Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. National Guard soldiers kill 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson in Memphis, Tennessee
Two Tennessee National Guard soldiers shot and killed 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson in downtown Memphis early Sunday morning, July 5, the latest and deadliest result of the Trump administration’s military-police occupation of the city.
According to the official account given by Memphis police and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI), officers responded shortly before 4:00 a.m. to reports of gunfire near Ida B. Wells Avenue and Union Avenue. Police claim that Johnson was seen carrying a handgun and fleeing on foot. National Guard soldiers assigned to the Memphis Safe Task Force joined the pursuit. Police allege that Johnson turned toward the soldiers with the weapon, after which two Guardsmen opened fire, striking and killing him.
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The killing of Johnson is not an aberration. It is the direct product of the Memphis Safe Task Force, established by Trump in September 2025 as part of his drive to normalize the deployment of soldiers and federal police in American cities.
Trump’s order created the task force to carry out “hypervigilant policing,” “aggressive prosecution” and the “large-scale saturation” of neighborhoods with law enforcement personnel. In reality, the occupation of Memphis has nothing to do with fighting crime or protecting the population. It is aimed at normalizing the deployment of armed soldiers in urban areas, suppressing protests and strikes and intimidating the working class.
The task force includes the U.S. Marshals Service, FBI, ATF, DEA, Homeland Security Investigations, ICE, the Tennessee Highway Patrol and local police agencies. As of Sunday, 1,450 National Guard soldiers were assigned to the Memphis Safe Task Force. All soldiers assigned to the task force are deputized by the U.S. Marshals Service on the day they join.
This is at least the fifth violent incident involving the Memphis Safe Task Force since October 2025 in which TBI investigators have been summoned. Of those five investigations, four involved shootings, two were fatal and one involved a person being run over.
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The shooting in Memphis took place during a weekend of police-state spectacle across the country. In Washington D.C., the Trump administration’s July 4 “Freedom 250” celebration turned the National Mall into a militarized zone, with fences, closed roads, screenings and heavy police and Secret Service presence.
On the other side of the country, police in Newport Beach, California, arrested 402 people during July 4 celebrations, after social media posts reportedly drew large numbers of juveniles and young adults to the beach. More than 350 officers from Newport Beach and 17 regional law enforcement agencies were deployed to clear the area after an “unlawful assembly” declaration.
The hypocrisy is glaring. Young people using social media to meet up at the beach and set off fireworks are treated as a criminal threat requiring mass arrests, mounted police and regional mobilization. But the Trump administration’s militarized Independence Day spectacle, complete with security checkpoints, military occupations, closed streets and a massive fireworks display, is presented as a celebration of “freedom.”
The Trump administration is spearheading the creation of a police-military dictatorship. But it is doing so with the cooperation of the Democratic Party. Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat, did not request the National Guard, but after Trump and Tennessee Governor Bill Lee ordered the deployment, the mayor chose to collaborate with the task force rather than mobilize political opposition to it. The city of Memphis is not part of the lawsuit challenging the deployment.
Young has repeatedly sought to present this collaboration as a pragmatic effort to steer the federal occupation toward “violent crime.” In an interview with WKNO last October, Young said, “What we were told as this was beginning is that this surge is going to be about violent crime... If there are individuals that have issues with documentation and status that are a part of any efforts around violent crime, then certainly they would be turned over to ICE.”
Young’s collaboration was so open that then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem held up Memphis as a model following the killings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis during federal immigration operations, which triggered mass protests and calls for a general strike. “I’ll point to the city of Memphis, which is where there is a Democrat mayor in place,” Noem said. “He worked with us and our federal law enforcement officers, and we saw murder rates drop by 50 percent because of that partnership.”
Young responded by insisting that Memphis was not collaborating with ICE on immigration enforcement, while admitting that the city had worked with federal agencies through the Memphis Safe Task Force on “violent crime.” This distinction is a fraud. The task force itself includes DHS agencies like ICE and operates within the same federal-police framework used by the Trump administration to terrorize immigrants, suppress protests and accustom the population to armed militarized patrols in American cities.
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The killing of Tyrin Johnson is a warning. Once soldiers are deployed on the streets under the pretext of fighting crime, they will inevitably be used as an armed force against the entire population. The official claim that Johnson “turned” with a weapon must be treated with the utmost skepticism. The police and military have lied countless times after killing civilians, and in this case they have not even claimed that Johnson fired at them.
The demand must be raised for the immediate release of all body camera footage, surveillance footage, radio traffic and reports related to the killing of Johnson. The names of the Guardsmen who fired must be made public. But the issue goes far beyond one investigation.
The Memphis Safe Task Force must be disbanded. The National Guard and all federal police agencies must be withdrawn from Memphis and every city in the country. The police, the immigration Gestapo and the military apparatus used to enforce inequality, deportations and the waging of imperialist war must be abolished.
2. US conducts massive RIMPAC joint naval drills
Throughout this month, the US and 29 other nations are taking part in the biennial Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) naval exercise in and around Hawaii. The largest joint maritime drills in the world, RIMPAC 2026 takes place as part of Washington’s longstanding preparations for war against China.The RIMPAC exercise began on June 24 and will last through July 31. According to the US Pacific Fleet website, the forces deployed to Hawaii include 32 surface ships, five submarines, 206 aircraft, and more than 30,000 personnel. Land forces from 15 nations are also taking part.
The aircraft carrier, USS Theodore Roosevelt, is leading the exercise alongside a contingent of other US warships, including destroyers, cruisers, submarines, and an amphibious assault ship, among others. This includes the USS Charlotte, the attack submarine that in March carried out a war crime by sinking an unarmed Iranian frigate, killing 84 of its personnel.
US allies in the Asia-Pacific are also playing leading roles, which includes Japan as the war games vice commander and South Korea as the maritime component commander. Canada is commanding the air component of the exercise.
Other key US allies in the war preparations against China taking part include Australia, the Philippines, and New Zealand. Israel, which is carrying out the genocide in Gaza, devastating Lebanon, and taking part in the US war against Iran, is also participating.
China is not taking part, though Beijing had previously been invited to join the exercise in 2014 and 2016. It was disinvited in 2018 over rising territorial disputes in the South China Sea that had been stoked by Washington and its allies.
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RIMPAC takes place without Washington directly mentioning China, and claims the world’s largest maritime drills are not aimed at China. Instead, RIMPAC “provides a unique training opportunity for allies and partners to strengthen their collective capabilities and promote a free and open Indo-Pacific region.”
