Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Tens of thousands of students across US join Minneapolis movement against ICE
2. UAW and labor bureaucrats mouth support for general strike while keeping workers on the job
On Friday, for the second time in two weeks, mass demonstrations are taking place in Minneapolis and across the country against the Trump administration’s campaign of murder and terror.
Among the millions opposed to fascism in the United States support for the idea of a general strike is growing. Community groups, as in last week’s demonstrations, have urged walkouts to coincide with Friday’s protests.
The potential for such a movement is shown by the growth of individual strikes across the country, including of 15,000 nurses in New York City and 31,000 nurses and other healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente on the West Coast. However, a general strike means, above all, the emergence of the working class as the leading force in the fight against dictatorship. It requires the shutdown of factories, docks, warehouses and other strategic workplaces all across the country.
What is taking place, however, does not yet constitute a general strike. The principal reason for this is the refusal of the union bureaucracy to call one. Instead, the bureaucracy has issued hollow verbal statements claiming to “stand in solidarity,” to “support Minnesotans” and even to support a “general strike” in the abstract—without making any actual calls for strike action.
The preparation of a genuine general strike requires a rebellion by the rank and file against the pro-corporate union bureaucracy, which is tied not only to the Democratic Party but even to Trump himself.
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Union bureaucrats across the country are stonewalling or limiting strike action. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has called for protests and actions on Friday—after school gets out in the afternoon. At the same time, it is censoring Facebook comments calling for strike action. Other unions that have called “actions” are limiting them to a few minutes, a lunch break or to middle class consumer boycotts.
For all of their claims to support “democracy,” the bureaucrats run the unions as dictatorships. They routinely override contract votes and retaliate against opposition workers. Reports by a federal monitor cite a “toxic culture of division and retaliation at the highest levels of the [UAW].”
Autoworkers should demand that the UAW sanction participation in a general strike. Putting money—drawn from workers’ dues money—where its mouth is, the union’s $800 million strike fund must be put to use for the struggle against dictatorship, not for lining pockets.
Claims that “no-strike” clauses prevent action cannot be accepted as an excuse, since these clauses were negotiated by the UAW itself and, as the union leadership now admits, the very right to strike itself is at stake.
Workers’ actions, however, must not depend on the approval or sanction of the union bureaucracy. The rank and file must establish the committees to transfer power and decision making to the shop floor. Workers should call mass meetings at every factory local and pass resolutions demanding strike action.
It should not be forgotten that in 2020, wildcat strikes shut down the auto industry during the first wave of COVID-19, in opposition to attempts by UAW officials to keep plants open. In 2024, University of California graduate students forced strike action against a crackdown on Gaza protests after months of delays by UAW officials.
If democratic rights are to be defended, it can only be done by the working class. The Democratic Party, while declaring support for the protests in order to get out in front of them, has reached a deal with Trump to continue funding ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, blocking an immediate government shutdown.
Friday marked the fifth day of an open-ended strike by 31,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers in California and Hawaii. The strike is part of a broader upsurge of social struggles, including nationwide protests Friday and Saturday against the ICE rampage in Minneapolis, as well as a three-week strike by 15,000 nurses in New York City.
Healthcare workers are being driven into direct confrontation not only with corporate healthcare giants like Kaiser Permanente, but with the entire political and economic framework that subordinates human life to profit, repression and state violence.
Next month, thousands of pharmacy technicians, clinical laboratory scientists and medical laboratory technicians (CLS/MLT) across Southern California are scheduled to strike. Pharmacy technicians have been without a contract since November 1, 2025, while CLS/MLT contracts expire on February 1, 2026, affecting workers in Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, Kern and Imperial counties.
