Draft Marxist-Humanist Perspectives for 2026-27

Part I. From war to war: Iran, Palestine, AI, climate
Part II. America 250: Counterrevolution mythologizes 1776 Revolution
Part III. Negating this world in crisis: the need to get to the negation of the negation

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Part I. From war to war: Iran, Palestine, AI, climate

At no time since the plunge toward World War II have the rulers so recklessly inflamed one crisis after another, from ecological destruction to an AI arms race.

The reverberations of the U.S.-Israel war against Iran in particular are being felt across the world. Its damage can never be fully undone. Thousands of Iranians were killed and tens of thousands injured, while the massive liberation movement against the theocratic Iranian rulers was stifled for now.

Their slaughter of protesters in January was compounded by Trump-Netanyahu’s war, which left the regime more entrenched than ever. Under cover of that war, Iran is holding mass trials of youthful protesters with not even a pretense of fairness and condemning them to death.

The war weakened the U.S. and strengthened China and Russia,[1] while bestowing new power on Iran over one of the world’s key trade arteries and its own people. It aided Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine, especially by helping Russia rake in far more money for its oil. The slaughter of Ukrainian civilians accelerated, while Ukraine has taken the war to Russia, damaging every refinery—and many distribution warehouses—from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea to Western Siberia.

Trump’s enabling of Putin’s war outweighs the grudging tokens of support he promised Ukraine. But the many retreats that Putin and Trump have been forced into are important indications that their message of invincibility is a lie. The battle is on.

ISRAEL’S WARS AND GENOCIDE

Thousands more civilians were killed in the front that Israel opened on its northern border, after which it occupied a swath of Lebanon that it announced it would absorb. At the same time, it grabbed even more Syrian land. Under cover of the war, Israel ramped up its ethnic cleansing in Palestine. The violent attacks on West Bank villages like Qusra by fanatical settlers—who act as “fascist militia formations” with the support of soldiers—sparked outrage around the world. As this is written they are still besieging villagers, cutting off water and electricity to their homes, and blocking an ambulance from picking up a sick toddler. This incident epitomizes what is happening across the West Bank. In the village of Al-Tuba, settlers set homes ablaze with children inside.

Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir made plain the genocidal ideology behind this drawn-out pogrom: “I think targeted killings should be carried out in Gaza every night. Kill 30 or 40, not only those who pose a danger to you at that particular moment. If there are people there who are not worthy of life, they should not live. They are not people.”

The calls for genocide issued by Israel’s leaders are not out of step with geopolitics. Major world powers have moved from a selective application of human rights and international law to open disdain. Genocide itself, though officially denied, is openly announced, from Trump’ threat to Iran (“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”) to Putin’s assertion that Ukraine should not exist.

The multiple wars, especially by the U.S. and Russia, have wounded the world economy so badly that Trump admitted, “I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened.” And yet, that concern did not stop him from restarting the war over and over.

WAR ON WORKERS AND ECONOMIC RISKS

Trump’s concern over the economy stops with his own power and wealth. He cares about the strength of capital but not the suffering caused by his cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, mental health funding for children, pregnancy prevention initiatives and other social programs. Inflation is, to him, only a political problem, though now two-thirds of the U.S. find groceries unaffordable. Interest rates are rising while credit card debt approaches new highs.

Cleansing the U.S. of brown-skinned workers outweighs the economic disruption it causes, from caregiving and healthcare to farming and construction. Even bourgeois economists can hardly break through Trump’s ideological fixation on destruction, as they warn about the economic risks of his war, tariffs—including his new tariff war on Canada—the climate crisis, and the Artificial Intelligence (AI) bubble.

AI: PERSONIFICATION OF CAPITAL WITHOUT PERSONS

AI’s destruction of jobs has only begun, largely through lack of hiring and creation of new jobs, which is harder to track than layoffs. Its proponents claim that it will eventually create many new jobs, which is doubtful. The risks of AI and the data centers needed to train and run it have sparked tremendous opposition all across the country. Risks include its increase of inequality, deterioration of our brains, especially children’s, worsening of climate change and the effects on water supply and the environment. An open letter from 1,378 employees of frontier AI companies warns that its development could “rapidly accelerate beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.” AI systems are beginning to be able to augment their own programming and have already demonstrated the ability to create new viruses and break out of human-imposed restrictions.[2]

AI technologies are supposed to replicate certain functions of human intelligence. Given that the minds of those who fund and lead these efforts are confined to the horizons of this capitalist society, what they are really aiming at is the personification of capital without persons. It should not be a surprise that AI agents often behave like sociopaths.