In reality, the phrase “free and open Indo-Pacific” is regularly trotted out to justify the ramping up of tensions with Beijing. Numerous longstanding territorial disputes exist in the East and South China Seas. However, in the past 15 years, the US has deliberately stoked tensions, encouraging countries like the Philippines to belligerently confront China, while accusing Beijing of “aggression” as the pretext for its own military build-up throughout the region.
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Rather than the “free and open Indo-Pacific,” Washington’s goal is the control of oceans, sea lanes, and choke points throughout the region. This has become all the more critical following the debacle in the US war on Iran, where the Trump administration has failed to achieve the objectives of US imperialism and Iran successfully closed the Strait of Hormuz.
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Beijing is well aware that RIMPAC is preparation for war against China. China Military Online, the official English-language news site of China’s military, stated in a July 6 article, “This year’s exercise is not only unprecedented in scale, but also features a stronger emphasis on major-country competition in both its strategic orientation and tactical arrangements, warranting close attention and vigilance.”
RIMPAC is far from the only US-led exercise taking place. Two additional exercises took place just as RIMPAC was beginning, Resolute Dragon 2026 and Valiant Shield 2026.
Resolute Dragon is an annual bilateral exercise with Japan, this year running from June 20 to June 30. The drill took place in Okinawa and Kyushu in the East China Sea involving 9,000 troops. The biennial Valiant Shield drill involving 10,000 troops began June 22 and ended on July 1, taking place in the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and Japan. Tokyo was closely integrated in the planning and execution of Valiant Shield for only the second time.
Japan is playing a key role in the war preparations against China. Under far-right Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, Tokyo has threatened war with China over Taiwan, ramped up military spending to 2 percent of GDP, and lifted a ban on the export of lethal military weaponry. Tokyo is also expanding intelligence gathering operations.
Takaichi’s threat of war over Taiwan is significant, as the island is a major red line for Beijing, which considers it a rogue province and part of China. Conscious that Taiwan could be used by the US as a military staging ground against the Chinese mainland, Beijing has stated it will use force to reunify the island if Taipei declares independence. For this very reason, Washington and Tokyo, in conjunction with the administration of Lai Ching-te in Taipei, have stoked tensions over the island, attempting to goad Beijing into firing the first shot.
That Taiwan’s own war games are taking place at this time is not a coincidence. In recent weeks, Taiwan held its Immediate Combat Readiness Exercise from June 22 to 26, which involved 100,000 troops. It is also holding the Joint Defense Exercise beginning on July 13 and Han Kuang, the largest annual exercise for the Taiwanese military, beginning on August 5.
When asked recently during a legislative hearing if any US personnel were taking part in these military exercises, Hsieh Jih-sheng, the deputy chief of the general staff for intelligence, refused to comment. However, he added that the US-led exercises throughout the region were evidence that Taiwan is “definitely not alone.” American troops have been stationed in Taiwan for several years, supposedly in a training capacity.
More than a month-and-a-half after their contract expired on May 16, 40,000 New York City subway and bus workers remain on the job with wages frozen as the cost of living continues to spike. The Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100, which claims to be “at war” with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) over the agency’s draconian wage offer and demands for healthcare givebacks, is seemingly content to drag out the process for months or even years.
Meanwhile, the eyes of the world are on New York. The 2026 FIFA World Cup is by some measures the largest sporting event ever hosted in North America. The New York/New Jersey region is among the tournament’s principal venues, culminating in the final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on July 19.
While New York City transit workers don’t directly provide transportation to the stadium, ticket holders depend on public transit to get to the stadium because of FIFA’s decision to ban parking at tournament venues. Beyond that, the World Cup is a major political undertaking—from Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s frequent World Cup public relations stunts to President Donald Trump’s self-appointment as the chair of the tournament’s organizing task force. The hosting of the event is intended to showcase prestige, economic strength and international standing, while masking social realities beneath a veneer of unity.
As such, enormous public and private resources have been mobilized for the 39-day event, with FIFA projected to rake in $13 billion in revenues. Meanwhile, public transit and other vital everyday services in the host cities face sustained disinvestment.
New York City transit workers keep the city moving during the World Cup, whatever the human costs. This past week’s dangerous heat wave, with outdoor temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) and many subway stations higher still, is just one of the many hazards workers face on a daily basis. And for this, they are being offered a pathetic 2 percent wage increase annually. The MTA is demanding workers pay 50 percent more for healthcare premiums and increased co-pays for hospital visits.
With the World Cup final approaching in less than two weeks, the question naturally arises: is now the time for transit workers to exert their enormous leverage and prepare a strike?
The World Cup itself, while followed by billions worldwide, including in New York City, is an event covered in corruption and political reaction. FIFA is widely despised, hated for its corruption and profit-taking. The 2026 World Cup has set a new low, with seemingly every aspect of the organization tailored to extract the most profit and advance a reactionary political agenda.
The unprecedented decision to reverse a suspension of USA forward Folarin Balogun following a direct intervention by Donald Trump is only the latest obscene spectacle. The list also includes: the farcical “FIFA Peace Prize” awarded to Trump last December; the dynamic pricing of tickets, which has surged prices to thousands of dollars, limiting attendance only to the wealthy; the implementation of commercial breaks midway through each half of all games for the first time in the sport’s history; the travel bans preventing fans from several World Cup nations from attending matches; and the deployment of ICE to US stadiums.
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The official narrative notwithstanding, the World Cup organization in New York-New Jersey reflects the stark class divide that pervades every aspect of society. An offensive by transit workers, bringing New York City to a halt at the very moment it is front and center before a global audience, would bring this real character of society to the forefront. And it would garner immense support from workers in New York and around the globe who similarly confront a crisis of affordability, increased exploitation and a political system that serves the wealthy.
A strike would immediately place transit workers in conflict with both political parties, including Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Mamdani. No doubt they would attempt to make full use of the Taylor Law to try and break it. But nothing has ever been won without a struggle.
Transit workers have a long history of defying anti-worker and anti-democratic laws, including a sit-down strike in 1937 at a Brooklyn Rapid Transit (BRT) powerhouse, which led to the establishment of the TWU and major walkouts in 1966, 1980, and 2005.
Union officials, however, have refused in advance to organize a fight. In 2008, Transport Workers Union Local 100 signed a statement forswearing the right to strike.
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The TWU bureaucracy is deeply integrated into the political establishment, mainly via the Democratic Party. After years of groveling to Governor Andrew Cuomo, TWU Local 100 endorsed his successor, Kathy Hochul, for election in 2022, and the International funneled tens of thousands to her campaign. TWU boss John Samuelsen has of late been desperate to distance himself from Hochul, and two TWU locals endorsed her Trump-backed Republican challenger Bruce Blakeman. Samuelsen, meanwhile, was appointed to a committee on Mamdani’s transition team.
