Tuesday, March 17, 2026

No Kings: How to Win A Ceasefire, End Trumpism, and Achieve Anything/Everything Else As Well


\By 
March 14, 2026
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Image from No Kings website

We win almost any social demand only when some elite figure(s) succumb and implement the sought change. We demand a higher wage, a new stop sign at a dangerous intersection, abortion rights, affirmative action, a wealth tax, an end to a war—whatever. In each case. the demand is either met or unmet when some elite or elites accept or reject it.

What can cause the involved decision-makers, DMs, to make a decision we seek? It is almost never that we teach the DMs new morals. It is almost never that we get the DMs to substantially agree with us. It is almost always, instead, that the DMs conclude that to to do what we wish will cost the DMs less than to not do what we wish.

First, how can I be so sure of that? Second, what can we do that raises unbearable costs for a DM who doesn’t implement wharf we demand? 

The DM’s mindset is typically “I am intellectually superior in this and all domains. My interests are paramount. My understanding is definitive. More, to maintain my dominance, I must always dominate. To accede to pressure would risk unleashing more demands, more pressure. To accede to pressure risks  slipping all the way to no dominance or even to being dominated.” 

This mindset, which takes various forms, rationalizes DM agendas. But where does this DM mindset come from? To become a DM instills it. A DM presides over decisions that constrain others. For self justification, DMs convince themselves others are fools. For self justification, DMs consider themselves eminently wise and competent. To navigate up a hierarchy of power, DMs dismiss and trample those below. Garbage deems itself god-like. Garbage rises. 

Consider local bosses, owners of firms, government officials who determine societal laws, guys who preside over a family, or a dominant race that represses other races. We encounter associated DMs when we make significant demands. Such DMs have disproportionate and often near complete say over the lives and circumstances others endure. But when a person navigates to such a position, they have to answer: why do I have such authority? Did I steal it? Or do I deserve it? They typically decide they have innate brilliance and wisdom that merits it. Or sometimes they decide their having successfully climbed over others and amassed essential talents merits it. Trump and Co. are the archetype exemplars of garbage rising. Yes, there are less delusional exceptions to all this, but the higher you go the rarer non delusional DMs are. And, of course, in any event, the constraints of their domineering roles always channel them.

A question arises. What can we do to raise costs for a DM? Valid answers nearly always take a similar form. We join together collectively. We organize to reduce their revenues, comforts, or power. We convince the DM that to reject our demands will cause our efforts to grow and strengthen. To avoid threatened losses the DM must give in to our demands. The DM will always try to reduce the likelihood of more people learning the efficacy of resistance. Indeed, even giving in to pressure, the DM will claim to have implemented the change that movements sought despite movement efforts, not because of them.

We want to win higher wages. We undertake a strike or a boycott or a workplace occupation. We persist and the threatened losses for the owner mount up until to continue rejecting our demands is a worse DM option than to grant them. The DM then claims to have ignored us. We know better.

We want to win a new law or policy, or to block one, and the same dynamic applies. For example, to end a war, if the war was undertaken with real elite reasons and high stakes, or to end fossil fuel addiction if the profits of its continued use are high, resistance will have to raise very large costs for the national government or the fossil fuel industry to succumb. Other times, to get a new stoplight at a dangerous street corner, a higher wage in a workplace, or a new restraint on one firm’s polluting practices, we can raise middling costs to win. All the details of struggles are contextual. But the logic is universal.

So what now? And what of No Kings? 

We are now in an existential fight to end current wars, to protect surrounding ecology, and to remove fascistic DMs. The stakes are enormous. So too, sadly, are the costs we must raise for the involved DMs to meet our demands. 

To turn out over and over with unchanging support and unchanging militance will not win. In that case, the cost for the involved DMs is to clean up our demo areas after we leave them. If our threat to them doesn’t grow, we are at most a nuisance. We have to do better than that. So how can we act in ways that raise the costs to the DMs steadily higher? 

We need to grow our numbers and commitment each time. We need to move from very sporadic to more frequent actions. We need for each new action to say to the DMs that their intransigence will keep increasing our numbers and our militance. We need for our resistance to impact tiny and then medium level and finally king-like DMs to fear that our growth is going to inspire their subordinated constituencies to challenge them on steadily more fronts. They have to fear that our actions, growing larger, more diverse, and more persistent are going to in time challenge the very structures that ensure their dominance. They have to fear that our growing actions will increasingly cost them, and if our sought change doesn’t come, our actions will eventually remove them as DMs. Our actions have to challenge, threaten, and if they don’t deliver our sought changes cut into and in time even take away their wealth and power.