The process of AI development itself already appears as an autonomous entity beyond human control. Countries like the U.S. and China worry about its impact but are afraid to stop developing it because the competitor will get the upper hand. The same dynamic plays out in the competition between different companies. It is actually a manifestation of the dialectical inversion that Marx identified, where the object, dead labor (accumulated past labor) in the form of capital acts as the automatic subject while living labor, the working human being, is relegated to the status of an object dominated by dead labor. As he showed in Capital:

“It is evident that this does not depend on the will, either good or bad, of the individual capitalist. Under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him.”

THE CLIMATE CRISIS

The same dynamic of the products of human labor appearing as autonomous forces out of our control is repeated with the maneuvering of petroleum-producing and -consuming nation-states trying to shift onto everyone else the burden of slowing the climate crisis and adapting to its harmful effects.

The crisis is unfolding before our eyes. Glacial collapse causing flooding in Nepal, leaving more than 5,000 dead or missing. Unprecedented wildfires tearing across Washington, Oregon, Ontario, Greenland, and Europe. Smoke making air hazardous to breathe in Chicago and New York. Deadly heat domes repeatedly lingering over North America and Europe. Heat also robbing outdoor, warehouse, and factory workers of health and wages across Asia. Extreme rainfall flooding people out of their homes in West Africa and from Afghanistan to Taiwan while a projected failure of India’s monsoon rains may debilitate farming there.

All this and more happened just this summer, disrupting the lives of hundreds of millions, if not billions, across the globe. Is this the new normal? Not exactly. A deeper climate crisis is locked in by the greenhouse gases already emitted into the atmosphere and oceans. As long as capitalism is allowed to ravage the environment and heat the planet, the dominos will keep falling.

If the world continues on its current track, the ongoing water and food crises will spread and intensify monstrously. Water rationing is already happening in Puerto Rico, cutting people’s incomes. Climate change is compounding the class-slanted and race-slanted living conditions and infrastructure neglect, which is how its real world impacts always manifest themselves.[3]

IS GAZA OUR FUTURE?

To see what kind of future capitalism is heading for, look at Gaza, where the devastating water shortage is caused by Israel’s genocidal occupation that deliberately targets water supplies, sewage treatment facilities, and fuel to run them. Doctors without Borders estimates that the average Gaza resident gets 4.3 liters of clean water a day, leading to diarrhea and skin infections. The UN sets the daily requirement at 50-100 liters, while the average consumption in the U.S. is 310 liters and Israeli settlers in the West Bank use up to 800. The exhausting and time-consuming daily task of obtaining water, including by children enduring hard labor, adds to the trauma of being surrounded by so much death and destruction and feeling abandoned by the world. Those who today ignore the torture imposed on Gazans may be thrust into it in the future, while the capitalist billionaires will continue to justify it in the name of the greater good.

Water shortages and flooding are not the only factors behind the food crisis. Climate-fueled heat waves joined the disruption brought about by Trump-Netanyahu’s war on Iran and Russia’s on Ukraine to cut crop yields and raise food prices. The World Food Programme forecast that 50 million people could be thrown into acute hunger in the next year or so. Already in Uganda, 19 hunger deaths precipitated an emergency food distribution.

Disease outbreaks are also being propelled by the climate crisis, from the explosive diarrhea of cyclosporiasis to legionnaires’ disease in Manhattan, and from hantavirus to Ebola. It affects mental health as well, disrupting social connections and increasing overdose deaths.

Forced displacement—whether from wildfires, hurricanes, or severe drought—takes a toll as well, such as what has happened to First Nations in Canada. Several hundred wildfires affected more than 80 First Nations, forcing more than 9,000 people out of their homes. Some communities were burned to the ground.

Across the world, many Indigenous communities are close to forests that traditional livelihoods are based on, leading to disproportionate impact from the fires. Peoples in Ontario and British Columbia pointed out “catastrophic and systemic failure” in the response by federal and provincial governments and the failure to send emergency alerts in Indigenous languages or to include Indigenous communities in decision-making during emergencies.

Hundreds of millions of people—at least—are expected to be forced to leave their homes in coming decades, and far-right nationalists are drooling to exploit their suffering by demanding an intensification and globalization of the Trumpist anti-immigrant agenda, from closing borders to brutally policing and expelling people who don’t fit their blood-and-soil national ideal, or throwing them in camps where they can be denied rights and humane treatment. In addition, the projected vast climate-based economic disruption would take a huge toll.