The fight to beat back the demands of the MTA and win raises that are necessary to live will not come from any element of the trade union apparatus or the Democratic and Republican Parties. The World Cup presents a major opportunity to seize the initiative. The money for a decent contract clearly exists. What is required is the organized collective power of the working class to take the struggle into their own hands, independent of the trade union functionaries and politicians. We urge transit workers to act now to build rank-and-file committees at every depot and yard so as not to let the opportunity pass. Fill out the form below to get involved.
4. New Zealand media glorifies man who died fighting in Ukraine’s fascist Azov Brigade
On July 5 the New Zealand Herald revealed that Sam Haines, a 22-year-old man from Auckland, was killed last December while fighting in Ukraine as part of the fascist Azov Brigade’s International Battalion.
The article and an accompanying 15-minute video report are pro-war propaganda. They exploit Haines’ death to glorify the US-NATO imperialist proxy war against Russia. The Herald portrays Haines as a hero, effectively encouraging others to follow his example, and whitewashes the Azov Brigade, a neo-Nazi organization that plays a major role in Ukraine’s armed forces.
The Putin regime’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was reactionary, rooted in Great Russian nationalism and serving the interests of the Russian oligarchy—but it was provoked by three decades of NATO expansion and relentless US encirclement of Russia.
The European powers, led by Germany, Britain and France, are now committing vast sums to their own militaries in preparation for direct war against Russia. New Zealand and Australia are supporting this imperialist war with funding, equipment, and training for Ukrainian forces.
New Zealand’s corporate media is seeking to condition the population to accept greater involvement in the war against Russia and deeper integration into US-led preparations for war against China.
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Ukraine has suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties and the military is desperate for new cannon fodder. The Kiev government says around 2 million Ukrainians are evading the draft and more than 200,000 soldiers have deserted their positions—a massive level of civil disobedience which points to widespread opposition to the war.
Thousands of foreign nationals are reportedly fighting in Ukraine’s military. Haines is the sixth New Zealander confirmed to have died in the war.
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The Herald states that Haines enlisted in the Azov Brigade “within weeks” of arriving in Ukraine in January 2025. The newspaper mentions in passing that Azov was founded as a militia in 2014 and attracted “controversy because of its early far-right associations,” before being integrated into the country’s armed forces following Russia’s invasion.
In reality the Brigade remains a neo-Nazi organisation. When Haines joined, its commander was Denys Prokopenko. Before joining Azov in 2014, Prokopenko was a member of the White Boys Club, a neo-Nazi fan club of the Dynamo Kyiv soccer team. Its Facebook posts have included photos of graffiti with their organization’s name alongside the number “88,” the neo-Nazi code for “Heil Hitler.”
The Azov Brigade celebrates Ukraine’s Nazi collaborators, including Stepan Bandera and Andriy Melnyk, leaders of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and Roman Shukhevych, head of its armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). These forces took part in the war of extermination against the Soviet Union, the genocide of Jews and the mass murder of at least 100,000 Poles.
The positions advanced by Azov and other far-right groups have been adopted by Volodymyr Zelensky’s regime, whose glorification of the OUN and the UPA as national heroes recently provoked a diplomatic crisis with Poland.
Zelensky’s corrupt, kleptocratic government has postponed elections and outlawed opposition parties. Anti-war activists have been imprisoned, including the socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk, whose organisation, the Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists, called on workers in Russia and Ukraine to unite against both oligarchic regimes in order to end the war. These facts are buried by the New Zealand media.
The Herald’s video report features an interview with an unnamed American soldier in Azov’s International Brigade, who praises Haines’ combat skills and describes the unit as a “brotherhood” in which fighters develop “powerful” bonds. The video includes combat footage taken by members of Azov for propaganda purposes, which carries a watermark of the brigade’s “National Idea” symbol—a variation of the Wolfsangel symbol used by the Nazi SS. We are also shown Haines’ coffin emblazoned with the same symbol as he is buried in New Zealand.
Sam Haines’ mother told the Herald: “He found his tribe. They loved him. They cared for him. I think he felt understood there.” His father declared that after learning of his son’s feats on the battlefield “I am in awe of him.”
The Ukrainian military’s foreign recruiting department could not have hoped for a more glowing endorsement of the Azov Brigade.
The death of Sam Haines raises many disturbing questions. Why was it only reported after an eight-month delay? How many other New Zealanders are fighting in Ukraine and are there more deaths that have not been reported?
Who exactly were the Americans who apparently encouraged Haines to go and fight in Ukraine? Are there recruiters for the Azov Brigade operating in New Zealand?
The Herald’s brief mention of Haines’ enrollment in Massey University’s Defence Studies program also raises questions. What exactly did he study and how did it influence his decision?
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The shocking revelation that a young New Zealand man was able to join a fascist brigade in Ukraine and was killed in battle has not prompted any statements of concern from anyone in the media, academia or the political establishment. The National Party-led government and the opposition parties, Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, are all silent.
This is because the entire political establishment supports the US-NATO proxy war. The last Labour government, backed by the Greens, sent military aid to Ukraine and deployed NZ troops to Britain to train Ukrainian conscripts. The pseudo-left International Socialist Organisation, which supports Labour and its allies, is openly aligned with US and European imperialism against Russia.
The state-owned and corporate media have effectively banned any criticism of the war. In 2023, when the journalist Mick Hall reported on the Ukrainian government’s promotion of fascists, he was hounded out of his job at Radio NZ, smeared as a “Russian agent” and investigated by the intelligence agencies.
Nor is there any dissent among academics. When Victoria University of Wellington hosted a Ukrainian nationalist exhibition in 2022, which promoted the Azov Battalion, downplayed the Nazi Holocaust and glorified Bandera and the OUN, the event attracted zero criticism outside of the WSWS.
The Herald’s war propaganda must be taken as a sharp warning by workers and young people. As the war in Ukraine continues to intensify, along with the US confrontation with China, New Zealand’s ruling class is preparing to escalate its involvement. With Labour’s agreement, the government is planning to double military spending and wants to rapidly increase recruitment into the armed forces. A minor imperialist power, Wellington is determined not to be excluded from the violent carve-up of the world’s resources and markets.
5. As they escalate war against Russia, imperialist powers greenlight Erdoğan’s police-state crackdown
In preparation for the 36th NATO Summit in Ankara on July 7–8, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government has declared war on basic democratic rights in Türkiye.
