for people.  I don’t think there was much recovery between 2009 and 2019, especially in the early years, and then we had the COVID epidemic, and following….  So, my data is a snapshot of economic reality just before the Great Recession.

I think, by any reasonable standard of interpreting this economic data, that we can safely say that the ruling elites have been directly attacking Americans of all income levels, with the greatest negative impact being on the poorest quintile, since especially the turn of the 21^st Century!

After this presentation—which has not been put together in this way by anyone else to my knowledge—I then discussed the economic impact of the war on Iran and how it was also hurting Americans and, as always, hurting those in worse shape more than those in better shape.  Obviously, gas prices have shot up, and about 35% of the world’s fertilizer is now unavailable to the Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which will ultimately hurt farmers around the world, reducing crop production and food consumption, while raising the prices of agricultural-based commodities.  Not good—and bound to get worse the longer Trump’s war continues.  (And we are subsequently learning of further impacts, such as denial of helium, an essential chemical needed by the microchip industry; I’m confident in asserting that the impact will expand even more as the war continues.)

So, I definitively established—based on empirical data—that the economic war against most Americans began in the earliest days of this century and this war is escalating with Trump’s war against Iran.  No wonder most people are hurting from these on-going and now combined assaults, and it’s getting notably worse for many!

We discussed other things like how the US National Debt has expanded from $ .9 trillion in 1981, when Reagan entered the presidency, to over $39 trillion and growing today under Trump.  We also talked about the measure of income inequality—as computed by the CIA—showed the US to be more unequal in 2007 than some of the poorest nations on Earth, including Mozambique, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and elsewhere.  I’m not going to elaborate here, but these issues are explained and discussed in my article.

Interestingly, unlike many  Q & A sessions, the Q & A session after my presentation turned into a forum of very experienced organizers covering a wide range of issues, including globalism, white supremacy, the US Empire, building political organizations, as well as confronting issues such as how to consciously operate politically in a world that Trump seeks to totally dominate while seeking to build a strong and effective anti-war movement.   This discussion might be of interest to many people, so I’m including this in the presentation.

For those who don’t know me or are unaware of my work over the past 40 years, I’m a US military veteran (USMC, 1969-73, who stayed in the States the whole time), a long-time political activist and union member who has worked on a global scale, and have worked as an industrial printer, secretary, high school teacher, and finally as a Professor of Sociology at Purdue University Northwest; I’m now retired. I have published over 300 articles in the US and in 11 different countries.  My writings—most linked to original articles—can be found at https://www.pnw.edu/personal…/kim-scipes-ph-d/publications .

If you are trying to think about organizing people, I think this video would be of great interest. If you think it’s worthy, please share widely with your contacts and ask them to share with your’s. When we get good material, we need to share it widely!  However, watching and discussing with groups of people might be an even better use of this video.

I hope it will be of interest to each of you and your friends!  Toward global solidarity!

by Dr Pardeep Singh Bali

If the 20th-century German philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were alive today, they wouldn’t be writing books in quiet academic offices. They would be on TikTok, utterly terrified. Decades ago, these critical thinkers coined the term “cultural industry.” They argued that in modern capitalist societies, culture had stopped being an expression of human creativity and had instead become an assembly line. Like cars or tin cans, cultural products—movies, radio, music—were being standardized and mass-produced for one reason: profit. For decades, that theory felt a bit academic, a dusty relic of the Hollywood studio system or the era of three-channel television networks. But enter 2026.

Look at any teenager or twenty-something glued to their smartphone on the subway, and you will realize that the cultural industry didn’t fade away. It just upgraded its software. On the surface, today’s digital landscape looks incredibly democratic. Anyone with a smartphone can hit “Record,” upload a video, and theoretically reach millions. We are no longer just passive consumers; we are creators; we have become respectfully ‘PRODUSERS’, having leverage of both producers as well as users. But this freedom is largely an illusion. While Gen Z and young millennials feel like they are steering the ship, the waters they sail are entirely controlled by data-driven algorithms designed with a single, aggressive goal: maximizing screen time and advertising revenue.

Take the recent explosion of “micro-dramas”—ultra-short, vertically shot, highly addictive fictional series tailored specifically for social media feeds. Deloitte reports that this format alone will pull in a staggering $7.8 billion this year. While the U.S. is expected to generate half of global revenue in 2025, its share will likely drop to 40% as other markets increasingly capitalize on this trend. They aren’t written for artistic depth; they are engineered based on algorithmic pattern analytics to trigger immediate emotional hooks and keep fingers scrolling. When every trend, dance, and audio clip is dictated by an optimization engine, “culture” becomes deeply homogenized. It is why scrolling through your feed can feel like a blur of identical aesthetics—whether it’s the “cozy slow-living” vibe or the chaotic meme-driven humor that currently dominates youth culture.

The most profound impact of this modern cultural machinery isn’t what it does to our wallets; it’s what it does to our minds. For Gen Z, identity formation has become an exercise in public curation. “Fandom is the new identity,” notes a recent 2026 media trends report. “Ninety-one percent of young adults say mainstream pop culture no longer exists. Instead, they assemble their own modular operating systems for self-expression out of niche internet subcultures.” Whether it is a deep-dive obsession with anime, a specific fitness subculture, or the aestheticization of daily life through “Sincerity-core,” these spaces provide genuine community. Yet, the cultural industry wastes no time in converting that sense of belonging into a transaction.

Take the modern influencer economy. Influencers are the ultimate cultural intermediaries. They don’t simply sell you a product in a commercial; they integrate it into their lives, blurring the line between authentic human connection and corporate sponsorship. Success and self-worth are transparently measured in views, likes and direct-message engagement. When our very identity is managed like a personal brand, we become both the factory worker and the product. But today’s generation isn’t a monolithic group of passive consumers. They’re becoming increasingly cynical of the digital ecosystem they were brought up in. One of the biggest changes of 2026 is an enormous, generational revolt against AI-created content. As generative AI floods social feeds with hyper-optimized, artificial imagery and text, young consumers are pushing back. This skepticism has ignited an unexpected counter-movement.

Tired of the over-polished, highly simulated digital world, Gen Z is migrating toward private feeds—sharing content via direct messages (DMs) and closed group chats rather than posting publicly. In fact, 70% of Gen Z engagement on Instagram now happens through DMs and private story replies. TikTok brand shares are up 60% quarter over quarter while follower growth dropped 27% in the same period. The platforms aren’t fighting this migration to private channels. There is a fierce craving for the unedited, the broken, and the human. The digital cultural industry isn’t going anywhere. It is the infrastructure of modern life, acting as the primary newsroom, marketplace, and social square for an entire generation.

