Iran’s Retaliation Reignites Discontent With US Military Bases in Middle East

The US spent decades building an empire of military bases throughout the Middle East. Now they’re under attack.

By Shireen Akram-Boshar ,

Truthout

March 20, 2026

Donald Trump arrives to address troops at the Al Udeid Air Base southwest of Doha, Qatar, on May 15, 2025.Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images

On Thursday, March 19, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister Prince Faisal warned Iran that tolerance for its regional attacks was running short — and that the Saudi regime has “the right to take military actions if deemed necessary.” He elaborated that Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states have “very significant capacities and capabilities that they could bring to bear” if the attacks continue. This came a day after Iranian attacks on Gulf energy sites in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, which Iran said was in retaliation for an Israeli strike on an Iranian gas field.

Over the past three weeks of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, Iran has increasingly targeted sites across the Gulf, further regionalizing the war. Among its prime targets are U.S. military bases in the region: Iran has targeted, and damaged, at least 17 U.S. sites in the region, 11 of which are military bases. The two largest bases, Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar and the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, host 10,000 and 9,000 U.S. military personnel, respectively — of an estimated 50,000 U.S. military personnel across the region.

The existence of these military bases should alert us to a larger problem — that the U.S. has come to dominate the region militarily, building relationships with local regimes that further encourage repression and domination. Now, Iranian retaliation against these bases spurred by U.S.-Israeli attacks is reigniting a divide between Gulf leaders and their populations.

Popular Pressure and the First Wave of U.S. Military Bases

In the mid-20th century, the U.S. had very few military bases in the Middle East — and these were not permanent, but subject to popular pressure that led to their removal during the 1960s. One of the first U.S. military bases in the Middle East was built in 1946 in Dhahran, atop a major Saudi oil field. This was just after the U.S. discovered that Saudi Arabia was an oil-rich kingdom, and thus as it began to orient towards the Middle East as a region of key strategic interest. A year later, Aramco, the oil company based in Saudi Arabia, became dominated by U.S. firms.

But the U.S. military base at Dhahran was removed in 1962, after anti-imperialist and Arab nationalist sentiment gained strength across the region in the 1950s and ‘60s. Throughout the 1950s, Saudi Arabia witnessed a militant labor movement made up of both Saudi and other Arab workers from across the region, the latter of whom brought Arab nationalist, socialist, and communist ideas to the country. The movement initiated major strikes in the oil fields at Dhahran in 1953 and ’56. In 1956, just before the general strike at Aramco, a demonstration confronted King Sa’ud’s visit to Dhahran demanding, in the words of historian Toby Matthiesen, “the removal of the American military base there and the nationalization of Aramco.” Escalating popular pressure led King Sa’ud — who was otherwise friendly to the U.S. — to eject the U.S. military base in 1962. Due to widespread anti-U.S. sentiment across the region, Saudi Arabia did not allow the U.S. to have a permanent base in the country until the 1990s (though it did allow the U.S. to have temporary forces there, as discussed below).


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This period was one of anti-colonial struggle, independence movements, and the rise of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and his version of Arab nationalism — all of which spread anti-imperialist and Arab nationalist sentiments across the region. Nasser’s popularity surged after his 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal. At times, Nasser directly addressed the issue of foreign military bases in the region. In February 1964, for example, The New York Times reported that Nasser “called on Libya… to ‘liquidate’ United States and British military bases” from the country. The U.S.’s Wheelus Air Base in Libya, which it used during WWII and the Cold War, was forcibly vacated and handed over to the Libyan government after Muammar Gaddafi’s 1969 coup — Gaddafi was, at the time, strongly influenced by Nasser and his version of Arab nationalism. In Morocco, the U.S. had built four air bases in the 1950s, and the local Istiqlal (Independence) Party pushed forward the demand to remove the American bases; they were removed in 1963 following Morocco’s independence from France. This largely closed the first chapter of U.S. military bases in the Middle East and North Africa until after the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

The Iranian Revolution and the Fall of the USSR

The U.S. began to prioritize expanding its military reach across the Middle East after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, with the loss of its ally, the Shah. Throughout the 1970s, the U.S. had worked with the Shah’s regime, with the U.S. embassy and other intelligence stations in Iran conducting surveillance against the USSR, and 50,000 U.S. advisors training the Shah’s army and secret police. The Shah’s regime was seen as an important ally in the region, and in the early ‘70s it assisted in funding Iraqi Kurds to fight against the Iraqi state, and in ’73 sent troops to repress a popular, left-wing uprising in Oman. Israel, while cemented as a key U.S. ally in the region after its defeat of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in the 1967 war, was not yet seen as capable of intervening on the U.S.’s behalf across the Gulf. With the loss of Iran, the U.S. began to search for other sites in the region from which to exert its power and military might, and other ways to control the Persian Gulf. Though Arab regimes were reluctant to associate openly with the U.S., Egypt, Oman, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia allowed limited use of their military sites and began to build up a military relationship with the U.S. — often covertly and without the knowledge of their populations.

But the real expansion of U.S. military bases across the Middle East began in the early 1990s during and after the Gulf War, with the establishment of permanent U.S. bases in Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain, as well as sites in Saudi Arabia that the U.S. would use for long stretches. Though many expected U.S. global military presence to decrease after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 1990 Gulf War saw a seismic expansion of U.S. troops in the Middle East along with the start of a unipolar world order dominated by the U.S. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. was now the world’s sole superpower, and the Middle East would experience its military might. Following the 1990-’91 Gulf War, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE all signed public, formal defense agreements with the U.S., granting the U.S. access to each country’s bases and other facilities. With the exception of Saudi Arabia, U.S. military presence was now well-known rather than discreet. And soon after the U.S.-led campaign ended Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait, the U.S. played a role in bringing the Palestinian First Intifada to an end, pushing for first the Madrid Conference and then the Oslo Accords to contain and end the uprising that challenged Israel’s brutal status quo. In the wake of the Oslo Accords, the U.S. also facilitated neoliberal transitions throughout the Middle East, accelerating privatization, deregulation, and the selling off of state assets — thereby reversing the nationalization policies of earlier decades and aligning the region with U.S. political and economic interests through a set of reforms and interventions commonly called the Washington Consensus. Thus, in the few years after the fall of the USSR, the U.S. managed to restructure the Middle East according to its designs; its military bases represented one pillar of its dominance and control over the region.