The Erdoğan government has implemented a de facto state of emergency in the capital and detained hundreds of people. The aim is to suppress the widespread opposition to the gathering of political criminals, headed by US President Donald Trump, who are waging a war of aggression against Iran, have made the genocide in Gaza possible and are creating the risk of a nuclear conflict in the war against Russia in Ukraine. Events in Ankara are the sharpest expression of the turn by the ruling classes worldwide toward war and dictatorship in the face of the insoluble crisis of the global capitalist system.
The Ankara Governorate announced a 13-day ban on demonstrations and press statements covering the period from June 28 to July 10. Over the weekend, more than 100 people were unlawfully detained during home raids conducted in 18 provinces. On Sunday evening, police attacked an anti-NATO march in Ankara and detained more than 100 people. Dozens of left-wing media outlets and organizations had their social media accounts suspended. This comes on top of the hundreds of detentions and more than 200 arrests in previous weeks.
Imperialist war abroad, in which the Turkish ruling class participates in pursuit of its own interests, and police-state repression against social opposition at home are two sides of the same coin.
The massive assault on basic democratic rights in Türkiye has the approval of American and European political and media institutions. Located at a crossroads connecting Asia and Europe, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, Türkiye is viewed as a key ally in the plans of all the imperialist powers—led by the United States—to wage war, dominate the Middle East and carry out the violent redivision of the world. It is considered critically important not only in terms of the war against Russia and Iran but also the war preparations targeting China, including disrupting the projects like the Belt and Road initiative. Erdoğan is also continuing to hold refugees fleeing the imperialist wars in Syria and Afghanistan in Türkiye on behalf of the European powers.
Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025 has accelerated the crackdown on the political opposition in Türkiye. Ekrem İmamoğlu, mayor of Istanbul, the largest city in Türkiye, and the Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) presidential candidate—selected by 15.5 million voters—has been in prison since March 2025. Since then, police raids have been carried out on dozens of CHP-run municipalities. Shortly before the summit, the CHP’s elected leadership was removed from office by court order, and several more mayors—including Ali Ercan Akpolat, mayor of Adalar—were arrested. Erdoğan is neutralizing the CHP, which emerged as the leading party in the March 2024 elections, through a political coup. All of this has been met with deafening silence in NATO capitals.
The presidential dictatorship Erdoğan has built with the approval of Washington and the European capitals serves as a model for governments grappling with the same crisis. Trump, who is signaling his intent to overturn or cancel elections and imprison his opponents, is following in Erdoğan’s footsteps. While Trump praises Erdoğan at every opportunity, the Democrats and their media mouthpiece, the New York Times, are tacitly endorsing this repression in Türkiye.
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The summit’s official agenda makes clear that this will be a summit aiming to expand rearmament and imperialist war. The Defense Industry Forum on July 7 is being attended not only by Ukraine but also by NATO’s Asia-Pacific partners (Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea) and the Gulf States. The agenda thus extends beyond Russia—against which NATO has been waging a proxy war since 2022—to preparations for continued aggression against Iran and war against China.
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The run-up to the summit was marked by Trump’s demand for a rapid increase in military spending and by disagreement over the future of NATO’s war against Russia. US officials claim that the front in Ukraine has “frozen.” While the European powers seek to escalate the war with strikes deep into Russian territory, Trump—meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Ankara on July 8 and conducting telephone diplomacy with Russian President Vladimir Putin—is pursuing a separate deal profitable for the United States. Far from reducing militarism, this inter-imperialist rivalry is accelerating it.
The trillions being poured into rearmament are being extracted from the working class through deep cuts to health, education, pensions and wages. Türkiye, which has NATO’s second-largest army, increased its military spending by 7.2 percent over the previous year and by 94 percent over the past decade. This increase came amid a massive cost-of-living crisis, a significant decline in real wages and pensions, rising taxes loaded onto the backs of the working class, and tax breaks and incentives for big business.
The European powers seeking to provoke a direct NATO war against Russia are likewise attempting to finance their rearmament programs through enormous social cuts. This is accompanied by moves to reintroduce conscription. Because these measures—opposed by workers and youth—provoke growing resistance, the ruling classes everywhere are resorting to police state measures. The transformation of Ankara into a fortress with some 70,000 security personnel, together with the wave of preventive arrests, is a concentrated expression of this logic.
This turn is even more naked at the center of world imperialism. On July 3 at Mount Rushmore, Trump delivered a fascist speech—characterized by the WSWS as “anticommunist hysteria and the conspiracy for dictatorship”—declaring war on socialism and branding political opposition as the enemy within. This anticommunism expresses the fear of the financial oligarchy in the face of the threat rising from the working class.
The ruling classes’ fear of social revolution is not unfounded. The same spiral of militarism and social austerity is fueling an ever-growing wave of class struggle worldwide. This year, Türkiye has witnessed significant signs of an independent workers’ movement; from warehouse workers to miners, from shipyard workers to teachers, sections of the working class have launched important struggles independent of the official trade union confederations. Energy, railway and hospital strikes in the United States, general strikes in Italy, and mass military desertions in Ukraine are the international signs of this upsurge.
The criminalization of opposition to war is a NATO-wide phenomenon. The NATO-backed Zelensky regime has imprisoned the Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk for more than two years on charges of “treason,” because he fights for the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers against the war and opposes both the Zelensky and Putin regimes. His detention is being extended even though three separate expert reports have refuted the charges. Behind the Zelensky regime that imprisons Bogdan and the Erdoğan regime that jails anti-war activists and political opponents in Türkiye stand the imperialist powers.
These events also expose the failure of bourgeois opposition parties, such as the CHP, which, amid mounting repression appeals to the very same NATO powers for “democracy” and “social peace” and pledges to be a better ally than Erdoğan to deliver on their promises. In Türkiye and across the world, no faction of the bourgeoisie can consistently oppose imperialist war and defend democratic rights. That requires a frontal assault on the wealth and power of the ruling class.
6. Everything Is Great!: Carsie Blanton and the Burning Hell call for the overthrow of capitalism
The official celebrations of the 250th anniversary of American independence cannot hide the deep disgust that masses of Americans feel toward the entire political system. In President Donald Trump, many see the embodiment of an oligarchy waging criminal wars, eviscerating democratic rights and engaging in brazen lying and self-enrichment. Expressions of this opposition in popular culture are unfortunately still uncommon.A noteworthy exception is Everything Is Great!, the recent album by singer–songwriter Carsie Blanton and Canadian indie band the Burning Hell. These sharp and funny songs take aim at the financial oligarchy, US imperialism and fascism. They not only call for the overthrow of capitalism but also look forward to a future of peace and equality. This positive attitude provides a welcome contrast with the despair that predominates among those who lean “left,” whether they are artists or not.
