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The Iraqi Left at a crossroads: Renewal, unity, and reclaiming grassroots action.

The Iraqi Left needs unity and flexibility to transform ideals into tangible social change

Rezgar Akrawi
09/01/2026

The Iraqi Left: A crisis of tools, not a crisis of values

This article comes at a critical moment that the Iraqi Left is experiencing. The results of the recent elections in November 2025 cannot be seen as merely a passing electoral loss or as a direct result of the unfair electoral law and the dominance of political money. While these external factors are valid and influential, they are compounded by even more grueling challenges of systemic restrictions and structural corruption. However, focusing on external influences alone overlooks the essence of the problem.

What happened is a concentrated expression of a deeper crisis affecting the organization, methods, and discourse within the Iraqi Left. It reflects a dysfunctional relationship between valid ideas and ineffective tools, as well as between radical transformative discourse and its presentation in a complex and harsh political environment. Despite this decline, the Iraqi Left remains a genuine hope and the most serious alternative for social change.

Given this dual diagnosis, the critical question arises: Why, despite the dire conditions faced by the masses and the power of corrupt cliques, has social change not emerged as a clear and convincing popular choice? Why has the Left’s project remained fragmented and inconsistent, with similar slogans but differing approaches, preventing the masses from seeing a coherent alternative?

Do we benefit from the Capitalist Methodology?

To understand this defect, it is necessary to examine the issue from an unconventional angle. The logic of capitalism, grounded in science and measurement rather than ideology, offers a strict practical model for addressing decline and weakness. The crisis facing the Iraqi Left can be seen as a failure of a promising transformative “product,” characterized by theoretically sound policies that lack optimal methods for practical implementation and require improved management and marketing. This occurs within a political market that faces significant competition from religious, nationalist, and bourgeois forces. Capitalism treats society as a market and ideas as commodities. When a group of “companies” with similar names enters the market to sell a singular product—social change—without harmony or coordination, the quality itself becomes problematic.

This reflects what happened to the Iraqi Left in the recent elections. Not only was it organizationally scattered, but it was also politically divided between participation and boycott. There was no unified position, clear discourse, or understood collective tactic. The masses did not perceive a single “product” with distinct features, but rather a series of similar products competing against each other instead of confronting real competitors. In such a scenario, the market punishes inconsistent products. Chaotic plurality, conflicting discourse, and confusion erode mass confidence, not because they reject the idea of change, but because it reaches them in a fragmented, elitist manner that is difficult to grasp in relation to societal development and daily needs.

The Left and addressing decline and weakness

Upon facing decline and weakness, a fundamental difference emerges between the logic of capitalism and that of many forces on the Left. Capitalism does not revisit its classical theorists at every crisis to determine if their texts were fully applied. As a practical system, it treats decline as a measurable and addressable technical signal. It quickly alters tools, discourse, facades, and work mechanisms without guilt or reverence for names and history. Capitalism employs scientific research: it collects data, analyzes numbers, studies behavior, and utilizes advanced technologies and artificial intelligence to test hypotheses. It asks simply and directly: Why did the product not succeed? Based on the answers, it rebuilds its policies.

In contrast, some forces on the Left tend to return to their classical theorists for answers during periods of decline, looking back to the celebrated history of their parties. However, the real question should be: Why did our message not resonate today? The issue isn’t the return to leftist heritage as a living critical method, but when this heritage and old organizational mechanisms become rigid standards that overshadow reality.

We reclaim the Scientific Method, which was always the essence of Leftist thought

The lesson here is not to glorify capitalism or adopt its values, but to benefit from its scientific method. The fundamental challenge lies in how to “borrow the tool” (the scientific methodology) while rejecting the “spirit” (individual profit and class dominance).

The Iraqi Left now needs this type of evaluation and scientific rigor. It must conduct real surveys in popular neighborhoods and among female and male workers, not to concede its class horizon, but to understand how its message is received, how it is interpreted, and where it falters. It needs to study and measure the impact of its policies, assess its presence both on the ground and in digital spaces, and evaluate the language of its discourse. It should ask directly: Why do we not reach our audience? And why do we not influence? Only then can bold political and organizational decisions be made based on the results.

The Left in the age of the Digital Revolution

In the context of the digital revolution, this need increases in urgency and in an unprecedented way. We live in a time where ideas are no longer measured by the soundness of their theoretical starting point only, but by their ability to reach, influence, interact, and transform into a tangible collective action, which are criteria that young generations understand and deal with daily in their digital and social lives. The young generation of female and male workers of hand and thought does not receive politics through long speeches nor through heavy theoretical texts, but through digital platforms, short videos, open discussions, fast solidarity campaigns, and forms of flexible horizontal organization that allow direct participation and decision-making from the bottom to the top. Ignoring these transformations does not mean neutrality, but leaving this space entirely to the Left’s opponents who are more organized and capable of investing in digital tools.

From here, dealing with the digital space as a real arena of class struggle becomes a political and organizational necessity, not a secondary technical or media matter. For organization, mobilization, building trust, formulating discourse, and measuring impact, have all come today to pass through this space as much as they pass through the street and workplaces. And without the Left possessing the tools of organization, mobilization, and scientific evaluation in this field, it is unable to transform wide social anger into an organized force capable of continuity and influence. The contemporary Left is that which is capable of linking the justice of its social project with a conscious and systematic use of the tools of the age, allowing it to reclaim its role as a real force of change in a society that is changing rapidly.