An Empire of Bases and Local Authoritarian Regimes

In 2001, the U.S. expanded its military bases even further, creating an “empire of bases” in the region as it launched its endless “war on terror.” During its wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. held more than 1,000 installations in those two countries alone. New bases were established and old ones expanded in Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, Iraq, and Jordan.

Though international and regional dynamics have changed over the past two-and-a-half decades, U.S. bases still dominate the region. The presence of these bases has also further encouraged U.S. support for authoritarian regimes capable of suppressing popular opposition to U.S. imperialism and support for the Palestinian cause. This is particularly obvious in the case of Bahrain, which hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet and some 9,000 U.S. troops — the second largest base in the region after Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base — and is thus seen as a crucial base in the region. During the wave of revolutions that swept across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011, Bahrain witnessed an uprising in February and March that saw 150,000 people taking to the streets at its height — over 10 percent of the island country’s population — and a mass strike that included 80 percent of the country’s workforce. The majority-Shia population confronted its Sunni ruling class and its repression and marginalization of the popular classes. But the Bahraini regime quickly and harshly suppressed the popular protests, with the support of troops from the UAE and Saudi Arabia. While the U.S. tepidly criticized Bahrain’s crackdown, it was clear that it prioritized the maintenance of Bahrain’s regime, at least in part because of the presence of its Fifth Fleet in the country.

Protests are rare in Bahrain given the level of repression; but over the course of the current U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, they have reemerged in the island country. These have been in solidarity with Iran, against the killing of Khamenei, and against the U.S. military presence in Bahrain; the regime has responded by arresting at least 65 protesters, including individuals posting on social media about the war. As Iran’s regime has targeted numerous sites in Bahrain, and particularly the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, protesters have explicitly blamed the U.S. presence in their country for their lack of safety. Bahrainis similarly protested against the U.S.’s Fifth Fleet and their country’s normalization of relations with Israel in 2024, seeing their ruling elite, the U.S., and Israel all as colluding, oppressive forces. It should be noted that Israel has used intelligence gathered from U.S. military bases when coordinating its attacks against Yemen and Iran in 2024 and 2025, and throughout its regional war emerging from its genocidal war on Gaza. While protests have reemerged in Bahrain against the U.S. military presence, Bahrain’s ruling regime has doubled down, reaffirming its security agreement with the U.S. and U.K.

Qatar, home to the U.S.’s largest military base in the region, the Al Udeid Air Base — housing 10,000 U.S. troops and including components of the U.S. Central Command coordinating military operations across the region — has also maneuvered to get closer to Donald Trump over the past several years. The Al Udeid base, constructed in the ’90s after a defense agreement between the U.S. and Qatar in the wake of the Gulf War, was first used by the U.S. in its bombing campaigns of Afghanistan followed by Iraq. More recently, the U.S. has used the base in its bombing campaigns against the Houthis in Yemen, and in coordination with Israel during the 12-day war on Iran. The base has been targeted by Iran throughout the current war and in the 12-day June war. But the U.S. military base has also helped facilitate the close relationship between Qatar and Trump. Qatar drafted the “Trump peace plan” for Gaza — which rejects any Palestinian representation or self-determination — and Trump has visited Qatari regime officials at the air base at least twice. Qatar’s rulers have maneuvered to negotiate multiple other peace processes, and to secure investment deals, and defense and energy partnerships with Trump. When Israel attacked Hamas officials involved in ceasefire negotiations in Qatar in September 2025, Trump gave Qatar a security guarantee followed by an executive order promising to defend Qatar in the face of another attack. On Wednesday, March 18, Trump warned Iran not to attack the “very innocent” Qatar, threatening more bombing of Iran’s South Pars Gas Field.

The US-Israeli war on Iran and the regionalization of the war highlight both the U.S.’s historic domination of the region, and the extent to which the region’s regimes have normalized relations with the U.S — straying far from the anti-imperialist sentiments that dominated the region in the 1950s and ‘60s. Instead, it is a reactionary status quo that is entrenched across the Middle East. While Bahraini people dare to protest against their regime, the U.S., and Israel, the Gulf states’ ruling regimes double down in their reliance on U.S. military support, making their alignment clear. Qatar in particular has used its military base to cozy up to Trump. And yet it is this U.S. military presence itself that has pulled them into the increasingly regionalized war. Still, the large U.S. military presence remains in tension with the wishes of the vast majority of the population in most countries in the region, and it remains to be seen if the current U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, and Iran’s widespread retaliation against this network of bases, will once again reshape the U.S. military presence in the Middle East.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Shireen Akram-Boshar

Shireen Akram-Boshar is a socialist writer, editor and Middle East/North Africa solidarity activist.

On the Middle East crisis and the Philippines.

Thursday 19 March 2026, by IIRE Manila

The global order is currently grappling with a catastrophic escalation in the Middle East. Initiated without provocation by coordinated US-Israeli attacks on Iranian strategic targets on February 28, 2026, the conflict has rapidly evolved into a multi-front war.

In response, Iran retaliated by targeting US military bases in the region. With the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader and the subsequent blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the Philippines finds itself in the crossfire of global war machines, a system it did not build but is now forced to fuel with the lives and livelihoods of its citizens.

