Summary: This is a revised and updated version of a report given to the July 2026 Convention of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization.

By Peter Hudis

Journal of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization

The hour of the barbarian is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.

—Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

August 22, 2026 – When Rosa Luxemburg proclaimed during the midst of World War I that the choice facing humanity was “socialism or barbarism,” she could not have known of the depth of barbarism that would engulf much of the world following her death, with the rise of Fascism, Stalinism, and Zionism. But we who have experienced the pain and horror unleashed by rampant racism, sexism, transphobia, political repression, war, and genocide since our last convention two years ago can identify with her sentiment all too well. At issue today is what contribution our organization can make to bringing forth a vision of socialist humanism for our life and times.

Part 1: The Nature and Depth of the Ongoing Global Crisis

A pivotal test is our response to the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran. As we anticipated, Trump’s Operation Epic Fury has become Operation Epic Failure. The despotic Iranian regime has not only survived the war but is in a much stronger position despite enduring intensive military assaults. In response, Trump tried to cut his losses by negotiating a provisional settlement with Iran; when that fell apart, he responded by imposing a series of economic sanctions on Iran, which are also likely to fail. Iran’s relentless attacks on U.S. allies in the region and use of inexpensive drones to shut down the Strait of Hormuz has put Trump over a barrel: he can either renew the bloodshed with no assurance it will undo Iran’s control of the Strait through which moves over 20% of the world’s oil, or he can find a way to cut a deal and withdraw, which will be inevitably taken as an unmitigated victory for Iran. Either way, the war is having a devastating impact on the global economy, raising the specter of a severe downturn.

It is worth noting that absent from the Memorandum of Understanding that the U.S. and Iran signed earlier in the summer was any discussion of Gaza. And not just by the U.S. While Iran stipulated that an end to Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah is an integral part of its tentative agreement with the U.S., it did not make ending Israel’s continuing war on Gaza a precondition of negotiations. Nor has Russia or China cut links to Israel: bilateral trade between Russia and Israel has recovered to $3 billion (Israel did not join Western sanctions against it), and China remains one of Israel’s largest trading partners, even as both maintain close links to Iran.

Conditions in Gaza today remain truly horrific. Israeli troops have killed over 1,200 Palestinians since the fake “ceasefire” started; virtually all the populace lives amid rubble, malnutrition is rampant, medical care severely compromised, and as if that is not bad enough, Israel has expanded its zone of control from 53% of Gaza to 70%. Ghada Abdulfattah reports,

It isn’t just the sadness of what was demolished. Seeing endless piles of concrete brings a second layer of violence—the violence of being forced to live with destruction. Rubble doesn’t just destroy the past; it erases the future. It forces your mind to stop imagining, to stop thinking, to stop dreaming about life after today… How that war became something they carried through the rest of their lives. I am afraid that this war will remain living within us as it did with them. Every time I recall these stories, a few of many, I try my best to move on. But there’s one question that comes back to me: not how will we survive war, but how will we learn to continue living after it.[1]

All of this is connected to Trump’s and Netanyahu’s plans for Gaza once they cleanse it of most of its Palestinian populace. Rafeef Ziadeh outlines the plans as follows:

The so-called Gaza 2035 plan is Netanyahu’s vision of [Gaza] transformed into a sanitized economic zone for fossil-fuel extraction, logistics and speculative urbanism…it casts Gaza as an empty canvas for redevelopment through gas projects, “green” technologies and luxury real estate schemes, a colonial vision that openly fuses military occupation with capital accumulation. It proposes an interim custodial regime led by Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Morocco …similar schemes, such as the so-called “Trump Riviera” plan, market Gaza’s coastline as a resort hub for regional investors. Far from advancing recovery, these visions erase Palestinian political claims and integrate Gaza into a regional infrastructure of extraction, logistics and finance accelerated by the Abraham Accords, in which war, humanitarianism and development are woven together, transforming destruction into an investment frontier. In this configuration, reconstruction does not lead toward Palestinian self-determination, but embeds new architectures of control, deepens aid dependency and advances settler-colonial objectives through the legitimizing language of modernization and “economic peace.”[2]

Trump and his mis-named “Board of Peace” for Gaza remain fully committed to these plans, despite recent tensions that have arisen between Israel and the U.S. over Trump’s decision not to move ahead (at least for now) with plans to bomb Iran into oblivion. While Israel remains totally dependent on the support it has received for decades from both major political parties in the U.S., the desire of virtually every political party in Israel to keep the war against Iran going despite its cost to the U.S. economy has led Trump to mildly chastise Netanyahu. This should come as no surprise; despite claims to the contrary, it is the U.S. that pulls the strings when it comes to Israel, not the other way around. And there is no difference between the two when it comes to evicting as many Palestinians from Gaza as possible in the name of creating a “Trump Riveria.”

For this and many other reasons, all roads lead to and from Gaza—despite the studied indifference on the part of the major players in our new multipolar world. (Continued)