The solution isn’t to log off entirely—an impossible ask in a world built on digital connection. Instead, the answer lies in critical media literacy. We need to teach young people to look at their feeds not just as windows to the world, but as highly complex financial ecosystems. When a young adult understands why an algorithm is showing them a specific video, or how a trend is manufactured to spark impulse buying, the spell breaks. Only by questioning the mirror can the contemporary generation reclaim control over their own identity—moving away from being passive metrics in a tech company’s quarterly earnings report, and moving toward becoming truly independent citizens of the digital age.

by Prince Kapone

When the Lithium Story Enters the Pink Pages

There is a particular kind of confidence that comes with writing for the house paper of finance capital. It is the confidence of a person who knows that the boardrooms, ministries, investment desks, and policy shops are already leaning in before the first sentence has finished clearing its throat. That is the atmosphere surrounding Thea Riofrancos’s March 8, 2026 Financial Times opinion essay, “Latin America’s lithium triangle is now in the hands of the right.” Riofrancos is an associate professor of political science at Providence College whose work centers resource extraction and green capitalism. The piece appears in the FT’s opinion and energy coverage at a newspaper owned by Nikkei and written for an audience trained to see the world through the movement of capital, the management of states, and the strategic anxieties of industrial powers.

The article’s central maneuver is elegant in the way ruling-class narratives often are: it takes a sprawling regional and historical question and folds it neatly into a story of political turnover. By the time the opening movement is complete, the reader is invited to believe that the decisive fact about the lithium triangle is that it has experienced a “stunning reversal of political fortune.” That phrase does a great deal of work. It tells the reader where drama lives, what counts as change, and what kind of intelligence is being offered. The real event, in this telling, is not the long social life of what the author calls “the opaque realm of resource extraction,” not the old conflict over land and development, not the stubborn fact that mineral wealth has always attracted outside appetite like meat draws flies. No, the real event is that governments have moved from left to right, and that this electoral shift may now alter the administration of a strategic resource zone. In one stroke, the mine, the salt flat, the water table, the village, and the laboring body are pushed into the background, while cabinet composition and investor mood walk to center stage.

From there the essay proceeds with the smooth manners of a text that wants to sound worldly without ever surrendering its class instinct. The lithium triangle is presented not as lived territory but as a strategic field. Governments become vectors of alignment. States become policy atmospheres. The future becomes a question of whether right-leaning presidents will “entice foreign investment,” how closely they may tilt toward Donald Trump, and whether China’s economic gravity will continue to complicate the preferred script. This is the article’s second move: it shifts from political reversal to geopolitical chessboard. Once that frame is set, the reader is encouraged to see the region as a zone suspended between Washington and Beijing, as though the highest form of understanding available is to identify which outside pole gains leverage over the next tranche of lithium output. It is a familiar trick. The people who actually inhabit a place are acknowledged, but the place itself is narrated from above, as a contest surface upon which larger powers test one another’s reach.

The third move is subtler and, in its own way, more revealing. The article repeatedly uses the language of openness, attraction, and confidence to describe what the right is expected to do. It speaks of “enticing” capital, favoring firms, pursuing bilateral deals, restoring a friendlier investment terrain. Notice the moral weather created by those verbs. Foreign investment appears not as a social relation with winners and losers, but as a kind of pragmatic rainfall for which the responsible government prepares the sky. The right is thus coded less as reaction than as normalization, less as class project than as administrative realism. Even when the article notes contradictions, it does so in a way that leaves the investment horizon fundamentally intact. The market is not interrogated; it is assumed. The argument does not ask whether this road is just, democratic, or socially coherent. It asks how smoothly traffic may move along it. That is how class ideology often works in polished prose: it appears not as propaganda shouted through a megaphone, but as common sense wearing a tie.

Yet the piece is too careful to present this realignment as simple or total. So it adds a measured dose of uncertainty, the sort of ambiguity that flatters the publication and the author alike. Appearances may be deceiving, we are told. China’s pull may remain stronger than the rhetoric of free markets suggests. Chile’s incoming direction remains not fully formed. Bolivia may restore relations with the United States while still honoring agreements signed with Chinese and Russian firms. This softening language performs an important ideological function. It gives the article the air of nuance while preserving its underlying map. Complexity is admitted, but only inside the established frame. The story still begins from electoral change, still orients toward investor expectation, still treats global powers as the decisive poles of motion. The uncertainty is real enough at the level of surface description, but it never grows sharp enough to threaten the narrative architecture itself. In other words, the article widens the hallway a little, but it still makes the reader walk in the same direction.

Then, almost as a gesture of balance, the social question enters. Environmental defenders, Indigenous communities, and local resistance appear near the end, after the article has already established what it considers the main event. This placement matters. The struggles from below are not treated as constitutive of the story’s meaning; they are presented as pressures that governments and extraction regimes will have to manage. Their function in the article is secondary, almost atmospheric. They arrive not as political subjects capable of redefining the terms of the debate, but as complicating factors in a broader tale about strategic minerals, rightward governance, and great-power rivalry. That ordering is not accidental. It tells us whose anxieties the article is structured around and whose intelligence counts as primary. Capital and states speak in the opening paragraphs; the people who must live with the consequences arrive later, like unpaid workers summoned to clean up after the meeting has ended.

The irony here is difficult to ignore. Riofrancos’s own scholarly work has been among the most incisive critiques of “green extractivism”—the tendency for the energy transition to reproduce the colonial geography of resource extraction under a new ecological banner. Yet when translated into the idiom of the Financial Times, that critique becomes muted. Structural questions about extraction recede into the background while electoral shifts and investment climates take center stage. The transformation illustrates something important about elite media itself: even critical voices are subtly reshaped by the ideological gravity of the platform on which they appear.

What emerges from a close reading, then, is not merely an argument about lithium. It is a worldview in miniature. Political turnover is elevated over structural continuity. Geopolitical competition is privileged over social conflict. Investor climate is treated as the practical horizon of policy. Community struggle is acknowledged only after the strategic map has already been drawn from above. The article does not need to sneer at the region to domesticate it. It performs a more refined operation. It narrates the lithium triangle as a zone to be interpreted through state alignment, mineral strategy, and market access, while everything messier and more human is tucked respectfully toward the back of the room. That is how elite opinion often launders power: not by lying crudely, but by teaching the reader which realities deserve the front page of consciousness and which are left standing in the hallway, cap in hand, waiting to be called.

The Lithium Triangle Beneath the Headlines

The Financial Times article invites the reader to view the lithium triangle through the drama of electoral change and geopolitical competition. But the ground beneath that narrative is older, denser, and far less polite than the investment columns suggest. According to the 2026 United States Geological Survey Mineral Commodity Summary, Argentina now possesses the largest measured lithium resources in the world at approximately 28 million tonnes, followed by Bolivia with roughly 23 million tonnes and Chile with about 13 million tonnes. Taken together, the three countries form the largest concentration of lithium resources known on Earth: about 64 million tonnes in total, or roughly 43 percent of the global figure. That geological reality has quietly transformed the Andean salt flats into one of the most coveted territories in the modern industrial economy. The geological map does not vote in elections, but it does determine where the industrial world will point its drills.