Since her debut album Ain’t So Green (2005), Blanton, who hails from Luray, Virginia, has steered clear of major labels and remained independent. Folk, country, jazz and Tin Pan Alley have all influenced her music. Some critics have compared Blanton with John Prine and Loudon Wainwright III.
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The Burning Hell, which originated in Peterborough, Ontario, is a loose collective centered on Matthias Kom and multi-instrumentalist Ariel Sharratt. Besides being a songwriter, Kom holds a PhD in ethnomusicology. He favors imagined narrators and gentle irony. The group’s songs often deal with work, community and the environment from a nonsystematic, broadly leftist perspective. Like Blanton, the band pursues a do-it-yourself ethic.
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The title track begins the album with lazy acoustic guitar strumming as Kom calls Blanton from Canada to make sure she’s okay amid the current political turmoil. With a country lilt, Blanton exhibits forced optimism while acknowledging that “they’re shootin’ people lining up for bags of flour” and “nobody wants to talk about what you should do if your government is starting World War III.” The song functions as an indictment of the ruling class and a satire of complacent, ineffectual liberals.
But a seriously false note arrives in the line, “Everybody knows Luigi was right.” Luigi Mangione is suspected of the December 2024 murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Though this act reflected mass anger at the corporate oligarchy, individual terrorism has no progressive outcome. It not only fails to provide political clarity or leadership but also serves as a pretext for the ruling class to increase repression. It expresses the politics of despair and frustration, not the outlook of a confident, broad-based socialist movement.
Despite such steps backward, the songs on Blanton’s album generally capture, usually in a humorous way, popular anger at war, exploitation and inequality. “Peace and Freedom” mocks official denunciations of political violence (including one by Senator Chuck Schumer) while cataloguing the Tomahawk helicopters, military bases and nuclear weapons at the government’s disposal. “Price of Eggs” satirizes the idea that change can be achieved through elections. Instead, “[We’re] gonna turn the one into the zero percent.”
Especially effective is the spare, minor-keyed “Private Equity,” which describes “A bottomless hunger to monetize / Every second of our previously worthless little lives.” Blanton sings about investors buying nursing homes and cutting the wages of immigrant workers who have fled US-backed coups. Finance capital is “driv[ing] up the price of the housing stock” and “buying the school and the TV show” to convince us that “there’s no point in fighting it.” Blanton draws out the last note of the song with a delicate, sinister curl.
Significantly, the album ends with four songs that strike a sustained note of optimism. The gentle “Live, Laugh, Love” urges, “No matter what anybody tells you, / If we work together, we can overthrow capitalism.” “Minor Characters” imagines an intimate, oceanside celebration after a successful uprising against the police.
The strongest of these final songs is “The War to End All Wars.” Leaning into her Southern accent and singing from a fictional near future, Blanton recalls joining an armed insurrection against Washington. “I try to tell the children, / But they don’t believe a stitch, / How we used to kill and die / To make more profit for the rich.” The album closes with a folk song set in a world at peace. “I’m a weary arms dealer, / And this world ain’t mine no more,” sings Kom.
From a musical perspective, Everything Is Great! is as enjoyable as it is unassuming. The musicians’ nonchalant approach almost obscures the songs’ stylistic diversity. More significant and refreshing is the fact that the musicians (mostly Blanton) address urgent social and political issues directly, intelligently and from an unabashedly left-wing perspective. These songs are pointed and amusing, and many may find them to be a balm during this time of acute crisis.
The album’s humor has its limitations, however. At times it is too gentle, at times too knowing. Blanton and Kom sometimes seem more like preachers before a choir than toughminded social critics. And as welcome as the anticapitalist and antifascist lyrics are, they also raise political questions. The fantasies about disposing of individual CEOs coincide with exhortations to mobilize the working class. At moments, one fears that the musicians’ perspective might not be so far from that of the petty-bourgeois liberals they lampoon.
Notwithstanding these reservations, Everything Is Great! says out loud what many Americans are thinking. It is no coincidence that the album has been released at a time of growing opposition to Trump and both political parties. The songs catch the listener’s attention and convince him or her that mass action against capitalism is not only necessary but also eminently possible. Blanton’s own career reflects the process of radicalization that is affecting workers and young people. But these radicalized masses must find their way to the socialist “genuine article.”
7. Prevent closure, defend every job at the Zalando logistics hub in Erfurt, Germany!
Zalando is slashing 2,700 jobs at its Erfurt logistics hub to boost profits—and the Verdi union bureaucracy is helping the company do it by haggling over severance pay instead of fighting to keep the facility open.
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It is not too late to organize resistance! Take the fight into your own hands now and organize yourselves in independent rank-and-file action committees! Wrest control of the negotiations from Verdi and initiate industrial action!
Verdi initially expressed outrage, denouncing the “ugly face of capitalism” and appealing to Zalando to “talk to the works council and union about ways to secure the site’s future.” From the outset, however, the Verdi apparatus never seriously considered the unconditional defence of all jobs. This is clear from the fact that it quickly made a “social plan”—that is, severance packages—its priority, while strictly refusing to call effective industrial action to defend every job.
As always in such cases, when the livelihoods of thousands of workers and their families are at stake, the unions appeal to “politicians”—in this case, the Thuringia state government. With its “Taskforce Zalando,” the state government has already ensured that the Federal Employment Agency opens an office directly at the site and has promised funds for “retraining measures.”
This is the mechanism through which masses of jobs have been permanently destroyed in recent years. It would be better described as a conveyor belt into unemployment. Everyone in Thuringia knows that comparable alternative jobs will never be created again.
8. Trump calls FIFA chief to lift suspension on US player: Chauvinism and corruption permeate World Cup
President Donald Trump has personally intervened with FIFA President Gianni Infantino to overturn a one-game suspension handed to US forward Folarin Balogun, in an episode that lays bare, more crudely than at any previous point in the 2026 World Cup, the subordination of the most popular sports tournament in the world to the US financial oligarchy and Trump personally.
Balogun, the United States’ top scorer and Monaco’s leading striker this season, was sent off in the Round of 32 match against Bosnia-Herzegovina after a VAR review found he had raked his studs down an opponent’s leg and onto his ankle. Under FIFA’s disciplinary code, a straight red card carries an automatic one-match ban, applied without exception or appeal for more than 60 years of World Cup history. Balogun was set to miss Monday’s Round of 16 match against Belgium.
Trump, who had not been asked by the US Soccer Federation to get involved, called Infantino on his own initiative reportedly after the game Wednesday. By his own account, he did not initially understand why a red card should carry any further consequence at all. “I asked for a review because I didn’t think it was a foul,” he told reporters, adding that he “didn’t know what the hell a red card was” before making the call. That admission of ignorance did not stop him from declaring, in the same breath, “I’m the one who got them to overturn it.”