Why do we need a broad and unified Leftist framework?

The Iraqi Left has played an important historical role in the struggle for the rights of female and male workers. However, this honorable history brings with it a greater responsibility: not to content ourselves with celebrating the past, but to confront reality as it is. The Iraqi Left is currently facing a challenging situation characterized by continuous decline, increasing popular isolation, and a notable distance from younger generations. The average age of current leadership mostly ranges between sixty and seventy, which, while acknowledging their significant contributions and sacrifices, highlights the need to create space for the energies of younger generations who navigate a different reality.

In light of this reality, it is no longer sufficient to merely diagnose the crisis. If our class opponents continually rebuild themselves through analysis, experimentation, and correction, then our scattered nature and adherence to old forms diminish our chances of influence. Thus, discussing a broad and unified leftist framework becomes both a practical response to this crisis and a historical necessity.

Lessons of unity and frontal work: How did global Leftist forces reclaim their effectiveness?

In many experiences worldwide, leftist forces have shown that overcoming marginalization and decline is not achieved by clinging to old organizational forms, but rather through unity, collaboration, and building flexible frameworks capable of embracing plurality. In Portugal, the Left Bloc serves as a leading model, merging several leftist currents within a framework that respects pluralism. This approach enabled it to become a significant player in forming governments and possessing negotiating power that individual parties lacked. In Chile, the “Approve Dignity” alliance formed between the Communist Party and youth organizations led wide protests and brought Gabriel Boric to the presidency as the youngest leader in 2021. Despite setbacks in the 2025 elections, the alliance remained steadfast as an organized opposition bloc, preventing the fragmentation of the forces for change.

In Denmark, the merger of three small Marxist parties into the multi-platform Red-Green Alliance transitioned the Left from the margins to a political force that garnered 7.1% of the votes in the 2025 elections, emerging as a major municipal presence in the capital. In Colombia, the Historic Pact succeeded as a coalition that included Marxists, environmentalists, and feminists, breaking the traditional monopoly on power and bringing Gustavo Petro to the presidency in 2022 through a radical pragmatic discourse that resonated with people’s daily lives. In Germany, the unification of leftist currents from the East and West in the Die Linke party created a strong framework that represented the social and electoral Left for years, despite intellectual variations. In Spain, Podemos utilized horizontal organization and digital tools to shift the Left from protest squares to the heart of Parliament in record time, challenging traditional party structures. In Brazil, the “Front of Hope” reclaimed power in 2022 through broad alliances that transcended narrow ideological slogans, employing digital tools effectively to confront the dominance of the far-right.

What unifies these modern experiences, despite differing contexts, is the recognition that the Left can no longer operate effectively as closed individual parties; instead, it must form wide, flexible, multi-platform alliances that manage differences and link politics to immediate social demands. These lessons may not transfer directly to Iraq, but they provide a practical horizon for considering the establishment of a broad and unified Iraqi leftist framework capable of overcoming fragmentation and transforming the justice of the leftist project into an organized and effective social force.

Foundations and mechanisms of the unified Leftist framework

A roadmap can be put forward for establishing a unified Iraqi leftist framework, based on gathering all leftist and progressive forces on points of meeting and an agreed-upon minimum program, through:

Holding a general conference for all factions and figures of the Iraqi and Kurdish Left, discussing the building of a unified multi-platform organizational framework, including parties, currents, unions, and syndicates, and allowing the joining of individuals from female and male activists.
Formulating a unified minimum program centered on what is possible to achieve in the near term; a short, clear, and direct program focusing on the interests of female and male workers of hand and thought, and the development of basic services, social justice, and providing job opportunities. The program adopts the issues of full women’s rights, neutralizing religion from the state, and protecting freedoms. This program is formulated in a modern, understood, and practical language, away from ideological complexities.
Choosing a simple name like “Bread and Freedom Alliance or Union,” away from traditional leftist naming.
The framework is based on a rotational collective leadership, and on flexible organizational rules, and different and flexible forms of membership. Most importantly, the founding leftist entities must be ready to restructure their frameworks and ease traditional party centralism.
Focusing on broad decentralization according to provinces and regions, so that each unit becomes capable of leading its work effectively within a unified general political line.
The active use of modern sciences in leadership, management, organization, media, and digitization, and in evaluating policies periodically, with the adoption of feedback from the masses as a basic mechanism.
Strengthening the role of youth in leadership through binding organizational rules, such as representation rates for youth and women in leadership bodies with real powers.
Building an effective digital policy that deals with the digital space as a real arena of class struggle, including multiple media platforms, digital training programs, the use of artificial intelligence, and actual scientific measurement tools.

The decisive condition is that the unified framework be capable of working according to points of meeting and the agreed program and containing the difference positively without turning into an arena of conflicts.

Will we continue to interpret the world while our enemies continue to change It?

The pivotal question today is not about intentions but about action: Does the Left propose alternatives based on what is socially and class-wise possible and achievable within the current balances, adhering to the logic of cumulative gradual change? Or is it content with raising slogans without fostering any actual, tangible change in the lives of the masses?