All this is not rocket science. In our upside down society, it is self evident. So what does it say to us?

Consider No Kings. 

If higher DMs—Trump and Co.—see No Kings every few months and each time it happens on one day. Each time it does the same things. Each time it has the same focus. Each time it doesn’t reach into new audiences. And each time it doesn’t escalate its non compliance. Then they won’t see a growing threat. Instead they will see that their ignoring our demands will only require cleaning up the venues on the scheduled day every few months. Likewise, somewhat lower DMs like Senators and corporate heads won’t get nervous that their constituencies are learning to resist. They won’t feel costs that force them to add their voices to our voices also demanding higher DMs succomb. 

Viewed this way, No Kings, so far, has been a monumental achievement in creating a foundation to build on. Millions standing. But the building needs to grow. So what do we need? A broadening and diversification of demands. A growing base of support because the events themselves reach into new audiences with persistent face to face organizing and diversified demands. Plus a trajectory of growing non-compliance by way of associated marches, sit downs, strikes, and then occupations and encampments that display how new recruits become committed militants. We need all of it to say to DMs, look where this is going. You need to give in or you will endure still worse to come. Our threat is real. Our commitment is unequivocal. 

In a couple of weeks No Kings returns with a hopefully larger and more militantly intense turnout even than last time. But then it needs to come back again in April. It needs to diversify its targets. It needs to march onto campuses to collect support and raise costs there. It needs to visit workplace entrances to collect support and raise costs there. It needs to go wherever there are potential allies. It needs to hear their concerns and add their demands. 

It needs to challenge media at the doors of media monopolies. It needs to challenge ICE, complicit corporations, courts, churches, colleges, high schools and more, at their doors. It needs to threaten business as usual on every front. If we do that we can win and all continue on. If we do less, we may all lose. 

The bottom line. Our words and actions need to convincingly convey what is ultimately a simple message. No more. We will not comply. We will not obey. We will raise costs for you DMs until you abide our demands. End military attacks. End Tariff attacks. End Police attacks. End sexist, racist, and classist attacks. End Trump and Co. It is all one big battle. Keep rejecting, and we will become one big movement of movements. Keep rejecting and we will move on to more fundamental change. 

As we make our decisions about each new action of resistance, is that our mindset? Our agenda? It needs to be. Email

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Michael Albert`s radicalization occurred during the 1960s. His political involvements, starting then and continuing to the present, have ranged from local, regional, and national organizing projects and campaigns to co-founding South End Press, Z Magazine, the Z Media Institute, and ZNet, and to working on all these projects, writing for various publications and publishers, giving public talks, etc. His personal interests, outside the political realm, focus on general science reading (with an emphasis on physics, math, and matters of evolution and cognitive science), computers, mystery and thriller/adventure novels, sea kayaking, and the more sedentary but no less challenging game of GO. Albert is the author of 21 books which include: No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World; Fanfare for the Future; Remembering Tomorrow; Realizing Hope; and Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Michael is currently host of the podcast Revolution Z and is a Friend of ZNetwork.

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Which BRICS Bark at Imperialism – and Which Are its Running Dogs?


By 
March 16, 2026
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Image of flags of the BRICS countries

Three months before taking power in 1949, Mao Tse-tung wrote of the solidarity required for the Chinese people’s revolution, remarking that a “principal and fundamental experience” was to “unite in a common struggle with those nations of the world which treat us as equals and unite with the peoples of all countries.”

Mao warned, though, of “domestic and foreign reactionaries, the imperialists and their running dogs.”

Fast forward to last week (March 9), as Indian writer Arundhati Roy rebuked Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government: “Some of you will remember how we used to joke about that florid, overblown Chinese communist term, ‘Running Dog of Imperialism.’ But right now, I’d say, it describes us well.”

Are BRICS rising? Or spalling? Or running (dogs)?

Does the critique of Modi’s allegiance to Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu apply more broadly, when we consider the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) bloc, now adorned with five (or six) others? In 2023 at the Johannesburg summit, new BRICS were added: Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), with Saudi Arabia an ambiguous invitee (Riyadh has never formally accepted). In early 2025 another new full member joined: Indonesia.

And at the Kazan Summit in 2024 hosted by Vladimir Putin, there were more ‘partner’ invitations – a category reflecting the bloc’s indigestion after the 2023 expansion – offered to Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Vietnam, all of which were accepted. (Only Algeria and Turkiye turned down partner status.)