Yet resources do not automatically become supply. The same USGS data reveals a striking asymmetry between geological endowment and actual output. In 2025, Chile produced roughly 56,000 metric tons of lithium content, China about 62,000, and Argentina around 23,000—up sharply from 13,800 the year before. Bolivia, despite possessing one of the largest lithium resource bases on Earth, does not appear among the major producing countries at all. The lesson is simple enough: lithium supply is shaped not by geology alone, but by the political economy of contracts, infrastructure, technology, and state strategy.

Lithium’s sudden celebrity status is not the result of political fashion but of a deeper technological transformation underway in the global economy. Electric vehicles, battery storage systems, and renewable energy infrastructure all rely heavily on lithium-based chemistry. As these technologies expand, so too does the hunger for the mineral that sits quietly at their electrochemical core. The International Energy Agency has projected dramatic increases in lithium demand as electrification spreads across transportation and power systems. What appears in newspapers as a story about politics is therefore anchored in something far more stubborn: the industrial metabolism of a world reorganizing itself around energy transition and digital infrastructure.

Yet even here the newspaper narrative leaves out an essential fact. Lithium extraction is only the first step in a much larger industrial chain. The mineral must be processed, refined, integrated into cathodes, assembled into batteries, and then embedded within vehicles, energy systems, and consumer technologies. The highest-value stages of this chain rarely occur where the raw material is mined. Studies by UNCTAD and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean suggest that countries exporting raw lithium often capture only a small fraction of the final value generated in the battery chain, while the highest rents remain concentrated in refining, advanced materials, battery manufacturing, and electric-vehicle production. Raw material flows outward while technological rents accumulate elsewhere. In this sense, the lithium boom already sits inside an older structure of unequal exchange familiar to the Global South.

China’s role in the battery economy illustrates how this unequal structure operates in practice. The issue is not merely that China refines large quantities of lithium, but that it dominates key downstream stages of the battery supply chain, including processing, components, and cell manufacturing. This means that even when lithium originates in South American salt flats, the decisive stages of transformation often occur thousands of miles away inside refineries, battery factories, and industrial ecosystems far removed from the sites of extraction. The geopolitical anxiety surrounding lithium is therefore not only about the mineral itself but about control over the industrial chain that converts raw material into technological power.

Latin American policymakers have long recognized this dilemma. The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean has argued that lithium could become a foundation for regional industrial development if governments move beyond simple raw-material export and invest in domestic processing, battery manufacturing, and technological capacity. In other words, the mineral itself is not the final prize. The real prize lies in the industrial chain that surrounds it. If the region remains confined to extraction alone, the lithium boom risks repeating the historical pattern in which natural wealth leaves the continent while value creation occurs elsewhere.

Meanwhile the territory itself is far from empty. The salt flats where lithium extraction occurs are fragile ecosystems and homelands of Indigenous communities who have lived with these landscapes for centuries. Lithium brine extraction typically requires pumping enormous volumes of underground brine into evaporation ponds—often cited at roughly 500,000 gallons of brine movement for every tonne of lithium produced in conventional pond systems. Different studies measure this impact somewhat differently, sometimes emphasizing brine pumped from underground basins and sometimes the resulting pressure on surrounding freshwater systems, but the broader point remains unchanged: in the high deserts of the Andes, where water is already scarce, lithium extraction places severe pressure on fragile hydrological systems. Indigenous organizations and community councils across northern Chile and Argentina have raised concerns about water depletion, environmental damage, and exclusion from decision-making processes that directly affect their lands. For these communities the lithium boom is not an abstract question of industrial policy. It is a question of survival, territory, and political voice.

Human-rights organizations have documented similar tensions across the entire lithium triangle. Investigations into the salt flats of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile show that expansion of mining projects is increasingly colliding with Indigenous territorial rights and fragile ecosystems. Communities have pursued legal challenges, public protests, and regional organizing networks to defend water systems and demand consultation rights. The expansion of lithium extraction therefore unfolds not only as an industrial project but as a growing social conflict over land, environment, and sovereignty.

These conflicts are not isolated episodes. They sit inside a long historical trajectory in which Latin American societies have repeatedly attempted to assert greater public control over natural resources. Nationalization campaigns around oil, copper, and other strategic sectors have marked the region’s political history for generations. Governments across the ideological spectrum have experimented with different formulas for balancing foreign investment, public ownership, and domestic development. Lithium enters this history as the latest chapter in a much older debate about whether mineral wealth will serve external accumulation or national and regional development.

The existing presence of multinational corporations underscores how little of this terrain is actually new. Companies such as Albemarle, Livent, and SQM have operated in lithium extraction for years, long before the current cycle of political change captured headlines. The lithium triangle did not suddenly open when right-wing governments appeared. It has been integrated into global mining capital for decades, though the scale and strategic importance of the sector have grown dramatically with the rise of battery technologies.

Another fact rarely acknowledged in investor narratives is that the rightward drift in parts of Latin America did not appear spontaneously out of the electoral soil. The region has experienced what Vijay Prashad described as “the angry tide of the Latin American far right” in response to earlier waves of progressive and nationalist governments. But these shifts have also unfolded within a geopolitical environment in which Donald Trump openly attempted to influence electoral climates in the hemisphere through threats, coercive signaling, and political endorsements. In Honduras, Trump publicly backed Nasry Asfura, warned there would be “consequences” if voters chose Xiomara Castro’s preferred successor Rixi Moncada, and was accused by President Castro of interference, manipulation, and blackmail in the country’s election. In Argentina, Trump went even further, explicitly threatening to pull U.S. assistance if Javier Milei’s coalition lost, declaring that Washington would not be “generous” with Argentina if Milei failed to prevail. These interventions did not determine the elections by themselves, but they did show the U.S. president openly attempting to shape the political atmosphere around strategic states in the hemisphere.

These developments are not occurring in a historical vacuum. The United States has a long record of intervening in Latin American politics whenever nationalist or left-wing governments attempted to restructure control over strategic resources. Declassified archives have documented U.S. involvement in the destabilization of Chile’s elected government in the early 1970s and the broader Cold War system of repression coordinated through Operation Condor. That network connected military dictatorships across the Southern Cone in a transnational campaign against labor organizers, students, and political movements seen as threats to the regional order. The shadow of that history continues to shape how power moves through the hemisphere today.

Taken together, these omitted facts complicate the simple storyline offered in the investor press. Lithium extraction in the Andes sits at the intersection of geological fortune, industrial transformation, corporate power, environmental fragility, Indigenous rights, and a long tradition of geopolitical intervention in Latin America. Elections may shift the tone of policy, but the deeper structure of the conflict lies elsewhere. Beneath the headlines about political reversal lies a far more enduring question: who will control the mineral foundations of the next industrial era, and whose development those minerals will ultimately serve.

From Salt Flats to the World System

Once the empirical terrain is laid bare, the political narrative advanced in the pages of the Financial Times begins to look less like analysis and more like stagecraft. The article is not wrong in the narrow sense that elections have consequences or that investors watch governments closely. But it is profoundly incomplete about the structure within which those elections occur. Lithium did not become strategic because voters changed their minds in Santiago, Buenos Aires, or La Paz. Lithium became strategic because the industrial metabolism of global capitalism has entered a new technological phase. The electric motor, the battery pack, the server farm, the data center, the grid-scale storage facility—these are the engines of the emerging industrial regime. And every one of them runs through the chemical corridors of lithium. In that sense, the salt flats of the Andes are not merely landscapes; they are pressure points in the circuitry of the twenty-first century world economy.