In conclusion, the crisis of the Iraqi Left is not one of sincerity or history, but rather a crisis of tools and methods. Scientific advancements and digital transformations have reshaped the spaces of influence, and those who ignore them will automatically exit the equation. We need a Left that is not only new in its values but also innovative in its discourse, action, and organizational mechanisms; a Left that translates ideas into tangible changes on the ground without abandoning the essence of its socialist project.

From this perspective, the boldness required today is the courage to dismantle rigid structures and abandon narrow centralism in favor of a broad and flexible framework that accommodates everyone and reconnects organization with living reality. We face two choices and no third option: to pursue renewal and practical unity to reclaim our role as a real force for change, or to remain on our current path and risk being bypassed by the march of history. Global experiences clearly demonstrate that unity is not only possible but also feasible, even under the harshest conditions.

Additional information:

The Iraqi Left is composed of a group of parties and organizations, the most prominent of which are: the Iraqi Communist Party, the Kurdistan Communist Party, the Worker-communist Party of Iraq, the Worker-communist Party of Kurdistan, the Communist Alternative Organization, the Communist Left Party, in addition to other organizations.
All leftist and progressive lists in Iraq that participated in the elections did not obtain any seat in the Iraqi Parliament in the November 2025 elections.

Understanding Gaza

After-Savagery-Review

Sankha Maji
07/01/2026

Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery is a book written with smoke still hanging over Gaza. There is no retrospective calm here, no archival distance to dilute the immediacy of horror. The prose feels as though it was typed between air raid sirens and casualty updates, in the blue light of screens that will not stop showing the same craters, the same small bodies, the same parents howling over the remains. This is not simply a work about Gaza, but one written from the perspective of Gaza, asking a question that refuses to go away: What does it mean for the world’s self-appointed custodians of “civilization” to watch a genocide unfold—and to arm, fund, and rationalize it in the name of their values?

From the outset, Dabashi strips Gaza of the language that has caged it: “conflict,” “escalation,” “cycle of violence.” Gaza is not a humanitarian crisis to be “managed”; it is the concentrated truth of what calls itself “Western civilization.” One statement becomes the conceptual fulcrum of the book: “Israel is the microcosm of the West—doing in Palestine what the West has done to the world.” The force of this assertion lies in its refusal of exception. Israel is not an unfortunate deviation from Western ideals, he suggests, but their most distilled form.

Yet After Savagery begins from an even more fragile position: the difficulty of writing in the middle of a genocide. Dabashi insists that it is morally imperative to think and write about Gaza; silence is one more layer of rubble. At the same time, he is honest about how easily language buckles under a daily roll call of massacres, amputations, and mass graves. One aim of Israeli violence, he argues, is precisely this: to produce so much horror relentlessly that the global public drifts from shock into indifference. “Shock and awe” is not merely a military doctrine; it is a strategy of perception. After Savagery is an attempt to keep perception alive.

To keep looking, however, is to confront something searing about the world that claims to be looking back. The genocide in Gaza, Dabashi writes, will be remembered as one of the darkest episodes in modern history. But what makes it historically decisive is not only its brutality; it is the way it exposes the entire self-image of “the West.” This is a civilization that has spent centuries narrating itself as the pinnacle of philosophy, art, democracy, and human rights. In Gaza, that same civilization is exposed as a history of conquest, slavery, and extermination, now live-streamed as policy. It is not that genocide has returned to a previously peaceful order, it is that the genocidal architecture of that order has finally lost its alibi.

To make that case, Dabashi turns to the archive. He places on his desk Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes, Arendt’s reflections on imperialism and totalitarianism, and Aimé Césaire’s insistence that Europeans only discovered the horror of their own violence when it recoiled upon Europeans themselves. The trail is brutally clear. Before Auschwitz, there was the Congo. Before the crematoria, there were plantations, slave forts, forced famines, and “civilizing” massacres in Algeria and across the Global South. The Nazi Holocaust is not denied its singularity, but it is refused its isolation. When Dabashi writes that “the two atrocities are interrelated as the two sides of the same coin of European genocidal practices,” he folds the camps back into the colonial world that enabled them.

From there, the line to Gaza is not a rhetorical leap but a structural continuation. Zionism, in Dabashi’s reading, is not an aberration in European political thought. It emerges from the same climatic zone as antisemitism and colonialism: a world of racial hierarchies, of chosen and expendable peoples, of “empty lands” and surplus populations. Israel, then, is not an external solution to European crimes; it is one of their afterlives. The siege, starvation, and carpet bombing of Gaza are read not as failures of policy but as the logical continuation of a project that has always required the elimination or containment of those it marks as native. In this sense, Gaza becomes, for Dabashi, a new moral and philosophical ground zero. The metaphors we habitually use—“cradle of civilization,” “Enlightenment,” “liberal order”—disintegrate once we place Gaza at their center. If Gaza is what “civilization” looks like when its weapons and doctrines are fully deployed, then the term has rotted from within. Any serious attempt to think about ethics, politics, or liberation today, he insists, must begin from Gaza’s ruins, rather than from European abstractions that have never considered Palestinians fully human.