As a result of the apparent strengthening of the bloc, by July 2025, geopolitics podcaster Ben Norton could remark with unparalleled BRICS-hype:

“The Non-Aligned Movement was founded in the 1960s by former formerly colonized countries almost all with socialist governments, the initial founders of the Non-Aligned Movement, saying that they refused to go along with US imperialism in the first cold war against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. So, BRICS is now bringing back this anti-colonial mantle. They’ve picked up the anti-colonial mantle and they’re fighting against US dollar hegemony which is a which is a form of imperialism. They’re fighting against western imperialism.”

But the BRICS bloc is not up for this fight, it is now apparent. In a March 9 Johannesburg discussion with leading local political broadcaster Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, Tricontinental director Vijay Prashad warned, “If the BRICS countries don’t wake up to the reality of trying to stop this conflict by any means possible, trying to stop this conflict now, if they don’t recognize this reality, the entire project of peace and development is in jeopardy.”

Likewise, just after the Trump-Netanyahu regimes began bombing Iran, ambitious hopes for BRICS were promoted by renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs on March 2:

“It’s not only Trump but there’s no brake, there’s no foot on the brake. This is only an accelerator towards expanded war right now. And the only way that it can stop is if the BRICS countries – and that means India, that means Brazil, that means Russia, that means China, that means South Africa and others – and it’s Iran, which is a member of the BRICS, says, ‘This is not the way the world can work.’ They have to stand up to American hegemony. This is the only way the world can be safe. And so this is actually a responsibility of the BRICS right now, which is the only standing bulwark against America’s global empire.”

This ‘only standing bulwark’ is, in reality breaking up, or ‘spalling,’ i.e. (as I’ve mentioned before), a construction-industry term referring to a process in which – mainly due to the freezing-thawing cycle – “a wall’s masonry and bricks crack, crumble, flake, and even pop out of the wall.”

Expel running-dog India, along with any other Israel-collaborationist (?)

From hype to hope to helplessness seems like the inevitable emotional slide-away for BRICS-watching multipolaristas. By March 11, one of the most ebullient of multipolar journalists, Thailand-based Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar, despaired – on Danny Haiphong’s podcast – that the BRICS bloc was now spalling beyond repair. So Escobar boldly recommended that one in particular be popped out by the others:

“India betrayed two top BRICS sequentially, Russia and Iran. That’s extremely serious. This would be grounds for expulsion of India from BRICS… The problem is what’s going to happen to BRICS this year, considering that India is the BRICS chair in this year when they betrayed two BRICS.”

The next day, Escobar told a podcast hosted by a former Fox News legal commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano, “BRICS would have grounds to expel India considering that India betrayed sequentially two top BRICS, founding member Russia and a new member Iran in several levels because of American pressure. When the Trump administration told India you cannot buy Russian oil, the Indian said okay, okay, master.”

(Tehran was forgiving: on March 14 two tankers carrying liquefied natural gas to India were allowed through the Strait of Hormuz. Perhaps this reflected compensation for both countries’ pain when Tehran’s battleship Dena was sunk by a U.S. submarine’s torpedo on March 4 – killing 87 Iranians – just after it left naval exercises in the Indian city of Visakhapatnam. As a former Indian military officer, Arun Prakash, complained to The Guardian, “The U.S. navy could have sunk this ship anywhere on the way back to the Persian Gulf. We are supposed to be friends and partners of the USA. To bring the war to right to our doorstep was a perverse act.” But one that New Delhi didn’t have the guts to criticise.)

On March 11, Escobar diagnosed the bloc’s feebleness: “At the moment, BRICS is in a coma. It’s very painful to admit it, but we have to be realists. It’s in a deep, deep coma, blown up by one of its founding members. And obviously, don’t expect anything coming from Brazil or South Africa.”

Escobar recalled that on February 26, “48 hours before the decapitation strike that killed Ayatollah Khamenei and very important people at the top of the government in Tehran, Modi was in Israel being best buddies with the war criminal Netanyahu. Because he wanted to clinch weapons deals with Israel, which they did, by the way. So we have a founding BRICS member completely aligned with Israel, which for the other BRICS, practically, all the other ones and the partners as well, this is unthinkable.”

But sadly, it’s not so ‘unthinkable’: the harsh realities of economic alignment to the Tel Aviv genocidaires can be discerned when BRICS hucksters open their minds and finally question the actual content of supposedly-multipolar ‘thinking’, which is oriented first and foremost to profiteering.

Since the outset of the BRICS bloc in the late 2000s, and even more so since the genocide began in late 2023, its capitalists and state agencies have increasingly linked themselves to Israel’s apartheid economy:

So they should all be expelled from the BRICS, by Escobar’s logic of banishing ‘unthinkable’ alliances with Israeli genocide-capitalism, especially since nearly all such relations have intensified since 2023, leaving only Iran in the bloc. But the very idea of Boycott Divestment Sanctions against the genocidaires, has been expelled by the BRICS elites.