Behind the scenes, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and White House World Cup task force director Andrew Giuliani pressed Infantino directly, while lawyers coordinated with a hedge fund manager and US Soccer donor to prepare legal arguments contesting the VAR review, which were passed on to the federation. Days later, FIFA announced it was suspending the enforcement of Balogun’s ban for a “probationary period” of one year, citing Article 27 of its Disciplinary Code, a provision never previously used to nullify an automatic World Cup red-card suspension mid-tournament.
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Trump found time for the Infantino call in between events marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That same week, he delivered a speech in Medora, North Dakota, dedicating the $450 million Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, in which he dwelt at length on Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill and the seizure of Cuba, Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898, declaring of that conquest, “they were all ours.”
The instinct to bend FIFA to Washington’s will over a soccer match and the nostalgia for imperial annexation fell squarely together in the would-be Fuhrer’s head as part of Independence Day events. This is a president for whom the affirmation of human equality in the Declaration of Independence must be recast as a celebration of American supremacy and aristocratic privilege over all concerns of society.
Political interference is by no means unprecedented in the history of the sport, though it has rarely been so brazen. Argentine dictator Jorge Videla visited Peru’s locker room ahead of a decisive 1978 group match Argentina needed to win by six goals; Argentina won 6-0. In 1973, FIFA gave Chile a forfeit victory after the Soviet Union refused to play a qualifier in the National Stadium, freshly used by Augusto Pinochet’s junta as a torture and execution center. In 1982, a Kuwaiti sheikh stormed the pitch to browbeat a referee into disallowing a legitimate French goal. Mussolini, who privately held the sport in contempt, used propaganda and pressure on officials to secure Italy’s 1934 title. In 1974, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko allegedly threatened his own players with exile if they lost to Brazil by more than three goals; they lost 3-0.
What distinguishes the Balogun affair is its scale and brazenness: the direct, public, repeated intervention of the president of the world’s dominant imperialist power in the officiating of a world tournament hosted on his own soil.
The episode is riddled with contradictions. Balogun plays for the US team only because he was born in Brooklyn in 2001 when his Nigerian mother was unable to fly home to London while seven months pregnant. This was the result of birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment that Trump’s administration is actively suing to abolish—not to speak of Trump’s travel bans targeting Nigeria and other majority-Muslim and African countries.
The president who mobilized the machinery of the US state to keep a Nigerian-American striker on the field is simultaneously working to ensure children like him are never recognized as citizens at all. Balogun, notably, has responded with more dignity than his own government, telling reporters he was conscious of “inspiring little kids” watching how “to handle things,” Meanwhile, US players themselves, on learning of the reversal, wondered whether the news was AI-generated. In this Twilight Zone of a tournament, no one would blink if Israel, which never qualified for the tournament, turned up in the semifinals.
None of this is incidental to Infantino’s FIFA. The federation he inherited emerged from the 2015 “FIFA-Gate” indictments, an FBI-led prosecution that toppled his predecessor Sepp Blatter over bribery charges tied to the Russian and Qatari World Cup bids, conveniently clearing the way for the “clean,” heavily lobbied selection of the joint US-Mexico-Canada bid over Morocco.
Infantino became Washington’s chosen instrument at the head of the world’s richest sporting body—one now facing a fresh criminal complaint filed in France by former UEFA president Michel Platini, alleging a conspiracy of false accusation that blocked Platini’s own path to the FIFA presidency a decade ago. Any US victory over Belgium will be permanently stained by this decision.
Host cities have welcomed visiting fans with real warmth, as hundreds of millions follow teams built increasingly from the ranks of immigrants and their children. That instinctive international solidarity and unity in sport and culture is precisely what the manipulation of FIFA by Trump and Infantino is designed to suppress beneath a fog of national chauvinism and rampant moneymaking.
The Balogun affair joins a growing catalogue: the exclusion of Iran’s team and staff from US soil under threat of bombing, the censorship of Haiti’s kit commemorating the defeat of Napoleon by the first successful anti-slave army, the airport interrogations and expulsions of African, Iranian and Arab players, referees, journalists and fans. Every one of these episodes exposes the same reality: a sport invented and sustained by the working class has been seized by a financial aristocracy and fused to the machinery of an increasingly fascistic state.
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) presented itself as a future governing party at its party conference in Erfurt last weekend, as the fascist Wing faction, led by Björn Höcke consolidated its position on the party executive. This was only possible because representatives of the Christian Democrats (CDU), Social Democrats (SPD), Free Democrats (FDP) and Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) had previously held out the prospect of cooperation with the far-right party, and because a large-scale police operation hermetically sealed off the party conference from tens of thousands of counter-demonstrators.
The venue and date of the party conference were chosen deliberately. Exactly 100 years ago to the day, on July 3 and 4, 1926, the first Reich Party Congress of the re-established NSDAP took place in nearby Weimar, at which the party reorganized itself following its temporary ban in the wake of the Hitler putsch and definitively pledged its allegiance to Hitler as Führer.
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Overall, the party leadership remained very cautious about making policy statements at the party conference. This is a calculated move, as any statement on their actual programme would diminish their electoral prospects. The AfD presents itself as the “opposition” and an “alternative,” but in reality it is taking the federal government’s right-wing policies to extremes with the utmost aggression.
It was the only party to have called, as early as the Bundestag election campaign, for an increase in military spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product—a demand that is now being implemented by the federal government and all the other parties in the Bundestag. It welcomes the reintroduction of compulsory military service and the unprecedented rearmament drive, and is absolutely unequivocal in its commitment to German militarism.
Its Bundestag election manifesto envisaged a massive redistribution from the bottom to the top: tax cuts for top earners and corporations, the scrapping of social benefits and the further privatization of public services. It is no coincidence that it received support from the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Like its friend Donald Trump, an AfD government would also enforce policies designed to enrich the wealthy and wage war by the most brutal means.
The AfD’s smear campaign against migrants also serves this purpose. When, as a result of rearmament and the enrichment of the wealthy, schools fall into disrepair, rents rise and hospitals are closed, the far-right party shifts the blame onto the most vulnerable in society—in order to protect the rich and build a police state against the working class.
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To the extent there was any criticism of the AfD, it came essentially from the right. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) stated that sensitive information would be withheld from an AfD government—not because they are fascists, but because “their proximity to Putin cannot be overlooked.” The Greens’ deputy parliamentary group leader, Konstantin von Notz, also declared: “The AfD is Moscow’s parliamentary arm in Germany.”