That question—who counts as human?—pulses through the book like an open wound. Dabashi asks, bluntly: “Are we non-Europeans, Palestinians or otherwise, even human beings in the enduring philosophical traditions of what calls itself ‘the West’?” The answer, he suggests, is inscribed in both policy and prose. On one side, Israeli ministers describe Palestinians as “human animals,” a phrase that drifts effortlessly into military directives. On the other side, Immanuel Kant treats the Blackness of an African man as “proof” of stupidity, or entire continents as incapable of “great” achievements. These are not accidental slips; they are symptoms of an epistemic order in which non-Europeans appear, in Dabashi’s phrase, as “a metaphysical menace … a racialised noise that must be quieted, conquered, and pacified.”

Here, After Savagery makes one of its starkest claims: that what Europe calls a “metaphysics of morals” has historically functioned as a metaphysics of barbarism. Grand ideas of duty, rights, and rational agency stand atop a world constructed by enslaved, colonized, and dispossessed people whose lives did not count as fully human in those systems. When those same concepts are invoked today to explain away Gaza—when “self-defense,” “security,” and “the rule of law” become the vocabulary of mass killing—they expose themselves, in Dabashi’s hands, not as neutral tools but as weapons with a very specific lineage.

The media, in this narrative, are not innocent bystanders. One of the most compelling threads in the book is Dabashi’s analysis of Western news outlets as part of the machinery that renders genocide palatable. He is not interested in easy language like “fake news.” He speaks instead of “processed speech,” a diet of language engineered to keep the killing machine well-oiled. In this lexicon, airstrikes “hit targets,” civilians “perish,” and Gaza “teeters on the brink” of famine long after famine has been deliberately manufactured. Numbers—of the dead, the displaced, the amputated—are recited without ceremony, flattened into background noise.

Dabashi’s counsel is to read these reports contrapuntally, to listen for what they cannot say. When an anchor intones that “both sides have suffered losses,” what structures of power and race make that sentence possible? When a think-tank analyst speaks of “mowing the lawn,” what histories of colonial agriculture and extermination are being repackaged as common sense? If we follow his lead, the nightly news becomes a ritual of the empire, carefully updated for the age of high-definition atrocity.

And yet, for all its exposure, After Savagery is not primarily a voyeuristic catalogue of horrors. It is also a book about resistance—intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual. Mahmoud Darwish becomes one of Dabashi’s central companions. “Darwish has, in short, become synonymous with his poetry, and his poetry with his occupied and stolen homeland,” he writes. The now-iconic imperative—“Write it down!”—echoes throughout the text as both command and accusation. To write is to refuse erasure. To write from Palestine is to insist that those the world treats as expendable have a history, a future, and a name.

For Dabashi, this is what “poetry after genocide” must mean. Against Adorno’s anguished claim that poetry after Auschwitz might be barbaric, he suggests that for those who have always lived “after” one genocide or another, poetry is among the few remaining acts of civilization. It is not consolation; it is not ornament. It is sumud: steadfastness in the face of a world built to unhouse you. He finds this poetics not only in Darwish but in Ghassan Kanafani, in The Little Lantern, in the work of filmmakers who move through the camps with their cameras and unarmored hearts. A kindergarten in a refugee camp becomes an ark of memory; a lantern carried by a child becomes a theory of shared light.

If poetry and film carry forward the work that “Western philosophy” abandoned, After Savagery also gestures toward a different theological horizon. Dabashi sketches, briefly but suggestively, a Palestinian liberation theology that cuts across confessional lines—Muslim, Christian, and secular—grounded not in chosenness but in justice. In the same horizon, he discerns the faint outlines of a post-Zionist Jewish liberation theology, one that would free Jewish thought from entanglement with a state that demands supremacy in one place while Jewish voices demand equality in another. Zionism, he argues, has colonized both Judaism and Palestine. Genuine decolonization would have to liberate both.

The book’s later pages widen further without losing the centre. Dabashi writes with James Baldwin on his desk and Gaza on his screen. Baldwin’s words, he admits, have accompanied him ever since he arrived in the United States in the 1970s; now, in the shadow of Gaza, they offer urgent companionship. Like Baldwin, he is skeptical of any civilization that asks its victims for patience. Like Baldwin, he insists that the fire next time will not be a metaphor.

It is in this spirit that Dabashi takes seriously comparisons that defenders of Israel find intolerable. When Burmese genocide scholar Maung Zarni says that “what we are seeing in Gaza is a repeat of Auschwitz” and calls it “a collective white imperialist man’s genocide,” Dabashi does not retreat. Committed to the historical reality of the Jewish Holocaust, he finds something “profoundly liberating” in bringing that suffering “out into the open, into the fold of humanity, where it rightly belongs,” rather than incarcerating it inside a garrison state. The point is not to compete over victimhood but to refuse the monopolization of grief in service of the empire.

The book’s conclusion returns to the term that has hovered over it all: “the West.” For Dabashi, Gaza signals the end of that illusion. “The myth and the illusion of the West,” he writes, have ended “in ignominy, buried forever under the rubble of Gaza.” The West was never a geographic fact; it was an ideological construct of global capitalism, an identity that depended on casting everyone else as “the Rest.” What Gaza has done, he suggests, is to strip that myth of its last moral cover. A civilization that can watch, excuse, and underwrite what is happening there cannot credibly claim to be the yardstick of the human.