Board of war, genocide and recolonization

Even more unthinkable would be formal membership in Trump’s sordid new ‘Board of Peace,’ a network of 28 imperialist, subimperialist and peripheral rightwing-ruled states, all of which are guilty of substantial human rights violations, according to The Intercept’s Nick Turse. Yet six of these are BRICS members and partners.

Trump announced the Board last October – and tellingly launched it at the Davos World Economic Forum on January 22 – in order, first, to recolonize Gaza under conditions of ongoing Israeli genocide and displacement, and to then extend its tentacles across the world as a mafioso-type enforcement gang. The Board may become an anti-UN run-around strategy in case the General Assembly belatedly grows hostile to Washington’s brazen imperialism, e.g. one day perhaps even attempting a ‘Uniting for Peace’ (U4P) strategy to counter U.S.-Israeli warring.

As Naomi Klein observed, the Board of Peace is a ‘parody of a colonial body’ and a form of ‘disaster capitalism.’ It’s obvious why the Board of Peace was invented: “They don’t want there to be a UN, because the UN represents as weak and disappointing as it is, it represents the possibility of accountability, whether it’s on a climate change, whether it’s on genocide.”

The UN’s International Court of Justice in The Hague is one site for such accountability but on March 12, Washington joined Israel in opposing the South African case there – originally filed at the end of 2023 – because the slowpoke “Court should maintain its standard for inferring intent. Lowering the standard risks broadening the application of the term ‘genocide’ such that it no longer carries its original weight and meaning, and invites attempts to misuse the Genocide Convention as a gateway for bringing extraneous disputes before the Court.” (In reality, South Africa’s original statement to the Court proved genocide intent beyond a doubt.)

Trump’s genocide-denialism was, of course, expected. But perhaps as also would be expected, Pretoria found very limited support from the other 19 BRICS members and partners: only Brazil, Cuba, Egypt and Malaysia made official submissions backing the genocide charge.

Still, even without more BRICS allies, the slackers in Pretoria could and should have done far more on this front: first by going back to the Court for more injunctions against Israeli genocide, as Palestinian-American journalist Sam Husseini argued in his recent visit to South Africa, and second, by endorsing and activating U4P – so as to assert General Assembly jurisdiction against the Security Council (following Colombian leader Gustavo Petro’s unfulfilled promise to do so last September).

In contrast to offering Palestine solidarity, a half-dozen BRICS members and partners joined Trump at the Board of Peace inaugural February 19 conference at the ‘Trump Institute of Peace’ in Washington: Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, UAE, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. (On March 2, Indonesia temporarily paused its participation, yet in late February Jakarta’s nationalist-populist leader Prabowo Subianto had offered 8000 troops to enforce Trump’s ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ vision requiring massive forced displacements of Gazans.)

India was also a formal observer at that Board of Peace session, whereas – unlike European countries which turned down membership – Brazil, China and Russia were invited by Trump but did not immediately reject his overtures. Moscow even appeared open to spending Trump’s requested $1 billion membership fee – ‘to support the Palestinian people’ – using funds frozen after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Worse, Russia and China had let the malignant Board of Peace notion fester last November 17 at the Security Council, by failing to veto the Gaza re-colonization strategy Trump imposed, on grounds the deal was then actively supported by BRICS members Egypt, Indonesia and UAE (and other Arab tyrannies) as well as by the quisling Palestinian Authority.

(Three other BRICS members – South Africa, Ethiopia and Iran – did not receive invitations. Here, we are not counting as a BRICS member Saudi Arabia – which if included would dramatically increase the weight of the running-dog case – because it has an in-again out-again posture, going to many 2025 Brazil meetings and listed as a member by host India this year.)

The geopolitical economy of running dogs and their Western canine handlers

All this leaves an extremely complicated, contradiction-riddled political terrain on which the BRICS as a whole appears to have simply slipped from the earlier ‘alternative-to-Western-imperialism’ rhetorical foothold.

In a February 24 podcast introducing his latest book, The Story of Capital, Marxist geographer David Harvey explains why such geopolitical fracturing cannot simply be read off countries’ corporate economic interests:

“The interplay between the capitalist and territorial logics of power is a defining feature of modern geopolitics. Marx noted that the concept of national wealth creeps into the work of the economist and its competition over that national wealth becomes predominant. But under the regime of competing ethnic nationalisms, the production of wealth by capital is primarily put to work to serve national interests rather than those of capital alone. These two logics are not merely competing forces, but ones that are deeply intertwined, influencing how states navigate global and domestic challenges. The dual role of the state-finance nexus becomes particularly evident during crisis. The state as both an enabler and a mediator of accumulation occupies a central political position in capital social formation. However, its dual logics of power, capitalist power and territorial power, create tensions that shape the trajectory of global and domestic politics.”