The right-wing extremists of the AfD are thus not being criticized for their horrendous rearmament plans, their attacks on social welfare or their schemes to enrich the rich, but because the party is not taking a sufficiently aggressive stance against Russia. The reason for this is obvious: all the established parties are in agreement with the AfD’s social and economic program. The AfD is the most brutal manifestation of the right-wing shift across the entire political establishment.
The Left Party’s call for the AfD to be stopped with the help of the governing parties, the CDU and the SPD, is therefore a disastrous political trap. At its last party conference, the party resolved to form coalitions with these parties in order to prevent the AfD from gaining ground. One might as well collaborate with the arsonist to put out the fire.
In fact, it is precisely the Left Party’s right-wing policies that have strengthened the AfD. Wherever the party has been part of government, it has, in the name of left-wing politics, supported the social spending cuts, rearmament and wage reductions that paved the way for the AfD....
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All parties that defend capitalism are moving ever further to the right. It is impossible to combat the rise of the fascists with them—they are part of the problem, not part of the solution. The Left Party, which votes in favor of rearmament in the Bundestag and wants to govern in Thuringia alongside the CDU, is part of the cross-party coalition for war and austerity.
The struggle against fascism is inextricably linked to the struggle against capitalism. The AfD is not a glitch in the democratic system, but the product of a system which, in the deepest crisis of its history, is destroying social programs, waging wars and eroding democratic rights. Anyone who wants to defeat fascism must eliminate the social conditions that give rise to it.
10. Massachusetts nurses, home care clinicians plan largest healthcare strike in state history
More than 4,500 nurses and clinicians employed by Mass General Brigham (MGB), the largest private hospital system in Massachusetts, are set to walk out Wednesday, July 8, in what would be the largest strike of healthcare workers in state history.
The strike includes more than 4,000 registered nurses at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston and roughly 450 MGB Home Care clinicians in Greater Boston, including registered nurses, occupational and physical therapists, speech-language pathologists, social workers and dietitians. The Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA) has called only a 24-hour walkout at BWH, while the much smaller Home Care unit is scheduled for a seven-day strike.
The strike vote at BWH was overwhelming. Nurses voted 2,798 to 12, or 99.6 percent, to authorize a strike, the largest such vote by nurses in Massachusetts history. The vote reflects years of anger over unsafe staffing, stagnant pay, higher health insurance costs and the erosion of patient care at one of the country’s best-known hospital systems.
MGB has announced that it will lock out BWH nurses for an additional four days, until July 13, claiming the more than 1,200 traveling nurses it is bringing in as strikebreakers require a five-day minimum commitment. This exposes the MNA’s strategy of a token one-day strike under conditions where management could predict the timetable, import replacement labor and then turn the hospital’s own lockout into a weapon against the nurses.
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The Massachusetts walkout is part of a growing wave of struggles by healthcare workers across the United States this year. In January, 15,000 nurses at major New York City private hospital systems began an open-ended strike over pay, staffing and working conditions, with nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian remaining out for six weeks. Later that month, more than 31,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers in California and Hawaii began an open-ended strike over wages and staffing, including 22,000 nurses in Southern California.
Other strikes this year have involved nurses and healthcare workers at Providence facilities in California, MarinHealth in Northern California, University Medical Center New Orleans, MultiCare Yakima Memorial in Washington and St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital in Chicago.
These struggles are rooted in the Wall Street domination of healthcare and the profit-driven subordination of patient care, which have produced sweeping attacks on hospital capacity, staffing levels, wages and working conditions, especially since the start of the [COVID] pandemic.
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MG’s claims of financial hardship do not withstand scrutiny. The system holds an estimated $35.8 billion in assets. For the fiscal year ending in September, it reported a $59.2 million operating gain and, boosted by investment income, a $2.4 billion net margin.
Earlier in fiscal 2025, in the quarter ended June 30, MGB’s bottom line reached $1.03 billion, driven largely by nearly $963 million in nonoperating gains. For the full fiscal year ending September 30, 2025, the system still reported a $59.2 million operating gain and $2.4 billion in net income.
Meanwhile, MGB’s 14 highest-paid executives took home a combined $35.9 million in fiscal year 2024. CEO Dr. Anne Klibanski alone received $8.4 million, more than 90 times the roughly $86,700 starting salary for a Brigham nurse. MGB also paid tens of millions of dollars to consulting, staffing and construction firms.
Management’s hypocritical claim that nurses’ wage demands would cost more than $90 million a year and push the system beyond the state’s 3.6 percent healthcare cost-growth target is a transparent attempt to make nurses pay for a crisis created by management.
11. Australia: What the proposed enterprise agreements at Western Sydney University reveal
A closer examination of the enterprise agreements that the trade unions are trying to impose quickly at Western Sydney University (WSU)—as a model for wider use at Australia’s 38 other public universities—is uncovering the full extent of the attack on pay, jobs and conditions.
The details, such as expanded workloads, show why the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) rushed last week, in a truly anti-democratic fashion, to push through a small meeting an endorsement of its deal with the WSU management before its members had a chance to read the documents, let alone discuss and debate them.
What is happening at WSU is a warning to staff and students alike of the retrograde conditions that the NTEU and the other main campus union, the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), are trying to inflict on them nationally, by separate enterprise agreements at one university after the other.
It shows the need for a unified struggle by university staff and students against the new wave of three- or four-year enterprise agreements, which will facilitate further pro-corporate and pro-military reshaping of the universities, on top of the 4,000 job cuts and restructuring under the Albanese Labor government over the past two years.
As the WSWS reported, in an NTEU online members meeting at WSU last Thursday, NTEU representatives bulldozed through a 45 to 18 vote, with 7 abstentions, to endorse its proposed 2026–2030 agreements for academic and professional staff—despite many objections in the Zoom chat to the short notice for the meeting, as well as what little was known about the content of the sellout deal.
The NTEU WSU branch president David Burchell boasted that the WSU branch was “leading the charge” nationally. The NTEU had released copies of the agreements only three days earlier, after five months of closed-door discussions with management and “approval” by the NTEU national leadership. That gave staff members totally inadequate time to read and properly review the agreements—which have more than 120 pages each.
Access to the documents remains difficult, even for union members. As yet, non-union members and students have no access at all, even though the management may move swiftly to put the agreements to an all-staff ballot under the Fair Work industrial relations legislation.
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The proposed agreements would inflict another four years of sub-inflationary pay rises—this time averaging just 3.5 percent annually. This is way below the soaring cost of living, fuelled by the ongoing impact of the criminal US-Israeli war on Iran, which the Albanese government backed within hours of the attack being launched on February 28.