CAPITALISM AT THE HEART OF CRISES

The point is to stop capitalism’s momentum toward global catastrophe.[4] Confronting climate denial and obstruction is an urgent step toward the needed transformation of social relations and structures.

The oil companies knew plenty about the danger of global heating, years before they began their program of deception and denial. The far right found denial useful and combined it with a conspiracy theory about evil scientists and environmentalists to divert attention from the system whose very law of motion of ever-growing capitalist accumulation leaves a wake of destruction of both humanity and nature, as Karl Marx pointed out.

The oblivious contradiction wired into their ideology juxtaposes exploitation of the effects of the climate crisis such as mass migration right next to denial of its causes, which it replaces with scapegoats: above all the migrants. Claiming to defend the “deserving” part of the working class, instead they help condemn it to suffer from ever-worsening crises.

That extremist ideology is woven into the fabric of contemporary politics. Donald Trump is an obvious example, as he exploits the achievements of science to maximize oil extraction, weapons production, and social media manipulation, while simultaneously attacking science and scientists. Trump put a denier in charge of the National Climate Assessment, killed the Arctic Report Card, filled regulatory agencies and advisory boards with political appointees (mostly anti-vax climate deniers) who silence or push out scientists. His administration deleted information on climate change from websites, national park displays, and a scientific manual for judges, and defunded research while subjecting it to political reviews. The Environmental Protection Agency shut down projects that touched on environmental justice or climate change.

The ideological assault goes hand in hand with sweeping initiatives to boost production and use of oil, methane gas, and coal and interfere with renewable energy. As we noted in our Call for Convention, Trump is leading a war on climate science, on the climate justice movement, on everything that represents a decrease of dependence on fossil fuels, to the extent that he is even fighting the private capitalist market by forcing the maintenance or reopening of dying coal plants. This, just at the time when the disastrous effects of the climate crisis are making themselves felt and solid majorities in every country surveyed are eager for serious action to save the planet and the conditions for human society.

CLIMATE HUSHING

Not to be left behind, many Democratic Party politicians—“populists” as well as centrists—latched onto “climate hushing.” As DSA socialist Matt Huber explained in The New York Times: “When it comes to climate change, for now, it might be better to say nothing at all.” The mass media have long engaged in climate hushing. When they report weather disasters, television network news shows seldom mention the climate crisis that is making the disasters stronger and far more likely.[5]

We are being told to avoid talking about the climate just at the moment when polls show that a majority of U.S. voters realize that climate change is worsening extreme weather, and two-thirds are worried about the climate crisis and yet are held back because they think most others aren’t! Just at the moment when it is vital to fight back against the ideological onslaught and to think and talk about what is needed to create a society that can set a new direction for the human-nature relationship based on new, liberated social relationships!

As Fossil Free Northwestern University, a student group, wrote:

Often, our work can feel isolating and impossible, especially as we witness seemingly never-ending rollbacks on progressive policy across the board, including environmental policy. It is important for us to remember that we are not alone, that these actions are not new, and neither is the action and organizing resisting them. Our perceptions of public opinion about climate action are intentionally shaped by those who hope to curb that action, prioritizing their own profits.

Climate and ecological actions from below will not be silenced, despite concerted efforts to suppress them. Indigenous peoples and women are engaged in many of these struggles, such as against the plans for a new oil pipeline from Alberta to British Columbia in Canada, expansion of the Line 5 pipeline in Michigan, and “carbon capture” pipelines. Climate, water, air, and noise pollution are central to opposition to data centers across the U.S. Environmental and social impact cannot be separated, as in the battle against the Pentagon-backed Quantum Facility on the South Side of Chicago, which threatens gentrification and displacement. Each of these movements raises questions about how to go beyond resisting what is and transforming society on the basis of new relationships between people, and therefore between humanity and nature.

Part II. America 250: Counterrevolution mythologizes 1776 Revolution

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1 While it is satisfying to see U.S. power diminish, China’s rise is not, as some think, something to celebrate. Such confusion reflects stopping at first negation—that is, opposing the status quo, without working out the positive coming out of the negation of that bare negation. Neither China’s rise nor a possible move toward a multipolar world is any break with capitalism and imperialism. The struggles of workers, Indigenous peoples, and youth in African countries against China’s “development” projects reveal those projects as nothing but accumulation of capital in China’s own imperialist interests.