The Human Costs

The immediate cost of this aggression is measured in blood. In only ten days, the conflict has descended into horrors that violate the core tenets of international humanitarian law. On the first day of the campaign, a guided missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ primary school in Hormozgan province. UN experts and Iranian authorities have confirmed the deaths of at least 165 schoolgirls, aged 7 to 12, who were killed when the roof collapsed mid-lesson. These same strikes claimed the lives of Iran’s highest leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his immediate family (wife, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter), and several high-ranking officials.

Beyond this massacre, verified reports indicate that over 1,675 people have been killed in Iran alone, while retaliatory strikes have claimed lives across the Gulf, including the confirmed death of a Filipino caregiver in Israel, while another Filipino crewman has gone missing after the United Arab Emirates (UAE)-registered salvage tugboat Mussafah 2 was struck by two Iranian missiles in the Strait of Hormuz. This violence treats workers, women, and children as mere collateral in a struggle for regional dominance. It is a stark reminder that aggression and violence can never bring democracy or peace; instead, they dig mass graves for the people and inflict huge losses on poor nations. While ordinary citizens suffer, the wealth of corporations investing in weaponry and armament complexes continues to grow, fueled by the rising demand for destruction.

Iranian Resistance Hijacked

For decades, the Iranian people have been engaged in an organic, grueling national struggle against the structural tyranny of the Ayatollahs—a movement rooted in the desire for secularism, economic dignity, and the restoration of stolen civic liberties.

However, this internal evolution is repeatedly “hijacked” by the aggression of the US-Israel alliance. When the primary tool of regime change shifts from supporting the voices of the Iranian streets to the deployment of flying bombs and targeted assassinations, it inadvertently hands the Islamic Republic its most potent survival manual.

By transforming a domestic crisis of legitimacy into a defensive war against foreign invaders, the regime is able to pivot from oppressor to protector. It weaponizes the deep-seated Iranian memory of foreign meddling, stretching from the 1953 Coup to the “Holy Defense” of the Iran-Iraq War (1980s), to consolidate power. In this atmosphere of high-alert militarism, the nuanced demands of the Iranian youth are silenced under the roar of flying jet fighters and bombs. Every explosion from the outside becomes a justification for more gallows on the inside; the regime frames every protester not as a citizen seeking rights, but as a Zionist asset or a Western agent.

Ultimately, this cycle of external aggression does not liberate the Iranian people; it entrenches their captors. It creates a siege mentality that allows the clerical leadership to bypass accountability for economic collapse and social repression by pointing toward foreign threats. By attempting to dismantle the regime through force, the alliance effectively hijacked the very organic movement that was already doing the hard work of eroding the Ayatollahs’ foundation from within.

Accounting by dollars

The current crisis in the Middle East is more than a tragedy of human life; it is a violent recalibration of the global economy and another impact of the lawless global order championed by US President Trump and Israel’s Netanyahu. We are watching a staggering $10.35 billion in military capital and $3.2 trillion in market value vanish into death machines, diverted from human progress toward systematic destruction.

Research noted that the United States-Israeli war on Iran is estimated to have cost Washington $3.7 billion so far in its first 100 hours alone, or nearly $900 million a day, driven largely by the huge expenditure of munitions, which has started as a $779 million opening salvo that spiked into soaring daily expenditures.

This isn’t just fuel and salaries; it’s the high cost of attrition. The US has already seen $2.55 billion in hardware erased from the ledger, including a $1.1 billion early warning system in Qatar and several F-15E Strike Eagles. As nations bleed, the military-industrial complex finds its grim profit, with contractors surging as governments race to replace the $4 billion in munitions spent in a single week.

Global Economy Choked

The global economy is reeling from a massive supply-side shock following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a move that has effectively severed the world’s primary energy artery. As the blockade of the world’s most vital maritime chokepoint enters its second week, the economic fallout is outpacing the 1973 oil embargo in both speed and scale.

The statistics are staggering. Brent crude has vaulted from the $70 range to nearly $120 per barrel, triggering a $3.2 trillion hemorrhage in global equities within the first 96 hours. In energy-dependent hubs like Tokyo and Seoul, market indices have cratered by as much as 8% as the reality of an energy famine sets in. With 20% of the world’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) now stranded, spot market prices have surged by 300%, threatening everything from European home heating to the global production of nitrogen-based fertilizers.

In the Philippines

For the Philippines, this geopolitical crisis is not a distant headline, it is a direct, systemic threat to the national interest. By March 2026, the country has entered a high-stakes economic emergency. Relying on imports for roughly 98% of its crude oil, much of which originates in the Middle East, the Philippines is currently witnessing the highest single-week price jump in its history.

With diesel, kerosene, and gasoline prices projected to surge by as much as ₱24, ₱38, and ₱22.80 per liter respectively this week, oil companies are reportedly staggering price hikes to prevent an immediate collapse of the domestic transport sector. Week after the war, kerosene per liter is at P78.90, diesel worth ₱55 and gasoline at P61 per liter. These increases surely effect prices of commodities and essentials for people’s sustenance. However, the economy faces a “double whammy” as the Philippine Peso nears the ₱60-to-$1 threshold. This currency depreciation forces the nation to deplete dollar reserves to cover ballooning import bills, which in turn further weakens the Peso and drives up the cost of subsequent fuel shipments. It seriously impacts on the country’s foreign debt (35% from the external source) which is based on US currency - which means the dollar value appreciation is an automatic increase of its foreign debt. For commuters and operators alike, this creates a punishing inflationary cycle. Furthermore, proposed fare hikes aimed at easing the burden on operators effectively shift these costs onto the most vulnerable sectors, forcing daily wage earners to shoulder a disproportionate financial strain for an essential service. It should be noted that the proposal for a nationwide P200 across-the-board wage increase, intended to help workers recover from COVID-19 pandemic losses, remains in the sidelines in both houses of Congress.