This is where the historical materialist lens sharpens the picture. Capitalism has always reorganized geography according to its technological needs. When silver financed empire, Potosí became the center of gravity. When nitrates fed European agriculture, the Atacama became a battlefield. When copper electrified the industrial world, Chile’s mines turned into the arteries of global industry. Now lithium enters the stage as the mineral companion of electrification and digital infrastructure. Each new technological wave redraws the map of extraction, and each wave produces its own frontier zones where the interests of industrial powers collide with the realities of land, labor, and sovereignty.

In this sense the lithium triangle is not an isolated curiosity. It is the latest chapter in a long story about how peripheral regions are pulled into the orbit of global accumulation. Marx once wrote that capital comes into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” The polite language of supply chains and investment flows does not change the underlying fact that these chains begin in specific territories inhabited by specific people whose land, water, and labor become the first inputs of industrial transformation. The lithium boom therefore belongs to the same lineage as earlier extractive frontiers: wealth flows outward while power gathers elsewhere, unless something interrupts that pattern.

The question, then, is not simply who governs the lithium triangle today, but what role the region will play within the global division of labor that is now reorganizing itself around electrification and digital infrastructure. If extraction remains the dominant role assigned to the region, the outcome will be familiar: raw materials exported, technological rents captured abroad, and local societies left to negotiate the environmental and social costs of production. The mineral changes, the rhetoric evolves, but the structure remains recognizable to anyone who has studied the long history of resource economies in the Global South. This pattern has long been recognized within the traditions of dependency theory and world-systems analysis, which have shown how peripheral economies are often locked into supplying raw materials while the higher-value stages of industrial production concentrate in the core of the world economy. This hierarchy is reinforced by the structure of the battery supply chain itself, where the higher-value stages of processing, active materials, and battery manufacturing remain concentrated outside the territories where the raw material is extracted.

Yet the present moment also introduces a new dimension. The global order that governed earlier extractive cycles is no longer as stable as it once was. The rise of China as an industrial and technological power has fractured the old monopoly over refining, manufacturing, and technological integration. What once appeared as a single channel of dependence has widened into a more complicated landscape in which multiple external powers compete for access to strategic inputs. This does not automatically liberate resource-producing countries, but it alters the balance of possibility. Where once there was only one door through which minerals could travel, there are now several—and the existence of those doors changes the bargaining terrain.

This widening field of maneuver explains why the struggle over lithium cannot be reduced to a question of electoral ideology. Governments in the region face a structural dilemma: whether to remain primarily exporters of raw material or attempt to climb the industrial ladder through domestic processing, regional industrialization, and stronger public control over strategic sectors. That dilemma has haunted Latin American development for generations. The difference today is that the stakes are tied to the technological foundation of the next industrial epoch. Lithium is not merely a commodity; it is a gateway into the industrial ecosystems that will power transportation, energy systems, and digital infrastructure for decades to come.

Seen from this angle, the political shifts highlighted in the Financial Times article acquire a different meaning. The consolidation of right-wing governments in key parts of the lithium triangle is not simply a matter of ideological preference or electoral mood. It intersects with a broader geopolitical contest over whether Latin America will function as a strategic resource reservoir for industrial powers or assert a more autonomous developmental trajectory. Right-wing administrations historically aligned with oligarchic and transnational interests often promise policy stability for foreign capital, streamlined regulation, and rapid extraction. These promises are rarely framed as class projects; they are presented instead as pragmatic realism, the supposedly inevitable logic of markets. But beneath the technocratic vocabulary lies a familiar political economy: minerals extracted locally, value captured elsewhere, and development measured primarily by the satisfaction of external investors.

The social and ecological contradictions of lithium extraction sharpen this dilemma further. The salt flats where lithium brines accumulate are not empty spaces waiting to be industrialized. They are ecosystems whose water systems sustain fragile desert environments and Indigenous communities that have inhabited the region for centuries. When extraction expands rapidly under the pressure of global demand, the result is not merely economic growth but an intensification of conflicts over water, land rights, and political authority. The people who live closest to the resource often become the first to experience the costs of its transformation into global commodity.

This is why the community struggles that appear only briefly in the investor narrative are, in fact, central to the political economy of lithium. They represent a different understanding of development—one that asks whether the wealth drawn from a territory will sustain the communities who inhabit it or simply feed distant circuits of capital accumulation. In that sense the salt flats have become more than mineral deposits. They are sites where competing visions of the future confront one another directly: extraction organized around global supply security on one side, and development grounded in territorial rights, ecological limits, and social sovereignty on the other.

The conflict over lithium therefore condenses several historical contradictions into a single landscape. It reflects the enduring tension between center and periphery in the world economy. It reflects the struggle between national development and externally managed extraction. It reflects the collision between industrial expansion and ecological limits. And it reflects the political question that haunts every resource-rich region: whether the wealth beneath the soil will deepen dependency or open the door to a more autonomous path of development.

When viewed from this wider perspective, the lithium triangle appears less like a chessboard for great-power competition and more like a frontier in the reorganization of the global political economy. The article in the Financial Times captures the movement of pieces on the board, but it leaves the structure of the board itself largely unexamined. To understand what is truly unfolding in the Andes, one must move beyond the polite language of markets and geopolitics and confront the deeper logic of the system: a world economy in transition, a region struggling over the meaning of its natural wealth, and a mineral whose importance now links remote salt flats to the technological future of the entire planet.

Where the Salt Flats Answer Back

If the previous sections have traced the mineral logic of lithium through the circuits of capital and empire, the final question is simpler and more dangerous: what forces exist capable of interrupting that logic? History gives us a clue. Every extractive frontier eventually produces its own counter-movement. The mine creates the miner; the plantation produces the rebel; the port gives birth to the dockworkers’ union. In the high deserts of the Andes, the lithium boom is already generating its own answer. It comes not from the boardrooms where the mineral is priced nor from the ministries where contracts are signed, but from the territories where the brine is pumped, the water tables sink, and the consequences of extraction become immediate and unavoidable.

Indigenous communities across the salt-flat regions of Chile and Argentina have begun organizing around the most elemental issue of all: water. In the Atacama and surrounding basins, lithium extraction depends on pumping underground brine into evaporation ponds that stretch like artificial lakes across the desert floor. The process requires vast quantities of water in ecosystems where water is already scarce. Communities whose survival depends on fragile hydrological systems therefore confront extraction not as a technical matter but as a question of life itself. Their mobilization has taken many forms—community assemblies, public campaigns, legal challenges, and international appeals asserting the right to consultation and environmental protection. These movements insist on a principle that modern resource governance has long tried to forget: that the people who inhabit a territory possess the authority to decide how that territory is used.