Where, then, do we begin instead? Dabashi’s answer is modest and uncompromising: “We need to begin with the most brutalized facts on the ground—the Palestinians, the Jews, the Native Americans, all those who have been displaced, all those who are the wretched of the earth.” From that premise, he believes, “a new moral intuition emerges,” a philosophy and political prose that “embrace us all and are reducible to none.” It will not resemble what passes today for “Western philosophy,” nor will it simply invert the hierarchy of West and Rest. It will be written from Gaza and places like it, by people who were never meant to survive the world that now calls itself civilized.

After Savagery does not claim to have completed this task. It offers neither a neat theory nor a finished map. It is closer to what Baldwin once called a record of how it felt to be alive at a particular historical moment. It records the insomnia of watching a genocide unfold while universities debate “civility” and newspapers editorialize about “both sides.” It registers the fury of reading Kant while children starve in a besieged strip of land his categories cannot see. It records, too, the stubbornness of those who keep banging on the walls of the tank.

Ultimately, Dabashi’s book is not simply something to agree or disagree with; it is a demand that we choose where we stand when we say “we.” Do we continue to think with the old words—civilization, security, democracy—as if Gaza has not exposed what they are doing in the world? Or do we accept his proposition that Gaza is now the measure, the new categorical imperative: if a principle justifies Gaza, it is not moral; if a civilization requires Gaza, it is not civilization.

To read After Savagery is to lose the luxury of innocence. It is also, in a strange way, to recover a kind of hope—not the hope that “the West” will redeem itself, but the hope that another moral imagination is already being born in the places it has tried hardest to erase. Gaza, in this book, is not only the world’s wound; it is also its compass.

AFTER SAVAGERY: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization by Hamid Debashi, 218 pp. Haymarket Books, 2025, $19.95

Red Flag: Power outage in Berlin — was this far-left terrorism?

In his weekly column, Nathaniel Flakin looks at the sabotage action claimed by the Volcano Group.

Nathaniel Flakin

As I write these lines, tens of thousands of Berlin households are without electricity. In the early hours of Saturday, a power cable over the Teltow canal—leading from the combined heat and power plant Lichterfelde to the small garden colony Zukunft—was blown up. The attack didn’t just knock out lights and communications for people in Zehlendorf, Dahlem, and other neighborhoods. Without electricity, most heating systems don’t work—during the coldest week of the year. Nursing homes are running with emergency generators, while many residents have been put in school gymnasiums.

The first thing we should ask: Why will it take until Thursday to repair basic infrastructure? Why couldn’t people without power be moved into hotels? The Senate announced a cumbersome program for residents to book hotel rooms for 70 euros a night—and after criticism, announced that this will be reimbursed at some point. Obviously, it is the people most in need of help who don’t benefit from this kind of expensive bureaucratic nightmare.

The real story here is German austerity: as they spend hundreds of billions on new weapons, the ruling class is letting infrastructure decay. Across the country, all kinds of pipes and cables are decades past their lifespans, and exposed to vandalism—look at these fiberglass cables next to train tracks, for example. Personnel for repairs has been cut to the bone for efficiency. If anyone is responsible for the power outage, it is the government.

Obviously left-wing extremists?

On Sunday at noon, Berlin’s far-right mayor Kai Wegner proclaimed that this was “obviously left-wing extremists”—the next day at a press conference he added: “this must be called terrorism.”

At 14:01 on Sunday, a “Volcano Group” published a letter claiming responsibility on the left-wing portal Indymedia: “Shutting down fossil fuel power plants is manual work,” they wrote, describing the sabotage, primarily directed at “owners of villas in these neighborhoods,” as an “act of self-defense” against fossil fuel companies and the “imperial mode of living.”

Was this a left-wing group? As of yet, Berlin police have presented zero evidence. Berlin has seen numerous sabotage actions claimed by a Vulkangruppe going all the way back to 2011—the name was originally in reference to Icelandic volcanoes whose eruptions suspended European air travel. As recently as 2024, the group claimed responsibility for an attack on an electricity pylon leading to the Tesla factory.

While the statement uses phrases from the German autonomist scene, we know that Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has written and published texts just like this: officers signed articles as “the two from the Muppet Show” in underground left-wing magazines in their pursuit of the “militant group” in the mid-2000s. Looking at the enormous resources the state mobilized to pursue the old mg, it is astounding that we have no information about the Volcano Group after almost 15 years. If it is indeed a left-wing group, it is just as astounding that they have no periphery at all—not a single left-wing sympathizer defending their actions.

Some people have pointed to perplexing spelling and syntax in the German text. Why is the U.S. vice president’s name spelled “Vans” (instead of Vance), while Berlin’s vice mayor is “Giffay” (instead of Giffey)? If the Volcano Group is unsurpassed in precision strikes, such misspellings pose a conundrum. Could this be a product of transliterating to Russian and back? There are numerous strange formulations that ring of AI—no German speaker refers to wealthy countries as “Metropolenländer,” for example. An SPD politician has also wondered about the “insider information” that the attackers have used—these are not anarchists setting random transformers on fire.