Beyond the pump, the crisis jeopardizes projected 2026 $36.5 billion Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) remittances, a lifeline provided by over 2.4 million stationed in the Gulf. As hostilities escalate between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, not less than 2.4 million OFWs face potential displacement or repatriation, threatening the primary pillar of Philippine consumption. Furthermore, the nation’s structural dependence on a labor-export economy and the reliance on remittances, which accounted for $6.48 billion (18%) from the Middle East in 2025, is now a critical liability.

In response to what many are calling a perfect storm, the Philippine government has officially triggered a State of Economic Alert. Emergency measures now in effect include: a mandatory four-day work week for executive offices; strict energy conservation rules, including the “24-degree rule” for public sector air conditioning; and legislative moves to grant the President emergency powers to suspend fuel excise taxes if Dubai crude remains above $80.

The immediate reality for the average Filipino is a rapid, painful spike in the cost of basic goods, electricity, and transport. National inflation is now tracking toward a “doomsday” forecast of 7.5%, while global GDP growth projections for 2026 have already been slashed from 3.2% to 2.2%. If the blockade persists beyond a month, exposed Asian economies could see up to 2% of their total growth evaporate.

The domestic agriculture sector, already “dying” from decades of neglect, under-investment, and trade liberalization, faces imminent collapse if the crisis is prolonged. Relying on the capitalist development orientation that enriches only the few and the bigger nations, allowing vast natural resources to be exploited and the Philippines to be used as a pawn in global power competitions, leads down a road to perdition.

The crisis in the lives of the people of Mindanao and the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) in the Philippines has particularly forced them into a compounding struggle, requiring them to shoulder a massive economic burden while still in the fragile stages of recovery from a relentless series of climate disasters. The final quarter of 2025 saw a convergence of catastrophic events, beginning with Typhoon Tino (Kalmaegi) in November and the massive Super Typhoon Uwan (Fung-Wong), which together inflicted over ₱5.16 billion in agricultural damages and left the Mindanao River Basin under record-breaking floodwaters. This environmental onslaught persisted into the start of 2026 with Tropical Storm Ada in January, which saturated the soil across Caraga, followed in February by Typhoon Basyang, which brought 100-year rainfall (according to experts) to Northern Mindanao, killing 12 people and dealing an additional ₱1.48 billion in losses to Surigao del Sur alone.

Consequently, the 7.5% inflation forecast and the projected ₱24 per liter fuel spike will not land on a stable economy, but on a population whose agricultural yields were already slashed, where workers are struggling with low wages, and living conditions are precarious. For Mindanao’s farmers and across the country, the fuel famine or scarcity of fuel would make irrigation and mechanization unaffordable, and prices of farm inputs will certainly increase, making the already hard lives even more difficult, while fisherfolk are increasingly grounded as the cost of a single fishing trip now exceeds their potential catch. Policies that liberalized agricultural imports while failing to invest in rural infrastructure and land reform have steadily declined the resilience of Philippine agriculture, and it leaves the farmers dangerously exposed to global market shocks.

Amidst the escalating turmoil, the BARMM government is in a high-stakes race to safeguard over 250,000 Bangsamoro OFWs currently in the Middle East, many of whom are located in high-alert zones like Dubai and Kuwait. The Office of the Chief Minister (OCM) and the Ministry of Labor have activated emergency protocols to provide logistical and financial lifelines to families who have lost contact with relatives in these volatile areas, coordinating with the national Department of Migrant Workers (DMW) and Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA). As of March 8, DMW reported 1,979 official repatriation requests from the region, including 633 in Kuwait, 312 in Bahrain, 285 in Abu Dhabi, 231 in Dubai, 173 in Qatar, and 90 in Saudi Arabia.

However, these figures raise a haunting question: out of more than 2 million OFWs in the region, why have only a fraction requested to return? This suggests a desperate calculation, that many workers may prefer the physical dangers of a conflict zone over the economic uncertainty and lack of opportunity awaiting them back home.

The vacuum of systemic neglect

On the other hand, this economic strangulation and the perceived regime change by bombs could be viewed as systemic neglect, creating a dangerous vacuum that threatens the Mindanao peace process. Disgruntled armed groups and fragmented remnants of local extremist networks may find new grounds in a narrative of abandonment, neglect, and exclusion.

What the Crisis Calls For?

Caught in the crossfire of the U.S.-China rivalry, the Philippines faces an existential security threat due to the posturing of the rival USA and China competing for their interests in the trade route since the Philippines is a U.S. military host and a Chinese economic partner. This geopolitical tension necessitates an independent foreign policy and a shift in priorities. The government must move beyond extractive economics, instead prioritizing national industrialization and an ecological transition that safeguards domestic production and sovereignty over strategic trade routes.

The current crisis calls for a tangible comprehensive political, economic, and social transition program with extreme urgency. The existing elitist political setup, characterized by dynasties and domestic tyrants who plunder the environment and government coffers, is incapable of protecting the people. There is an urgent need to advance concrete democratic programs—moving from mere procedural reforms to a total system change of the political and socioeconomic systems and apparatus.

This crisis must compel social movements to find creative ways of articulating our political and economic visions and connect to the mass populations. It is an opportunity to center public discourse on sustainable development and ecological alternatives. This can substantiate more sweeping reform campaigns, including the repeal of the oil deregulation law, trade liberalization, and the Mining Act, for example, while dismantling political dynasties and the institutionalized systems that permit environmental plunder and bureaucratic neglect.

Solidarity on what grounds?