In Argentina the same struggle has moved through the courts as well as the streets. Communities in the Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc basin have pursued legal action demanding recognition of their territorial rights and protection of the ecosystems on which their livelihoods depend. The legal terrain is not neutral, of course; courts often reflect the balance of political forces that surround them. But even within that constrained arena these campaigns reveal something important. The populations most directly affected by extraction are not passive observers of the lithium boom. They are political actors seeking to reshape the terms under which development proceeds.

The struggle has also begun to take regional form. The Observatorio Plurinacional de Salares Andinos has emerged as a cross-border network connecting organizations concerned with the protection of Andean salt flats and wetlands. Its work reflects an understanding that the ecosystems sustaining lithium deposits do not obey the boundaries drawn on political maps. The hydrology of the Andes, like the migration routes of capital, moves across national frontiers. Effective resistance therefore requires coordination across those same frontiers. What begins as a local defense of territory gradually grows into a regional conversation about ecological limits, resource governance, and the rights of communities whose lands have long served as extraction zones for distant economies.

Environmental justice networks have likewise entered the debate, connecting lithium extraction to a broader critique of the global energy transition. Their argument is direct enough to make technocrats uncomfortable: a transition away from fossil fuels cannot be called just if it reproduces the same colonial geography of sacrifice zones that characterized the fossil era itself. If the Global North reduces its emissions while the ecological costs of mineral extraction are displaced onto Indigenous territories and peripheral regions, the structure of the system remains unchanged. The energy source may shift from oil wells to lithium brine, but the hierarchy governing whose land absorbs the damage remains intact.

None of this implies that electrification itself should be abandoned. Modern societies will require batteries, energy storage systems, and new technologies to move beyond fossil fuels. The question is not whether the energy transition occurs but how it is organized. If electrification reproduces the same colonial geography of sacrifice zones—where peripheral regions supply raw materials while wealth accumulates elsewhere—the transition will merely exchange one extractive regime for another. A just transition would instead link mineral extraction to local development, democratic resource governance, and ecological protection.

These movements represent more than a defense of landscape. They point toward a deeper political question that the lithium boom has forced onto the global stage: who will govern the material foundations of the energy transition? If that transition is organized solely by the demands of industrial supply chains and corporate profit, it will likely replicate the old pattern of extraction and dependency that has marked the history of resource economies across the Global South. If, however, communities, workers, and states assert greater democratic control over strategic minerals, the transition could become an opportunity to reconfigure development itself—linking extraction to domestic industry, ecological stewardship, and social need rather than external accumulation.

For movements in the Global North, the implications are equally clear. The demand driving lithium expansion originates largely in industrial economies whose consumers, technology firms, and automakers require enormous quantities of battery materials. Solidarity with territorial struggles in the Andes therefore cannot remain symbolic. It must involve confronting the political economy of supply chains that connect distant consumption to local extraction. Labor movements, environmental organizations, and anti-imperialist networks in wealthier economies possess a particular responsibility here: to challenge corporate narratives that portray the energy transition as a purely technological solution while ignoring the social relations embedded in its mineral foundations.

None of this suggests that lithium extraction will disappear or that modern societies can simply abandon the technologies that depend upon it. The point is not to romanticize pre-industrial landscapes or to deny the material requirements of contemporary life. The point, rather, is that the organization of extraction, industry, and development is a political choice rather than an inevitability dictated by markets. Who controls the resource, how the benefits are distributed, what ecological limits are respected, and which communities participate in decision-making—these are questions that belong to democratic struggle, not to the quiet negotiations of corporate boardrooms.

The salt flats of the Andes therefore stand at the intersection of two possible futures. In one future the lithium triangle becomes another chapter in the long history of resource frontiers: minerals exported, ecosystems strained, local communities marginalized, and technological wealth accumulated elsewhere. In the other future the region uses its geological fortune as leverage to reshape development on more sovereign and socially grounded terms. Which of these paths emerges will not be decided by headlines in the financial press. It will be decided by the balance of forces between those who treat the earth as a warehouse of inputs and those who insist that the land, the water, and the mineral wealth beneath them belong first to the peoples who live there.

The lithium boom may have begun as a story about batteries and markets, but it is already becoming something else. It is becoming a struggle over the political meaning of the energy transition itself. And in that struggle the salt flats are not silent landscapes. They are speaking back.

by Marisa Lourenço

Photo caption.  Protest in Johannesburg (Photo: Andy Diesel / Pexels)

South Africa’s migration debate is overwhelmingly focused on what happens when migrants arrive. Politicians argue about deportations and documentation. Activists focus on xenophobia and human rights. Journalists report on violence and vigilantism.

The question no one asks

Far less attention is paid to a simpler question: across Africa, why are so many people leaving home for South Africa in the first place?

President Cyril Ramaphosa touched on it in his 7 June national address on migration when he observed that South Africa “cannot address migration challenges alone”. In doing so, he acknowledged something that is often missing from public debate: migration is not simply a border management problem, a law enforcement problem or a political problem. It is also a regional problem.

Migration itself is neither unusual nor inherently negative. People have moved across borders in search of safety, opportunity and prosperity throughout history. But across Africa, most people do not leave their homes, families and communities lightly. They move largely because they have no alternative. And as the region’s most industrialised economy – and arguably its most robust democracy – South Africa inevitably attracts migrants seeking opportunities that are unavailable elsewhere on the continent.

That observation matters because discussions about migration frequently focus only on what South Africa should do differently.

South Africa’s share of responsibility

Certainly, the ANC-led government bears significant responsibility. For more than two decades, it has treated repeated outbreaks of xenophobic violence as temporary crises to be managed rather than symptoms of a deeper structural problem requiring sustained political attention, even as these episodes exposed deep public frustrations over unemployment, crime and poor service delivery.

It is also true that politicians across the political spectrum in South Africa have exploited these frustrations for political gain, particularly over the past decade. Those who have weaponised anti-immigration rhetoric as an easy route to popularity often appear indifferent to the very real and sometimes deadly consequences of their words.

But there is an uncomfortable truth that many governments elsewhere in Africa prefer not to acknowledge. Economic stagnation, political instability, weak governance and limited opportunities remain acute across much of the continent.Zimbabwe’s economic collapse drove millions of citizens to seek opportunities elsewhere over the past two decades, while persistent poverty and limited employment opportunities continue to encourage migration from countries such as Malawi and Mozambique.

A burden South Africa cannot carry alone

South Africa should not be expected to solve a challenge rooted in broader regional dynamics. Nor is it capable of doing so. South Africa itself faces enormous challenges. Unemployment exceeds 30% – and rises above 40% among young people – while many public services are under significant strain. Much of the spatial inequality designed by the apartheid government remains untouched more than three decades after the dawn of the democratic era.

These challenges are the product of historical imbalances, domestic policy choices and governance failures, not migration. But it would be equally wrong to suggest that migration places no pressure on public services, labour markets or local communities. When systems are already under strain, additional demand can intensify existing frustrations.