It’s certainly possible that a conspiracy is afoot. There have been attempts by Russian intelligence services to organize vandalism in the name of environmental activists. People on social media are pointing to parliamentary inquiries by the AfD about the electricity network in south-west Berlin. Finally, someone claiming to be the Volcano Group of 2011 published a statement on Indymedia condemning the attack in Lichterfelde.

Nonsensical

But it’s also possible that the Volcano Group is a genuine left-wing group. There is a section of the climate movement that calls for sabotaging the infrastructure of fossil capital: Andreas Malm made a very popular book and a motion picture about how to blow up pipelines.

Tadzio Müller, Berlin’s most eccentric climate activist, did not condone this attack, but told the taz newspaper that similar actions “could be necessary and legitimate under certain circumstances” as long as they did not endanger human lives.

Yet even the most successful sabotage—an ideal job that somehow manages to be extremely disruptive without endangering or even inconveniencing normal people—is never politically useful for the Left. Our project is one of universal human self-emancipation: billions of people will have to struggle to break the power of the capitalists and reorganize the planet.

Such a mass struggle cannot be replaced by clandestine groups. From the Russian Narodniks to the West German RAF, guerrilleros might believe that armed actions will electrify and inspire the otherwise passive masses. But after several centuries of attempts, we can say that this “propaganda of the deed” has failed.

It is workers—the billions of people who keep all of society running—who have the power to shut down fossil capital. Even mass sabotage events like those of Ende Gelände, where thousands of activists occupied coal mines and power plants, were not able to replace the potential of just a handful of workers going on strike.

At the moment, we don’t have enough information to say who is responsible for the power outage—it could be state agents but also extremely confused lefties. Back in 2017, I described attacks against train infrastructure, in protest against the G20 summit, as “the most nonsensical action of the year.” If we want direct action to stop the direction of our planet, there is no other way than organizing workers.

Red Flag is a weekly opinion column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears at The Left Berlin.

13 January 1898: Emile Zola publishes J’Accuse

This week in working class history

Phil Butland

In December 1894, French army officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of espionage. The prosecution based their case on a single document—the borderau—which contained apparent proof that Dreyfus had sent military secrets to the German embassy. Even though the borderau was not even written in his handwriting, Dreyfus was Jewish, which was seen by many as proof of his guilt. He was sentenced to imprisonment in a stone hut on Devil’s Island in South America.

Three years after Dreyfus’s conviction, author Émile Zola took action. Zola was one of the world’s most translated authors—best known to socialists for Germinal, his novel about a miners’ strike. On January 13th 1898, Zola penned a 4,000 word open letter to the French president published in L’Aurore, a Parisian daily paper. It sold 300,000 copies. The article, titled J’Accuse, accused leading politicians and army leaders of antisemitism and obstruction of justice. Zola was not afraid to name the names of the people responsible.

Zola intended to be prosecuted for libel as a result of his letter, so that more facts about Dreyfus’s case would become public. The French establishment reacted quickly, fining Zola 3,000 Francs, sentencing him to a one year imprisonment, and withdrawing his Legion d’Honneur title. Despite this, documents confirming Dreyfus’s innocence remained hidden from the public eye. Zola fled to England until the French president pardoned Dreyfus the following year, albeit with his guilty verdict sustained.

Jules Guesde, a former associate of Karl Marx, argued that the affair was merely a conflict within the ruling class and that the French Left should not support any faction of an army that had recently crushed the Paris Commune—an army in which Dreyfus himself had served as an officer. But French socialist leader Jean Jaurès was a passionate supporter of Dreyfus, as was Rosa Luxemburg, who argued: “The principle of class struggle imposes the active intervention of the proletariat in all the political and social conflicts of any importance that take place inside the bourgeoisie.”

A vast campaign by the League for the Rights of Man organised a mass petition and held public meetings throughout France. In 1906, it finally overturned Dreyfus’s conviction. The Dreyfus Affair has a number of lessons for us today: from the way in which our rulers use racist (in this case antisemitic) attacks to divide us, the need for unity of all victims of capitalism, and the knowledge that while talented individuals like Zola can make important contributions, it is mass action that brings change.

US attack on Venezuela prompt calls for respect for international law

Interview: with Patrick Bond by Oliver Dickson, South African Broadcasting Corporation

Phil Butland
06/01/2026

Patrick Bond is Distinguished Professor at the University of Johannesburg Department of Sociology, where he directs the Centre for Social Change. We have asked him to share some thoughts on the US attack on Venezuela.

The US attack on Venezuela is not unprecedented but nonetheless extraordinary. What do you project the immediate implications of it to be?

Well, it’s an indication that Donald Trump is starting 2026 as the maximum bully. And I think we’re going to see him gain confidence for his neoconservative militaristic side, and he will also threaten the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, Panama and maybe Denmark, in terms of control of Greenland.

So we’re now in a very lawless, wild-west period in the Western Hemisphere that follows the national security report of Marco Rubio, which basically says, “the Western Hemisphere is ours”. The old 1823 Monroe Doctrine – claiming that the US will control that area – is now being called the Donroe (Donald Donroe Trump) Doctrine. And that is something I think the world must wake up to and say, “no you can’t do that”.