This crisis demands a response that goes beyond one country’s waters. This calls for radical people-to-people solidarity that transcends national borders. The struggle of the Filipino farmer against fuel hikes is the same struggle faced by Iranian women and Palestinian children against bombardment, and the American worker whose taxes are diverted to the military-industrial complex.

We need a radical, direct alliance between the working classes and social movements of both occupied and imperialist nations, bypassing the corporate and financial intermediaries that traditionally dictate the terms of trade. By asserting that workers and movements of occupied and imperialist countries must directly establish economic exchange and solidarity, we reject the extractive logic of global capital in favor of horizontal cooperation.

In this model, the exchange of products, modeled on the historical efficacy of barter trade and deep-seated consumer-producer solidarity, can be improvised today as a resilient alternative to volatile global markets. Let us transform the act of consumption into a political commitment to producers’ sovereignty; this solidarity functions as a grassroots tool for mutual aid, prioritizing communal well-being and collective autonomy over the accumulation of profit. Alternative trade should be strengthened.

True solidarity requires clarity of our socio-economic and political goals. We must refuse the temptation of sectarianism and the urge for movements to outmaneuver each other for temporary political leverage. Instead, we must build a unified front based on:

• An Anti-War Solidarity from Below by uniting the democratic and productive forces and the poor of both “occupied” and “aggressor” nations against the elites who profit from war and oppression.

• Recognizing that people, nature, and the poor must be the center of our transition, not the bottom line of armament corporations and capitalist interests.

• Integrating the fight against foreign and imperialist interference with the struggle against domestic tyrants.

Finally, the time calls to move beyond critique and toward concrete proposals for democratic governance, climate justice, food sovereignty, ecological transformation, and strengthened solidarity from below. We do not start from zero; for decades, social movements, Indigenous peoples, and activists have pioneered alternatives to profit-driven, elitist models, grounding their work in ecology and human necessity. Central to this mission is the cultivation of a collective working-class consciousness, empowering the people to spearhead the transition toward a more equitable political order.

Attached documents

• on-the-middle-east-crisis-and-the-philippines_a9459-2.pdf (PDF - 1 MiB)
  Extraction PDF [->article9459]

Philippines

• From Flood Fund Plunder to Environmental Plunder – On the Moral, Political, and Ecological Crises Shaping the Philippines
• Women and girls fear for their safety in the Philippines, as earthquake aftershocks continue to rock Northern Cebu
• After Typhoon Tino (Kalmaegi): Mourn and Rage for Accountability and demand for ecological transformation
• Manifesto for an Ecosocialist Revolution: Possible consequences in the Philippines
• Introduction to the Manifesto for an Ecosocialist Revolution: Work Less, Live Better

• IIRE Manila

  International Institute for Research and Education - Manila. https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064440529121

 

Workers Can Reverse Enshittification

By John Chadfield

March 13, 2026

Source: Tribune

The creeping enshittification of online platforms isn’t accidental but the inevitable consequence of the power of Big Tech. Only organised workers can reverse it.

If you are the sort of person who noticed that Keir Starmer appointed former British head of Amazon Doug Gerr to lead the Competition and Markets Authority and wondered how that could possibly be right, then Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It might be the book for you.

By now, concepts like ‘shrinkflation’ have entered the public discourse, and people are aware that consumer products are starting to cost more for much less. But anyone who interacts with Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft or others will be familiar with the feeling of ‘enshittification’, even if they haven’t yet heard the phrase.

The degraded state of modern technology, powered by your data and bolstered by weak competition regulation and enforcement, has created a globally unaccountable set of interoperating monopolies able to capture and inhibit regulatory bodies with ease, often with the assistance of elected politicians who later land highly paid jobs in a revolving door between government and big tech. The result is digital products and services getting worse while we are fleeced for the privilege of using them.

If you have found yourself inescapably locked into the Apple ecosystem because you once liked the look of an iPhone, if you wonder what happened to all those independent shops on your high street that couldn’t compete with Amazon’s massive purchasing power and price-gouging tactics, or if you recently discovered that you don’t actually own all those albums and audiobooks that you could have sworn you paid for, then you know about this phenomenon.

Monopoly Power

Doctorow’s diagnosis is that ‘people in the United States and all over the world have figured out that there is something rotten going on with corporate power. A genuine, spontaneous groundswell of popular rage of the enshittification of everything is all around us.’ The author is clear: the power is too great and concentrated in too few people’s hands.

Enshittification unpacks monopolies, mergers, cartel behaviour, rentier business models, public harm, and the lengths tech companies go to in order to obscure their activities. We now know the game being played: for example, Uber is not an unregulated taxi firm with no licences or duty to adhere to worker protections, as its many lawyers have argued, but an app that should not be held to the standards enforced elsewhere. But we are probably less aware of how far along the game is, and where it could lead.

As part of the cure to these ills of stage of late capitalism, Doctorow suggests that labour and unions must play a pivotal role, alongside stronger regulatory enforcement. The author’s knowledge of prescient examples of modern regulatory capture alone makes the book worth reading.

Organising Against Enshittification

Throughout his writing (not only in this volume) the author references the rise and fall of tech workers’ labour power from a position of scarcity, which peaked sometime in the last two decades and is now in recognisable freefall. Doctorow does this to advance his hypothesis that the enshittification we are now experiencing on big tech platforms and the internet more generally was held back by this bastion of labour power flexing its muscles to protect users’ interests.

Scarcity gave tech workers at these companies unusual leverage to use their labour market power and specialised skills to push for the safety of users and the reputation of the products they worked on. Internal teams were able to hold management to account in ‘town halls’ and similar forums, and to successfully lobby internal stakeholders to do the right thing. But as the tech labour market contracts and convulses, that power has proven fragile and temporary.