Coverage of migration often reflects this imbalance. Journalists frequently ask migrants why they fear xenophobic violence in South Africa, but far less attention is paid to why they left home in the first place. The answer is often found not in Johannesburg or Durban, but in the economic and political realities of Harare, Lilongwe, Maputo and elsewhere. Focusing only on conditions in South Africa risks obscuring the forces that make migration appear attractive despite the deep risks involved – which in South Africa sometimes include death at the hands of vigilantes. It also risks deepening perceptions that government is more responsive to the needs of migrants than to those of struggling citizens, whether that perception is justified or not.

Governments across the region often reinforce this tendency. They are quick to condemn xenophobic violence in South Africa, and rightly so. But far less attention is paid to the political and economic conditions that compel so many of their citizens to leave home in the first place. It is easier to criticise South Africa’s response to migration than to confront the governance failures and economic stagnation that continue to drive migration across much of the continent.

Why the silence holds

South Africa is unlikely to challenge this narrative directly. No ANC president will want to publicly criticise neighbouring governments for contributing to migration pressures in South Africa. South Africans will recall how former president Thabo Mbeki maintained his policy of quiet diplomacy towards Zimbabwe in the 2000s, even as political repression and economic collapse under Robert Mugabe drove large numbers of Zimbabweans into South Africa.

Still, Ramaphosa’s remarks briefly pointed in that direction. South Africa’s migration challenge is inseparable from the wider condition of the region around it. Until that reality is confronted more directly – by South Africa and its neighbours alike – migration will remain a source of political tension.

by Kim Scipes

Strong support for Palestine and Palestinian workers was obvious at the recently concluded Labor Notes conference in Chicago.  This bi-annual conference of labor activists took place on June 12-14 at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare Hotel.  Over 4,700 activists from across the US but also from Canada and other countries, including Brazil, Italy, Portugal, and South Korea, registered to report, share, and discuss developments effecting the labor movements in these and other countries.

Labor Notes itself is a monthly news magazine for these activists, who form an informal network around the journal, and who meet bi-annually.  The slogan for the journal is “Putting the movement back into the Labor Movement.”  It was established in 1979 and has continued expanding to date.  The size of the conference was probably the largest to date, although cancellations because storm conditions hampered flying from the East Coast, cutting some registrants’ participation.

Much of the program was dedicated to organizing workplaces, garnering better contracts for the workers, and encouraging leadership development, including challenging reactionary leaders for elective office. Yet these efforts were not alone; cultural aspects, such as singing, writing, and acting were also emphasized.

However, there is a growing awareness among the activists of needing to link up with workers in other countries.  While Labor Notes has long brought a few foreign workers to previous conferences, building global labor solidarity has not been seen by this writer as a substantial issue for the journal.

And this writer is still not convinced this has changed.  In the middle of the war with Iran—a war initiated by the United States and Israel—there were no formal discussions of the war at the conference.  Nor were there any formal discussions of the AFL-CIO’s “labor imperialist” foreign policy, which a few of us have been challenging for the last 40 years.

However, what was unmistakable was the growth of a global understanding by this new crop of activists; for a significant number, their visions went far beyond US borders.  There were many informal discussions around these and other issues.

One of the key issues discussed was that of injured GM (General Motors) workers in Bogota, Colombia; they had been injured on the job, and GM had refused to compensate them.  Some of these workers have been living in tents outside of the US Embassy in Bogota, seeking respect and compensation, for the past 15 years!  Under continued pressure from a few of its members, the UAW (United Auto Workers) leadership has taken on this issue, and will be meeting with GM executives in early July in Bogota to finally address this issue.  Hopefully, this will lead to a serious settlement.  Auto worker activists from Brazil, Italy, Portugal, and South Korea each expressed solidarity with these injured Colombian workers, suggesting the expansion of this fight should GM demur.

But there was no international issue discussed more than Palestine.  There were two formal panels that this writer attended, with the larger having over 100 participants, and people were also sitting two-deep on the floor.  The other was slightly smaller.  It is clear that the Israeli/US treatment of Palestinians is not only deemed unacceptable, but that these activists are working hard in their unions to educate fellow workers and who are taking formal action to change US Labor’s support for Israel and its US benefactors.  Not surprisingly, much of this support was specifically for Palestinian workers.

Speakers reported what was happening in their unions.  We were told about educational campaigns that had developed formal support for Palestine; we were told about emerging campaigns; and we were told of campaigns blocked by reactionary leaders who opposed them.  And we were told of successful efforts to go around and by-pass some of these opposing efforts.  Some of these involved becoming much more familiar with their union’s constitutions and other enabling acts.  Others were more inventive:  a couple of cases reported establishing direct links with Palestinian unions.  But it was clear that there is an emerging cadre of both leaders and aspiring leaders who not only have Palestine on their map but are consciously fighting within the labor movement to support Palestinian workers.

One of the most inspiring reports was from Canada.  In May, activists in Labor for Palestine-Canada won an important vote at the recent Canadian Labour Congress—the largest Canadian labor center, comparable organizationally to the AFL-CIO—to break all ties with Israel’s Histadrut, their national labor center.  But the Histadrut is not just a regular labor center, uniting labor unions; it was a key organization in the Zionist effort to create the State of Israel; it is formally part of the Israeli state.  The first Prime Minister of the State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, had been a leader of the Histadrut, but in that role, according to author Jeff Schuhrke’s recent book, No Neutrals There:  US Labor, Zionism, and the Struggle for Palestine (Haymarket Books, 2025), “He was also largely in control of the Haganah, the labor Zionist militia that fell under the Histadrut’s purview.”  Another Prime Minister, Golda Meir, also had been a Histadrut leader.  And, needless to say, the Histadrut treats its Jewish members—Zionists and non-Zionists—qualitatively better than its Palestinian members.

Along with these developments, there was a social gathering sponsored by Labor for Palestine-US, outside of the conference, that showed the depth of support among the activists.  Apparently not approved by Labor Notes staff—or at least not willing to trust them—activists decided to meet away from the hotel site of the conference; they found a place in a public park, approximately one-quarter of a mile away from the hotel, where they had their luncheon gathering.  While some people arrived early, others kept streaming in.  Elaborate displays had been put up, including Schuhrke’s book and pictures, on some tables, but they had to be removed so people could have places to sit and eat.  Others gathered in a number of groups under trees.  The large amount of food soon proved inadequate, so some of the later arrivals did not get full plates of food.  Approximately 200 activists attended this luncheon, where they discussed a myriad of issues around Palestine and discussed ways to advance their efforts.  It was a very spirited meeting and new connections among activists were made and expanded.  (For more information, go to https://laborforpalestine.net.)

The importance of this was that these were mostly rank-and-file activists, present in many unions and from across the country; this was not a rogue group.