America’s NATO partners were quiet when America did this in Iraq and once again in Syria. And of course we saw what they did in Libya with the regime change of Gaddafi. What does the world stand to lose this time around if they once again turn a blind eye?

Donald Trump will be empowered to continue with his regime change agenda. He will probably feel the need to do that in the period between now and November, when he will face tough elections for his members of Congress: the House of Representatives all turn over, plus a third of the Senate. We can often see these sorts of interventions as a distraction, as a way of exerting power abroad when things are going badly at home. And I think that’s probably part of the calculation this year.

The other aspect is the hypocrisy of the G7. There’s a G6 which is Europe, Canada and Japan, and Donald Trump has broken free. He did not come to the G20 here in Johannesburg, and he also dropped out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – which means the US is violating the world’s responsibility to cut emissions. He also quit the World Health Organization, which throws pandemic preparedness into question.

In the first sixth months of 2025, Elon Musk, our South African born-and-raised ally of Trump, cut USAID, which operated as the main agency for overseas development, healthcare, climate support, food and emergency aid. A report in the Lancet says that means 14 million lives will be threatened by 2030.

What more? Bombing Iran in June. Supporting the genocide in Gaza by giving Benjamin Netanyahu free reign, as he just did this last week. It is really time to ask what can be done now, to say this rogue activity must be stopped. On trade, we saw divisions, and only one country stood up to him on the tariffs. That was China, who said, “we’ll put sanctions on you with the rare earth minerals”.

I think that was a signal that, actually, Trump can be forced to back down. The Houthis forced his Navy out of the Red Sea in May by virtue of their drones, and being able to shoot down US drones. And I think there are moments where you see some resistance. We all have to remember what his own vice president JD Vance said: Donald Trump could be the next Adolf Hitler. When he said that, just before the 2016 election, we didn’t really know Trump. Well, now we do, and I think we do have to worry that there is an expansive, arrogant, and, as our foreign minister says, “white supremacist” point of view, that led him into this attack on Venezuela, which I think the world now must stand up against.

What we learn from Syria, Iraq and Libya to an extent is that often an invasion of a country leads to insurgencies on the ground. And regularly that leads to protracted wars, which forms the pretext of America’s continued “war on terror”. Do you anticipate that would happen in this instance as well?

Well, just add Afghanistan. That was the crucial insurgency, with the Taliban coming back and in 2021 Joe Biden – Trump’s predecessor – actually felt the need to pull out US troops. So it can be done. Iraq has not gone well. The US lost quite a few troops there when they invaded in 2003.

The vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, is a loyalist and coming out of the Chavez tradition, the left. But according to Marco Rubio, he talked to her and said, “she’s willing to do business”. Interestingly, Trump said that the popular middle-class leadership, including the Nobel Prize winner María Corina Machado, isn’t ready to take over. Edmundo Gonzalez was the candidate against Maduro in 2024.

At that point, Maduro didn’t really prove that he’d won the election. He just said he’d won. They never released the ballots and therefore he lost the support of, for example, Lula in Brazil, or Mexico’s president at the time Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or president Gustavo Petro in Colombia. The left didn’t hold together to support him.

Cuba’s very weak. Nicaragua was extremely weak, and no longer really a left government. And I think the potential for resistance remains the biggest question, because Maduro was captured and is no longer in Venezuela, unlike in 2002 where Chavez – having been captured and taken away – was returned to power after the masses of the people came back during that coup attempt.

About a decade ago I was a TeleSUR columnist, so I kept in touch, and I’ve been to Venezuela. But if the US invades again, I don’t think that that sort of mass popular support for Maduro can be counted on anymore. I think it’s going to be up to all the rest of us to protest at US embassies and consulates, and start sanctions. Those would be the ways forward if the Venezuelan people call on us, because they feel that the US will really clamp down on any dissent there.

I want to ask about Russia, China, and Iran as well, because they also have economic interests tied to the fortunes of Venezuela and its political stability, for which Nicolas Maduro was an important interlocutor. Do you anticipate that they would throw their support behind Delcy Rodriguez, as she assumes a head of state position?

Probably they’ll make continuing objections, and there may be a debate in the UN Security Council, and probably the US will just veto, and that’ll be that. We’ve seen once before, a coup within the BRICS countries – before Iran joined – that was an internal coup against the Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. That was in 2016, and there was a lot of discussion then about the potential for the BRICS to say, “we won’t deal with the new president of Brazil”. But they never did. Nor did they react to Trump’s bombing of Iran last year.

That’s the biggest dilemma for the BRICS: they talk left, they walk right. They don’t really do very much to change the status quo. So I doubt we’ll see China, Russia, or Iran standing up. In fact, Iran is probably hunkering down because again, Trump has essentially said, Yeah, Israel, you can go and bomb them. We can take out the Iranians. The popular unrest there now is maybe giving them some sort of excuse.

The pretext that Donald Trump relied on to invade Venezuela seems to have shifted over time. The indictment that came out of the United States District Court’s Southern District of New York reads as follows: “Nicholas Maduro, the defendant, is at the forefront of that corruption and has partnered with his co-conspirators to use his illegally obtained authority and the institutions he corroded to transport thousands of tons of cocaine to the United States. Since his early days in the Venezuelan government, Maduro Moros has tarnished every public office he has held.”