Whether you see this as a generalisable diagnosis or not, you can’t avoid the fact that one could plot a graph showing the quality and safety of Twitter before and after Elon Musk’s firing the platform’s trust and safety teams. Had that maniacal takeover not happened, and had those teams remained in place, we would be unlikely to see the release and eventual monetisation of a generative ‘AI’ product called Grok which has generated more nude deepfakes than every other tool on the internet combined.

The author points out the difference between how companies treat their workforce depending on labour market conditions. Amazon technical workers, coders and the like, enjoy many of the perks and freedoms expected of the privileged tech employee. Amazon workers in fulfilment centres and drivers are practically forced to urinate in bottles and defecate in bags, all the while being surveilled by ‘AI’ systems and disciplined for infractions such as singing along to the radio.

These well-documented examples are used by Doctorow to make a point: organised labour and unions are part of the cure. The author describes a ‘mohawked coder’ workforce (which I must confess I’ve never encountered in two decades in the industry) and correctly identifies that the privileged tech employee currently enjoys labour power through job-market scarcity of their skills. But as this changes, Amazon’s preferred labour conditions, already inflicted on the majority of its employees, will become standard.

The author goes on to argue that worker power based on scarcity is temporary at best, and that we need unions to rebalance workplace power. This means enforcing improvements in living conditions through higher wages, reduced stress, shorter hours, an end to sexual harassment, protection from bullying bosses and a better work-life balance. In the UK tech sector, the United Tech & Allied Workers (part of the CWU) are winning this struggle in the workplace; delivering to members material improvements on their pay, terms and conditions whilst rebalancing an out-of-date power dynamic that sees management holding all the cards. Worsening labour market conditions and growing awareness of the material effects of enshittification on people’s lives are both driving the growth of unions in a previously un-unionised industry.

The Limits of Reform

Doctorow, drawing on years of experience working with and writing about regulators across the globe, argues that regulation is not to be sniffed at. The author details how effective regulatory capture has been for US-based big tech companies — including Starmer’s appointment of a senior Amazon executive here. Globally, however, we are beginning to see a regulatory fightback. A example is Italy’s communications regulator AGCOM imposing a record-breaking €14.2 million fine on Cloudflare.

I have no complaints about the surface-level analysis, as this book is best understood as a well-crafted series of polemical blog posts. What leaves this reader slightly unconvinced is that the author fills more than 300 pages with vivid examples of the failures of liberal reform in western democracies, yet still suggests that an inflection point will arrive and a grand pushback will follow. Whether institutions of reform will save us remains uncertain. Unions will certainly be part of the picture, but I am less convinced about the power and reach of regulatory bodies across the world. As Enshittification itself shows, they are simply too easily captured by a big tech lobby with deep pockets.

The Old Left Recognizes the Danger of AI, Where’s Everybody Else?

Eve Ottenberg

MARCH 17, 2026

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

It’s time for the so-called new left to wake up to the existential threat posed by AI. The only U.S. politician cognizant of this stupendous danger is old left Bernie Sanders, who recognizes the late-capitalist AI tsunami coming for us all. He’s the only one asking questions about what happens once governments and corporations turn everything over to AI, because the only way to compete is to rely on a technology that functions at the level of “the best humans” and will soon develop beyond and surpass the best and smartest humans.

This is the overall danger posed by AI. More specific ones have been making headlines lately, namely the AI corporation Anthropic’s imbroglio with Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth. With breathtaking arrogance, Hegseth threatened to ditch Anthropic’s $200 million defense department contract for its AI called Claude, if Claude could not be used for certain despicable and frankly illegal purposes: in autonomous weapons systems that can kill people without human input and allowing Claude to be used for mass domestic surveillance. To his credit, Anthropic’s ceo Dario Amodei resisted Pentagon pressure. But these horrifying demands reveal AI’s monstrously anti-human and homicidal potential. On the evening of February 27, before Anthropic and the Pentagon could release their final positions, Trump, in a fit of pique, banned all government agencies from doing business with Anthropic. So I guess we know where the white house stands on potential abuses of AI. But in the end, this hullaballoo between an AI corporation and the Pentagon is only one aspect of the broader danger AI poses to humanity.

So what happens when, in a few years, the labor portion of the economy is zero percent and the capital portion is 100 percent? And that’s coming fast, because Donald Trump has unleashed AI. The situation might be manageable if the U.S. and China slapped some controls on this monster – so that creating AI superior to the best and smartest humans is delayed – and China would probably be willing to do that. But Trump’s U.S., particularly his venture capitalist backers? Not so much.

Most of the left regards AI as merely the latest Silicon Valley craze, like crypto. It is not. On this, the old left, represented by Sanders, is a lot smarter. Because this is not a matter of “well, I ignore AI, so it will leave me alone.” It won’t. Years ago on Twitter, The Wire’s writer, David Simon, was asked if he’d use AI to help him write, and he replied, “I’d rather put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger.” For those of us who want AI out of our lives, that could soon be the only option.

Roughly five years ago, of the four big AI companies – Open AI, xAI, Google and Anthropic – two stated openly that if we developed an artificial general intelligence, the chance of human extinction would immediately hit 25 percent (Anthropic’s ceo DarioAmodei) or 20 percent (xAI’s boss Elon Musk). It was then still a theoretical concern, but these leaders in the field admitted that to make up for employment extermination, government would have to supply a universal basic income. But now, with the public asleep to this menace and competition having increased, those corporate bigwigs are no longer quite so honest.

Making matters worse is the fact that for Trump promoting AI keeps the stock market booming. And since Trump regards the stock market as the economy, he has issued horrible executive orders on AI, the worst being his attempts to preempt state regulation of AI, which is the only thing that might protect us from this technological Godzilla.