However, the question not addressed was the role of the AFL-CIO top-level leadership in this process; it is not encouraging if we go back to 2004-05 developments.  There had been over 30 years of work by California-based activist and plumber, Fred Hirsch, who had exposed the AFL-CIO’s regional organization at that time, AIFLD (American Institute for Free Labor Development), and its role in training and then in helping to prepare reactionary workers to participate in the military coup in Chile during 1973.  Hirsch’s work was extremely well-respected, and along with others, had built up significant support for condemning the AFL-CIO’s “labor imperialist” foreign policy.

In 2004, over 400 elected representatives of California’s 2.5 million union members—one-sixth of the entire AFL-CIO at the time—voted unanimously to condemn the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy.  Accordingly, this resolution was transmitted to the AFL-CIO’s national office to be considered at the 2005 National Convention in Chicago.  It was then transmitted to the Resolutions Committee of the convention, headed by AFSCME President Gerald McEntee, a strong supporter of AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, who transformed it into a resolution praising the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy.  McEntee would not let any supporters of the California resolution speak in support of the way-laid resolution on the floor of the convention, and it was passed as modified:  labor democracy be damned!

At the same 2005 convention, USLAW (US Labor Against the War) got a resolution passed that demanded that the US pull its’ troops out of Iraq at the first opportunity.  This had been the first formal resolution passed by union members that challenged US foreign policy during a war that the US was engaged in.  Despite being passed by constitutional actions, AFL-CIO leaders simply ignored it.

So, 20 years down the road, and Palestine is a major issue facing the US labor movement.  Union members are organizing to oppose the genocide.  Will they be able to break the hold of the top-level reactionary “leadership”?  Only time will tell.  But the AFL-CIO is much weaker than it was 20 years ago, and the range and intensity of support for Palestinian workers is much broader than “just” California back then; continued organizing, both in efforts and in depth of educating members, give hope this time around.  And, if successful, the work done at the 2026 Labor Notes conference will be a significant milestone.

by Gisela Cernadas, David Vine, and John Bellamy Foster

Photo caption.  Columbia Class Ballistic Missile Submarine. Image: U.S. Naval Systems Command.

U.S. President Donald Trump has proposed a $1.5 trillion military budget for the fiscal year 2027, which would increase by 44 percent the acknowledged budget for 2026. While a roughly $500 billion increase would be unprecedented in modern U.S. history, the idea that the military budget only recently hit $1 trillion is incorrect. U.S. military spending has exceeded $1 trillion for many years. Adding $500 billion (and potentially $200 billion more to fund war in Iran), as the president has proposed, would take the total military budget up to $2 trillion to $3 trillion.

A new report from the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), written by David Vine, John Bellamy Foster and Gisela Cernadas, argues that this widely reported number dramatically understates the true cost of maintaining the U.S. military. Using five different methodologies, the report estimates that total military spending in 2025 was between $1.5 trillion and $1.8 trillion and could be as high as $2.3 trillion when interest payments associated with military-related debt are included. The report concludes that the United States has been spending well above $1 trillion on military activities for many years, contrary to the common perception that this threshold was only recently crossed.

According to the analysis conducted by the POGO, the Hartung/Smithberger methodology produces the highest base estimate at $1,766,172,000,000, followed by the Wheeler approach at $1,727,634,000,000 and the figure reported by USAspending.gov at $1,717,989,509,643. The Cernadas/Foster and National Priorities Project methodologies yield comparatively lower base estimates of $1,494,236,125,000 and $1,477,081,000,000, respectively. When interest is incorporated, the totals increase substantially, ranging from $1,713,283,160,060 under the National Priorities Project methodology to $2,284,383,842,468 under the Cernadas/Foster approach. It should be noted that the National Priorities Project figure focuses on discretionary spending and excludes mandatory forms of spending; were the latter included, this estimate would align far more closely with the others.

Whether intentionally or otherwise, Congress, presidents, and the Pentagon have hidden the true size of the U.S. military budget for decades. Journalists, think tank analysts, academics, and other experts have, with rare exceptions, perpetuated the problem by reporting only a portion of true military spending; most are unaware of the costs they’re overlooking.

The problem with most conventional reporting is that there are hundreds of billions of dollars in military spending outside the Pentagon’s annual budget appropriated by Congress. Even a generally authoritative source of global military spending data such as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) underestimates U.S. spending by overlooking significant sums outside what Trump calls the Department of War and related budgets.

One major example is nuclear weapons spending, which represented around $33.5 billion in net spending for FY 2025. Although nuclear forces are controlled and deployed by the U.S. military, a significant portion of the budget for maintaining and modernizing the nuclear arsenal is allocated through the Department of Energy rather than the Pentagon.

Another large category of hidden spending involves veterans and military retirees. The costs of pensions, health care, disability benefits, survivor assistance, and other long-term obligations are primarily funded through the Department of Veterans Affairs and other federal accounts. These expenditures are direct consequences of maintaining military forces and fighting wars, yet they are typically excluded from military budget calculations.

Beyond veterans’ benefits and nuclear weapons, military-related spending can also be found within the budgets of the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of State, and several other agencies. Programs ranging from military aid to foreign governments to certain homeland security functions contribute to national military capacity but often fall outside official defence budget totals.

A major significant issue is debt financing. Since the wars launched after 11 September 2001, the United States has relied heavily on borrowing rather than taxation to finance military operations. For this reason, some refer to the post-2001 wars as ‘credit card wars’. While analysts disagree on how much of the national debt should be attributed to military activities, including these costs pushes 2025 military expenditures well above $2 trillion under some methodologies.

Despite differences in definitions and data sources used by the authors, all five methodologies arrive at a similar conclusion: the commonly cited military budget substantially underestimates what the United States actually spends on war, military forces, and related activities. This suggests that the issue is not a matter of partisan interpretation but rather the result of longstanding budget practices that disperse military costs across numerous federal agencies.

Understanding the true scale of military spending is essential for democratic accountability. Citizens cannot effectively debate national priorities if they are presented with incomplete information about how public funds are allocated. If major expenses associated with military activities are distributed across multiple departments, the public may struggle to compare military expenditures with spending on other priorities such as education, housing, infrastructure, health care, or climate resilience.

If the United States is already spending between $1.7 trillion and $2.3 trillion annually on military-related activities, proposals for additional increases should be evaluated against that broader fiscal reality rather than against the narrower Pentagon budget alone.

Unfortunately, there remains ambiguity about the full scale of military spending given the poor state of Pentagon accounting practices, including its inability to pass a financial audit. Members of the public and members of Congress need a full accounting of the military budget to analyse, discuss, and debate the proper size of military spending both on its own and in relation to other non-military funding priorities.

To provide accurate spending figures, Congress should reform its budgeting practices and provide a true total military budget that combines all forms of military and war spending in one place and one true total figure. Congress also should stop appropriating, and thus hiding, money for the military in other agencies’ budgets. Until Congress begins reporting accurate numbers, members of the media and other analysts should stop repeating incomplete congressional spending data and tell the public what the country is really spending on the military and war.

by Khwezi Mabasa

Photo caption.  Supporters of the anti-immigration group March and March march through Bellville, Cape Town, demanding action against undocumented migration, May 2026. Source: Ihsaan Haffejee/GroundUp via Africaisacountry.