In short, even if the BRICS are generally united (excepting Iran) as a subimperial pack of hounds when profiting from Israel’s genocide, naturally, there are bound to be major differences between the West and BRICS given the depth and breadth of world capitalist crisis. These differences include military and oil alliances, as are being played out in the Gulf now.

After all, in any imperial/subimperial relationship in which occasionally-divergent state-territorial logics and corporate expansionism generate all manner of frictions, there exists what Ruy Mauro Marini termed ‘antagonistic cooperation‘ (as he put it in his classic 1973 Dialectics of Dependency).

Such collaboration becomes, ultimately, more durable due to mutual interest in improving the global terrain for capital accumulation and profiteering, than might be suggested by multipolar rhetoric or than is indicated by sporadic sites of struggle:

  • the current Iranian fight-back and de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz to U.S. allies;
  • China’s brief threat to ban sales of rare-earth minerals to Trump’s U.S. and its eventual retaking of Taiwan;
  • the South African case against Israeli genocide at The Hague; and
  • Russia’s 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine. 

These incidents of apparent anti-imperialism create genuine antagonisms, to be sure. But the overarching process is cooperation between imperial and subimperial powers, especially when it comes to surplus value extraction from the world’s workers, super-exploitation of the world’s women involved in social reproduction, and the abuse of nature as a ‘free gift,’ to quote Marx.

BRICS promote global-corporate power under the cover of multipolarism

To those ends, the BRICS elites advance the agenda of corporate imperialism because they are completely committed to strengthening the tools of neoliberal multilateral power on behalf of their largest firms – especially the deadly fossil fuel industries – and banks.

Consider the case of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, so vital for the sake of future generations and potential avoidance of planetary ecocide. But the tragic conclusion we must draw is that both G7 Western politicians and BRICS ruling elites continue working closely together to prevent bans on fossil fuels or greenhouse-gas emissions cuts to the extent necessary for fending off climate catastrophe.

Starting with the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, then U.S. President Barack Obama “blew up the United Nations,” as Bill McKibben explained at the time. “He formed a league of super-polluters, and would-be super-polluters. China, the U.S., and India don’t want anyone controlling their use of coal in any meaningful way. It is a coalition of foxes who will together govern the henhouse.” (The leaders of South Africa and Brazil were also part of formulating that deal in a secret side room.)

Since then, the G7 and BRICS have also been utterly unwilling to acknowledge polluter-pays climate-debt obligations to poorer countries and to their own internal victims of extreme weather – even after last July’s International Court of Justice advisory opinion insisting on the validity of reparations demands from 27 youth from a sinking Tuvalu.

Indeed, given how much the world’s corporations and banks rely upon the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organization (WTO) for a ‘rules-based order,’ it is no surprise to find BRICS leaders’ annual statements supporting these agencies of imperial power. The BRICS currently lead the calls for their refunding and relegitimization, even at a time Trump’s (occasional) paleo-conservative hatred of ‘globalists’ signals his retreat from climate summits, refusal to boost the Bretton Woods Institutions’ funding, and sabotage of the WTO.

Why, when neoliberal multilateral institutions are more shaky than ever, do the BRICS give them unwavering support? Simply, for the sake of their capitalists’ own accumulation strategies: global value chain exploitation, raw-materials extractivism, Intellectual Property protection, unchecked emissions and fossil fuel exploration, sleazy trade and investment deals, and debt squeezes on poorer economies where BRICS banks stand exposed. 

If Mao warned against “domestic and foreign reactionaries, the imperialists and their running dogs,” maybe – in spite of select surface appearances – that epithet “describes the BRICS well,” as Arundhati Roy might also conclude.

Mostly, though, the subimperial BRICS bloc is the rabies-addled ‘dog that didn’t bark,’ when confronted by even Trump’s excesses of imperialism and Netanyahu’s genocide. But occasionally when some in the pack do bark left, we should not be distracted or surprised when – as any Palestinian knows – they simultaneously bite right.Email

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Patrick Bond is a political economist, political ecologist and scholar of social mobilisation. From 2020-21 he was Professor at the Western Cape School of Government and from 2015-2019 was a Distinguished Professor of Political Economy at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Governance. From 2004 through mid-2016, he was Senior Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Built Environment and Development Studies and was also Director of the Centre for Civil Society. He has held visiting posts at a dozen universities and presented lectures at more than 100 others

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