Three years ago, you could easily discern if you were chatting online with AI. But by winter of 2025, most AI passed the Turing Test, which means it could fool you into thinking you were chatting with a person, if it wanted to. Now if you look at more quantitative fields, like computer programming, well, in the past few months, top computer programmers have stopped writing their own code and have turned this task over to AI. In formal mathematics, AI already operates at the level of pretty good PhD students, but not yet professors. So mathematicians are still doing math. But that will likely be the first of the hard sciences that falls to total automation.

The real danger comes in the next few years, when, according to the research institute METR, the task length that AI can complete extends – because it’s been doubling every few months. So that’s an exponential trajectory that means AI will surpass most human knowledge work – computer programmers, Wall Street entry-level associates much of whose work is manipulating Excel spreadsheets (they will be merely the first to go) – in a matter of years. This change will wipe out knowledge workers, since AI will be able to perform all their tasks, faster and better.

Within Silicon Valley opinions differ on how desirable it is to summon super intelligence into the world. But Trump and his venture capitalist supporters, who have quite successfully kept this issue off the public and congressional radar, have backed those who are most gung-ho for creating super intelligence. This is dangerously short-sighted. These guys may all get rich, but they’ll do so producing a super intelligence that could easily decide in the future that we humans are a nuisance, like so many insects that need to be exterminated. If you think this is an overreaction, well then, you haven’t been paying attention.

Bernie Sanders has. Back on November 24, 2025, he released a statement entitled “The Future of AI and Its Impact on Humanity.” “The question is: Who will control this technology? Who will benefit from it? And who will be left behind?” Then on February 20, the Guardian reported that Sanders “Warned that Congress and the American public have ‘not a clue’ about the scale and speed of the coming AI revolution, pressing for urgent policy action to ‘slow this thing down.’” Sanders calls this the “most dangerous moment in the modern history of this country.” He added, “the Congress and the American people are very unprepared for the tsunami that is coming.” Sanders reissued his call for a moratorium on the expansion of AI data centers to “slow down the revolution and protect workers.”

Sanders first called for a moratorium in December 2025. “If there are no jobs and humans won’t be needed for most things, how do people get an income to feed their families, to get healthcare or to pay rent? There has not been one serious word of discussion in the Congress about that reality.” As the Guardian reported December 28, 2025, he questioned the motives of “the richest people in the world” pushing AI. “He singled out tech moguls Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel.” Sanders calls for slowing “this process down. It’s not good enough for the oligarchs to tell us, it’s coming, you adapt…They’re going to guarantee health care to all people? What are they going to do when people have no jobs…make housing free?” Again and again, Sanders says, correctly, we need to slow this hurricane down.

So when it comes to AI, old left Bernie Sanders knows the score. Donald Trump does not. Or, more likely, he just doesn’t care. In 2025, Trump issued four executive orders promoting AI and deregulating it. Worst of all was his December 2025 order designed to stop states from restricting AI. Scheduled for March 2026, the Secretary of Commerce is tasked with identifying burdens on AI, among other things. Trump’s assault on the only guard-rail against explosive AI development, namely state regulations literally threatens us all. The only way out of this dead end that AI is corralling us into lies in Congress. If Sanders can wake up his fellow congress members, then we humans might stand a chance. Otherwise, it’s a future of no jobs, no income and the likelihood that super-intelligent AI comes to regard the human species as redundant or outright expendable.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is Booby Prize. She can be reached at her website.

An Existential Threat to Organized Labor’s Ability to Help People

We are not afraid enough of AI's pernicious dynamic.

By Hamilton Nolan

March 13, 2026

Source: How Things Work

Members of the Painters union (IUPAT) rallied with 6,000 others in New York City on May 1. In over a thousand rallies around the country, demonstrators united against a dictatorship by and for the rich. Photo: Jenny Brown

Rarely has a story filled me with such a profound sense of dread as Josh Dzieza’s New York Magazine piece this week headlined “The Laid-Off Scientists and Lawyers Training AI to Steal Their Careers.” More than anything I have read before, this story has begun to crystallize for me the exact ways that AI is a threat not just to jobs, but to the entire existence of organized labor in America. This is serious shit.

We are all familiar with the ways that the “gig economy” has preyed upon flaws in American labor law to weaken workers and strengthen capital. Employers figured out that by making all of their workers “independent contractors,” they could avoid paying them benefits, abdicate most responsibility for their welfare, push work costs onto them, and, crucially, rob them of the ability to legally unionize. This dynamic has been evident across the economy for decades. The same dynamic making people become Uber drivers also has made everyone adjunct professors and has made everyone work for shoddy subcontractors rather than directly for the firm that it seems you actually work for. It is the push to eradicate, to the extent possible, the existence of the full time employee. The rise of the gig economy is a serious threat to organized labor power. The labor movement has made efforts to nibble at its edges, but success has been hard to come by.

In Dzieza’s story, I saw something that is potentially even more deadly. He profiles Mercor, one of several companies in the business of hiring economically desperate professionals—not just lawyers and scientists, but screenwriters, designers, PhD’s, and experts in a wide variety of academic and professional fields—to train AI models to become better in their areas of expertise. Major AI firms hire Mercor to improve their models. Mercor recruits the appropriate pool of expert works, all as contractors, all working remotely, and then, with no predictable schedule, tosses them batches of work, which they all compete to finish as quickly as possible. Workers do not know the end client. Workers are monitored by software that tracks their actions scrupulously the entire time. Workers can be deactivated and cut off from their supply of work for any reason at all. Workers describe a process of the company cutting rates for the same tasks over time—from $30 an hour, for example, down to $16 an hour. Mercor’s 22 year-old founders became billionaires last year.