South Africans commemorated two significant events in May: Africa Day and Workers’ Day. These moments normally evoke political reflection on the importance of African unity and workers’ solidarity in challenging racialized capitalism over decades. Yet this year’s reflections were marred by Afrophobic and tribalist attacks on black African working-class migrants. The leaders and supporters of this movement argue that Black African migrants are primarily responsible for the country’s perennial unemployment, crime, and low-quality public service problems. These claims seek to justify violence and discriminatory stereotypes loaded with colonial racist assumptions. Furthermore, these organizations have not provided any evidence to substantiate their claims, particularly regarding employment and labor absorption across various economic sectors.

There is consensus that the country’s socioeconomic inequality continues to disproportionately affect Black working-class individuals, households, and communities. Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) household and labor force surveys point to racialized and gendered disparities in employment as well as household expenditure. But it is entirely erroneous to attribute and reduce the structural socioeconomic challenges cited above to increased migration. What is more concerning is the essentialist, Afrophobic logic that underpins these claims, which narrows systemic economic problems to individual or group identity. The unsubstantiated sweeping generalizations should be questioned on the following empirical and political grounds.

First, South Africa has a structural unemployment problem that is not primarily caused by increased labor migration. The research evidence on the country’s persistent labor market inequalities and unemployment points to different core causes. Sectors that have historically employed large sections of the black working class have declined since the late 1980s. Deindustrialization, trade liberalization, deregulated financial markets, and reduced state intervention all contributed to structural weaknesses in high labor-absorbing sectors such as manufacturing, textiles, and agro-food system value chains. This trend directly impacts employment figures and needs to be reversed. Several civil society organizations, research institutes, and the labor movement have proposed policy solutions to increase employment through various industrial and macroeconomic policies.

The second flaw in the claims about employment relates to the nature of South Africa’s labor market. Research indicates that the country has a multilayered labor market structure in which workers have differentiated wages, employment security, and industrial relations rights. The workforce is divided into two main groups: a small group of workers with standard employment status and rights, and the majority who occupy precarious jobs with minimal labor protections. This context makes it easier for employers to dismiss workers or exploit them through labor market flexibility. The job losses recorded in several sectors and communities—not migration—are related to these trends. Additionally, migrant workers constitute a small portion of the overall employed workforce. Most surveys conducted by both state and non-state research organizations indicate that migrant workers constitute less than 10 percent of the overall labor force. The discussion needs to be further disaggregated into sector-specific trends so that citizens and policymakers can obtain a clear, evidence-based picture. Reports from organizations such as the African Centre for Migration & Society and the Migrating for Work Research Consortium found that non-South African migrant employees typically hold precarious and low-paying jobs. These facts challenge the sweeping generalizations about employment articulated in the context of the recent violent attacks.

The third and final shortcoming in this shift towards heightened anti-migrant mobilization is its state-centrism. There are minimal efforts to hold private actors and businesses accountable for creating labor market super-exploitation. Most of the frustration about exclusion from labor markets is directed toward black African migrants or state authorities. Yet there are cases where both large and small private businesses continue to hire migrant workers in exploitative labor conditions. The state-centric emphasis in these movements overlooks this trend and redirects the core causes onto marginalized migrant workers and the government.

Most South Africans agree that breaking labor laws and regulations is fundamentally wrong. But the policy solutions to address this circumvention of labor law must be evidence-based and directed toward the core institutions causing the crisis. More importantly, the country needs labor market and macroeconomic policy reforms that substantially increase employment. These alternative policy proposals are articulated in many formal policy submissions by the labor movement and civil society. The main propositions include: strengthening labor rights implementation; protecting high labor-absorbing sectors; reducing trade liberalization; demand-led fiscal policy frameworks; and reducing concentrated market structures across the economy.

by Nirmal Gorana, Gig and Platform Service Workers Union

Background note by the Kamgar Ekta Committee Team:The 114^th international Labour Conference, held by International Labour Organization (ILO) concluded on 12 June with the adoption of the first international labour standards aimed at improving working conditions for millions of people who earn their living through digital labour platforms. The new Convention on Decent Work in the Platform Economy calls on Member States to ensure that digital platform workers enjoy fundamental rights at work, including freedom of association and collective bargaining, protection from discrimination, child labour and forced labour, and the right to a safe and healthy working environment.

Platform workers are being told to welcome a historic breakthrough. But from the workers’ side, this moment feels far more like a warning than a victory. After years of organizing, strikes, testimonies, and demands from platform workers across the world, what has emerged is not the transformation workers fought for, but a compromised text that still leaves too much power with platforms, too much discretion with governments, and too little that will immediately change the lives of ordinary workers.

The Convention acknowledges that the platform economy has serious decent work deficits. It recognizes unsafe work, algorithmic control, inadequate protections, problems of classification, weak social security access, unfair pay practices, arbitrary deactivation, and the cross-border nature of digital labour platforms. But recognition is not justice. Naming exploitation is not the same as ending it.

Platform companies are already organized globally. Their business models, capital, investors, data systems, and algorithmic controls operate across borders, while workers are forced to struggle country by country, law by law, and case by case. In this reality, a convention that does not establish strong, enforceable rights in unmistakable terms will not bring substantial change in the lives of workers. Without binding global standards, companies will continue to shift responsibility, exploit legal gaps, and play one jurisdiction against another while workers remain trapped in low pay, insecurity, surveillance, and silence.

This is why many workers see the outcome as deeply inadequate. The Convention allows exclusions for certain categories of platforms or workers, leaves key protections to national law and practice, and depends heavily on future ratification, implementation, and enforcement by states. Workers know what that means in practice: delay, dilution, and loopholes.

The text speaks of fair payment, but it does not guarantee a universal living wage floor for all platform workers. It addresses social security, but only according to workers’ classification, which is exactly where platforms have historically escaped responsibility by misclassifying workers. It speaks of algorithmic transparency and review, yet it still leaves workers vulnerable to opaque systems that decide who gets work, who gets punished, and who gets removed from the app.

Workers did not fight simply for better language. They fought for power, bargaining rights, protection from retaliation, full recognition as workers, employer accountability, and real remedies when rights are violated. A framework that still permits exclusions, postpones justice to national processes, and softens employer obligations cannot be presented as a complete achievement for the working class.

We reject any attempt by governments, international institutions, or platform companies to package this as a finished victory. For workers on the ground, there is no victory where wages remain unstable, costs are pushed onto labour, social protection is uncertain, and deactivation can still destroy a livelihood overnight. There is no victory where workers are recognized in principle but denied justice in practice.

GIPSWU therefore insists that this Convention must be treated as a floor for continued struggle, not as the end of it. Governments must ratify it quickly, close every exclusion, enact stronger national laws, and ensure full enforcement through labour inspection, collective bargaining rights, social security, wage protection, data rights, and safeguards against arbitrary suspension and termination. Platform workers need more than symbolic recognition. They need enforceable rights, global accountability, and a system that puts human dignity above digital exploitation.

by Benard Marszalek