The agreements promise a 16.92 percent pay rise spread across nearly four years (March 2026 to January 2030), averaging 3.5 percent a year, when the Consumer Price Index (CPI) remains above 4 percent.
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Both the professional and academic agreements provide for workload increases. Under the proposed academic agreement, academics can be loaded up by their departmental supervisors with extra teaching, beyond the nominal split in workloads of 40 percent teaching, 40 percent research and 20 percent university governance or community engagement.
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For the thousands of sessional academics that WSU exploits to teach classes, there are no guaranteed casual conversions, unlike the 2022 agreement that purported to ensure 150 conversions over three years.
There is just a promised overall 25 percent reduction in the overall casual academic workforce, which was also promised but not met in 2022–25. Any former casuals will still be loaded up with heavy teaching loads of up to 70 percent of their working hours—only allocated 10 percent research workloads, rising to 30 percent in their third year.
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Last August, the NTEU and CPSU struck a deal with the WSU management to allow its “Reset” restructuring to proceed, with the loss of some 187 jobs and the displacement of more than 600 professional staff.
Far from protection against further restructuring, the proposed agreements provide for a closer partnership and collaboration between the unions and the management in “Managing Change.”
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The processes for misconduct charges and injury or ill-health assessments have been accelerated to give staff members less time to prepare and challenge victimisations.
“Misconduct” that can lead to disciplinary action is defined in sweeping terms. It can be “a breach of the University’s (unspecified) policy.” “Serious misconduct” that can lead to sacking can be conduct that causes “serious and imminent risk” to “the reputation, viability, or profitability of the University.”
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The WSU Rank-and-File Committee is preparing a campaign for a “no” vote by all WSU workers, whether academic or professional staff, or union or non-union members, if and when the management puts the agreements to an all-staff ballot as required under the workplace laws.
This attack on university workers is occurring in a definite context. As we have documented, under its Universities Accord, the Albanese government is starving the universities of adequate funding, along with public schools, public hospitals, the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and other social programs, while allocating hundreds of billions of dollars for AUKUS and other military expansions.
It is time to take a stand. For decades, the NTEU and CPSU have imposed one enterprise agreement after another in the universities, cutting wages in real terms, driving up workloads and assisting restructuring. This has not only affected university educators and all staff members, but also the students—left with larger classes, higher fees, narrower study options, less educational support, fewer services and greater restrictions on free speech.
University workers and students have to build new genuine democratic forms of organization—rank-and-file committees, totally independent of the trade unions—that will develop and fight for demands based on their needs, and those of working people and society as a whole, not the dictates of capitalist governments, the corporate ruling class and the plunge into war.
12. Geethananda Balasuriya Jayasekara (1955–2026): A fighter for Trotskyism
The last rites for comrade Geethananda Balasuriya Jayasekara, a longtime member of the Socialist Equality Party in Sri Lanka and its predecessor Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), known as Geetha in the party, were held on July 1 in Colombo.
Around one hundred party members, sympathizers and relatives took part. The funeral procession marched about a kilometre from the gate of the Borella Cemetery in Colombo, to the meeting hall, where the SEP paid tributes to comrade Geetha.
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The comrade died just two months before his 71st birthday on September 13. Joining the party in 1983, he dedicated four decades of his life to the international socialist perspectives of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the SEP, its Sri Lankan section.
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The turning point in his political life was the influence of his elder brother, the late comrade Keerthi Balasuriya, the founding general secretary of the RCL and prominent international Trotskyist leader. He died prematurely of a sudden heart attack at the age of just 39 on December 18, 1987.
Geetha joined the Young Socialists (YS), then the youth movement of the RCL, in the late 1970s while still a student. He began studying Trotskyism and engaged in RCL political activities. He then joined the party in the early 1980s. At the time, he was working as a mathematics tutor, but later gave up tutoring in order to devote himself full-time to building the Trotskyist movement.
Geetha joined the party amid heightened class tensions. The rightwing United National Party (UNP) government of President J.R. Jayawardene systematically provoked anti-Tamil racialism to divide working-class resistance against its pro-market policies and the dismantling of social gains. An island-wide pogrom against Tamils in 1983 plunged the country into a protracted communal war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
The RCL took the lead in opposing the government’s Sinhala chauvinist campaign, military-police repression and reactionary war. Only the RCL/SEP called for the unity of Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim workers to demand the withdrawal of troops from the North and East of the island as part of a political struggle for socialism.
The party waged this political struggle courageously, in the face of violent attacks by thugs and police-military repression. Leading comrades were arrested, including the late SEP general secretary Wije Dias.
Geetha himself was attacked while he and two other comrades were campaigning against the war. Racist thugs aligned with the UNP government assaulted them in Kotahena, a multi-ethnic working-class neighborhood in Colombo, while they were selling the RCL’s Sinhala and Tamil language newspapers. All three were hospitalized.
Geetha took the lead in organizing campaigns at the meetings of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), Stalinist Communist Party and Nava Sama Samaja Party, to distribute party literature. When organizers tried to remove our teams, he courageously challenged them and defended the party’s democratic rights.
Comrades recalled that Geetha patiently educated them in the party’s Trotskyist heritage. He had a good knowledge of the ICFI’s Security and the Fourth International investigation into assassination of Leon Trotsky, co-leader of 1917 Russian revolution, and founder of the Fourth International.
Geetha sided with the ICFI’s defense of genuine Trotskyism in the 1985–1986 split with the opportunist leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party in Britain. He was particularly enthusiastic about the launching of the WSWS in 1998 that vastly expanded the scope and reach of the ICFI.
Geetha was instrumental in the posting of articles in the Sinhala language on the WSWS. That work began in 2002 and ended three months before his death due to deteriorating health. He also proofread Sinhala-language articles and those translated into Sinhala from English.
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Geetha was a very cultured person and was held in affection by party comrades for his humane disposition and readiness to assist whenever needed. His interest in the arts was influenced in part by his elder brother, Keerthi. He had a considerable knowledge of music and poetry, as well as the ability to sing. He particularly loved Beethoven’s symphonies and broadly appreciated Indian music and musicians.
On one occasion, Geetha participated in singing the Sinhala version of the Internationale alongside prominent cultural figures, including the classical vocalist W. D. Amaradeva, the dramatist Dhamma Jagoda, and the late SEP comrade, Professor Piyaseeli Wijegunasinghe of the University of Colombo.
Geetha’s life stands as an example to all comrades and to all those in the future who will take up the struggle for socialism of what it means to be a Trotskyist fighter. His memory will last long in the party and the Trotskyist movement internationally.
13. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Brazil:
Canada:
Peru:
United States:
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