Exploitative work is not new. It is a feature of capitalism. American workers have been fighting against it for centuries. The labor movement has a rich history of organizing highly exploited workers and improving their conditions. Coal miners. Factory workers. The list goes on. People died. Violence was intense. Is a company like Mercor really so bad compared to all this?

The answer, I think, is that a company like Mercor poses a fairly unique challenge to the labor movement’s prescription for empowering workers. Here are some characteristics of the type of work that Mercor and its AI industry clients are offering. While many of these characteristics have been present in various workplaces throughout modern history, I do not believe that this lethal combination of characteristics has ever been so ascendant at the center of our economy:

• No worksite. Remote workers are hard to organize.
• No full time employees. Independent contractors cannot legally unionize.
• Workers are in competition with one another for piecework, rather than cooperating on tasks. The nature of the job encourages workers to see one another as threats, not as peers with whom to foster solidarity.
• Total technological control of the work process by the company. Absolute monitoring of tasks, absolute lack of transparency by workers into the company’s operations and what their coworkers are doing, and absolute ability of the company to fire workers at will.
• The success of the company contributes to the economic precarity of its own workforce. These workers, already unable to find jobs that can support them after years of training, are employed to improve the AI models that will automate their own industries. The better Mercor’s workers do their work there, the fewer good jobs for humans there will be in their own fields.
• The workforce gets better as it becomes more economically desperate. A subtle second-order effect of the dynamic described above is that as improved AI models eat more jobs in professional fields, the pool of highly trained workers forced to work for a company like Mercor will expand. Meaning that over time Mercor will be able to offer AI companies more highly skilled workers to train its models, while at the same time being able to offer those workers less, because they are competing with more of their unemployed peers. The leverage of the workers goes down as Mercor’s ability to hire better workers goes up.

As you consider this set of characteristics, ask yourself: Where, exactly, is the realistic intervention point for a labor union to build power for workers here? Even if you were able to overcome the significant hurdles of having a disparate pool of remote workers, and make a list of workers to organize, and pull them together and get them willing to act in solidarity, and avoid having the company deactivate them immediately, they are still caught in a system that is constantly employing them to undermine their own leverage. Even in the best scenario, labor’s leverage at a company like Mercor would be: The company can’t fire these workers because there is a demand for their services from the AI clients. But the more successful the workers are at their jobs, the more the advancing AI models will automate their industries and create an expanding pool of desperate workers who are forced to underbid and undermine the workers at Mercor who organized. It is a non-virtuous cycle. It is a bloodless white collar version of an imperial conqueror who employs impoverished natives as soldiers to oppress their own neighbors.

Mercor.

My own union, the Writers Guild of America, has more or less fully unionized the screenwriting industry. The union is strong and well organized and has experience using its position at a vital chokepoint in the entertainment industry to build and exercise power for writers. It is probably the best-case scenario for existing unions facing this type of AI threat. And even in the case of the mighty WGAE, what companies like Mercor are doing give me the sickening feeling that we are fucked.

The WGA signs contracts with all of the big Hollywood studios and entertainment companies that make films and TV shows. We have an ability to exercise power against these existing companies. We can put provisions strictly regulating AI in our contract with these firms, and strike to enforce it. The real threat we face, though, is not just from the firms who are signatories to our contract wanting to use more AI to replace writers. It is that AI models, trained by us, will become so skilled at replacing writers that entirely new firms can rise up, with little friction, and make film and television without employing writers at all. AI is not the usual sort of threat to labor. In the case of AI, economically desperate workers of today are not training their temporary replacement, or helping a company move to a different place where labor is cheaper; they are training a permanent replacement. The highly trained workers at Mercor are in effect the last gasp of the skilled workforce that they thought they would be entering. They are the desperate members of an expedition, forced to eat the horses that were their only hope of escaping the bad place they are in. After that, they can only eat each other. Then they all die.

Even with respect to “the gig economy”—though it is very difficult—the path for organized labor has been clear. Organize the workers. Build their collective power. Use that power to fight and win protections. But this entire paradigm is being broken now. Even if we could organize the workers of Mercor (something that unions have thus far not even attempted in any serious way), we cannot escape the fact that the very nature of their work is to improve the thing that will destroy their own career prospects in the future. We do not have unions at the AI companies. We cannot strike against them in any meaningful way. Nor do we have a clear path to assert the power of today’s highly skilled workers against the companies of the near future that will be using the AI models we just trained to replicate our work without us.

The progress of the AI industry is in effect shrinking the sphere of economic life in which unions might even hope to be able to help humans. At some point that sphere will become too small to matter to most humans.

This is not just about writers. Not even close. It is about architects and lawyers and scientists and teachers and a whole host of other fields that are facing the same dynamic. The basic threat of white collar job automation by AI has been understood for a long time. But I do not think that organized labor itself—all of the labor unions in America today, the ones still able to exercise power on their own little industrial islands—has really begun to reckon with what we are up against. It is not just that workers are threatened by the job automation, the disappearance of their careers, their declining leverage in the economy. It is that, absent federal laws, it is unclear what unions can even do about this. We can’t organize AI models, and organizing unemployed people offers little power.

The speed at which the AI industry is moving relative to the federal government means it is pretty unrealistic to expect any of us to be saved by the law any time soon. This is very bad—even for the lucky slice of workers who are members of strong unions today. A guillotine is being constructed, by our own desperate peers, that will be capable of rendering today’s version of organized labor more or less obsolete, at least in many of today’s industries that host strong unions. We are heading to a place where not only are workers exploited, but organized labor as it is currently constituted has no moves to make to help them. I confess I don’t have the answer here. But we had better get our fucking thinking caps on, fast.Email

Hamilton Nolan

Hamilton Nolan is a labor writer for In These Times. He has spent the past decade writing about labor and politics for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian, and elsewhere. More of his work is on Substack.