I want to pause there. He’s allegedly running a narco state and facilitating the transportation and distribution of cocaine in the US. Then he is presiding over an illegitimate government that he had rigged elections. How much truth is there to any of that?

The main thing is, you can’t trust the US. They claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and they arranged an invasion in 2003 and went looking for them. They never found them and never really came to grips with that.

The New York Southern District Court began that indictment back in March 2000. So this is now nearly six years in which we’ve heard the allegation, but we haven’t seen any proof. We just saw a few dozen small speedboats being bombed, and 115 deaths on the same grounds. But no proof. We do know – and DEA statements confirm – that the fentanyl and cocaine isn’t coming from Venezuela. The cocaine is mostly from Colombia, fentanyl from China.

Trump says that they’re killing 300,000 Americans a year and that’s the justification for self-defense, and therefore not needing to go to Congress to approve this attack. But I think when all’s said and done, these claims have no evidence and from what we’ve heard Maduro just hasn’t the history of such drug trafficking.

The other big question: is Maduro’s 2024 electoral victory genuine? And if it’s not (and I would say it probably wasn’t) – he hasn’t released the votes properly – then do you just kidnap him? Obviously not. Even if you disagree with Maduro, I think that’s the position that most people take.

Is he a dictator?

I think so. He inherited the Chavista tradition, which was a genuine left popular tradition, maybe you could say a benign dictatorship. I witnessed him there, and met him, and found that this was a very popular effort.

I think Maduro lost a lot of that popularity over time, and he then partly imposed neoliberal – that is more pro-corporate – policies over the period. So there became a left opposition to Maduro. But certainly all of the leftists that I’ve known, and I’ve tapped into their statements, are against this US invasion. I think that’s a crucial point.

Sovereignty is absolutely critical here, no matter whether Maduro was someone who played all sorts of games with his own society, and stole that election.

The other crucial thing is that Donald Trump is really doing this for the oil. I think that point can never be underestimated. That was the same for Iraq in 2003. It’s always the question, what does the US military-industrial complex – and now Trump’s very good friends in the oil companies – get out of it?

America will effectively now be selling oil to the rest of the world that it does not own. It will reap the economic benefit of selling this oil to the people that are already buying oil from Venezuela. This is a point of inflection in the moral question of the international order that Russia, China, Brazil and all these countries will have to face. Do we support an American imperialist industrial military complex system where they’re allowed to sell oil that they ultimately do not own? And if they answer that question in the positive, it means that they embolden and empower the US. But if they answer that question negatively, it means that they have to stand up to the US. Which way is that scale likely to tip?

It’s so vital to think about what you could do, as a backlash against US power. For example, Tesla and X, both owned by Elon Musk, have been subject to boycotts. And that means our homeboy Elon Musk lost a quarter of his net worth in the first few months of 2025 when he was deep in this administration. Could one do that more generally? Could one have boycotts against Trump and his full set of operations? Many of the countries we’ve seen are scared, and they’ve been divided and conquered over the past year.

But I think the basic question for oil is what happens if Trump says Okay, there’s about 800,000 barrels a day coming from Venezuela – and he wants to increase that. The Saudis are about 6 million barrels a day. The US has about 4 million. The Chinese have been buying much of that oil. Would they say, “no, we’re not going to be dealing with the stolen property”? This remains to be seen.

I suspect that they may find that they can get their oil elsewhere in the world markets. Iran still has a very strong supply of oil also that goes to China, particularly because Russia still has big surpluses. So there might be some way in which we see a sort of configuration of the West maybe against the BRICS axis. Thus far, they’ve actually worked relatively well together: imperial power and subimperial connectivity.

But that may change because of the extraordinary arrogance of Donald Trump. Especially if he goes further – Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, Panama, maybe Greenland – and he does consolidate a sort of western hemispheric power. That’s an invitation to China invading Taiwan, and Russia continuing to expand its borders.

There’s an interesting response from the French government, which says: “The military operation that led to the capture of Nicholas Maduro violates the principle of not resorting to force that underpins international law. France reiterates that no lasting political solution can be imposed from the outside and that only sovereign people can decide their future”.

They are perhaps the first western nation to outrightly condemn the US here. But it’s also interesting to note France has oil interests in Mozambique, potentially South Africa if what’s happening in the Orange Basin goes ahead to an extent, and Angola. But very importantly, in Guyana, a neighbor of Venezuela. Is this the sort of response you would have expected from the French nation? And would they potentially be a lot more emboldened to support Venezuela?

There’s always a temptation, especially if you’re European, especially if you’re French, to condemn the Yankees. That’s easy. In fact, they did so in the Iraq invasion. Not only the French: the Germans as well. They were against Bush and Blair, at the time, invading Iraq in 2003. But they didn’t do anything.

Indeed we’ve seen Trump demand that the NATO powers – especially Germany and Britain and France – increase their spending, to up to 5% of their GDP, on military. And the way things are going, unfortunately, these are fairly weak governments in Europe and they’re probably going to go along with it. They may, you know, bark a little bit. But Trump will pet them and they’ll do what he wants.

This is a shortened transcript of two interviews given to SABC News, lightly edited for clarity. You can view them hereand here.