Under intense pressure from the rank and file, multiple UFCW Southern California locals (UFCW 770, UFCW 324 and UFCW 135) were compelled to issue a unified 10-day unfair labor practice (ULP) strike notice to Kaiser, set to begin February 9 at 7:00 a.m. across the region. Workers are demanding across-the-board raises, retroactive pay, wage equity, especially for low-paid workers in Kern County, safe staffing, aligned contract expiration dates, an improved Performance Sharing Program, no concessions and caregiver input into patient care.
Workers in UFCW Local 324 voted overwhelmingly to strike in October. In spite of this, no strike was called, and workers have been kept on the job without a contract since November 1.
At Kaiser, the UNAC/UCHP union accused management of “anti-union escalation” in a statement Thursday, for hiring thousands of temporary workers and filing lawsuits to end national bargaining and prioritizing profits over patient care.
In spite of this, the union has not called for broader action, even when the conditions are emerging for a powerful national movement in defense of public health.
On January 21, Kaiser filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California against the Alliance of Health Care Unions, seeking to weaken or dismantle the national bargaining framework established under the 1997 Labor-Management Partnership (LMP).
The legal maneuver amounts to giving the union bureaucracy its marching orders to shut down the strike or risk getting cut off from tens of millions in corporate funding. The LMP is a corporatist body set up with the explicit goal of preventing strikes. Its founding agreement calls on Kaiser management and the unions to “unite around our common purposes and work together to most effectively deliver high quality health care and prevail in our new, highly competitive environment.”
But the defense of healthcare requires a movement of the working class against oligarchy and inequality, not “partnership.” Such a movement has to be built through independent action from below by nurses themselves, enforcing democratic control over the struggle and establishing contact with healthcare and other workers across the country in order to prepare for a general strike.
4. Michigan immigrants face increasing repression from federal agents
ICE operations in Michigan and across the United States have increasingly taken on more aggressive and deceptive practices, meant to draw less public attention, and are reflective of clear growing authoritarian trends.
ICE arrests in Michigan, through October 15, 2025, numbered 2,349, a nearly 230 percent increase over the 952 ICE arrests recorded in Michigan in 2024. Nationwide, the number of arrests during this period exploded to approximately 380,000.
Nearly 75 percent of immigrants arrested in Michigan in the first ten months of 2025 had no criminal history, and included immigrants with lawful status or those with US-citizen spouses and family members.
ICE arrests are now occurring after routine traffic stops by local police, who then alert ICE; and at marriage-based green card interviews—where ICE agents use back entrances to avoid detection by other immigrants in the waiting room awaiting their own interviews. ICE officers are frequently not wearing uniforms, and are otherwise not identifying themselves.
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ICE’s heavy-handed methods, and particularly its bloody crimes in Minneapolis, have resulted in significant pushback from the working class, forcing some Michigan municipalities to walk back cooperation with immigration authorities.
Detroit City Council Member At-Large, Mary Waters, has introduced an ordinance, named the “Alex Pretti Detroit No Masks Ordinance,” that would ban law enforcement from using masks to conceal their identities within city limits. Ferndale Mayor Raylon Leaks-May issued a statement at a January 26, 2026, City Council meeting, meant to reassure nervous Ferndale residents about ICE activity, that the Ferndale Police Department does not cooperate with ICE and has no intention to cooperate with ICE.
The Michigan Supreme Court is also currently considering a court rule that would prohibit most ICE arrests of individuals who are “attending a court proceeding or having legal business in the courthouse,” which would apply to all Michigan’s state trial and appellate courthouses; a direct response to the Trump regime’s increase in courthouse arrests of immigrants.
On January 21, 2026, the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners barred ICE agents from conducting immigration enforcement on property owned, operated, or leased by the county. ICE agents must now obtain a valid judicial warrant or court order to enter such properties. Washtenaw County employees and contractors have also been banned from voluntarily assisting ICE enforcement on county property.
The Washtenaw County decision is significant in the context of the recently-revealed May 12, 2025, internal ICE memorandum signed by Acting ICE Director, Todd Lyons. This memo purports to give immigration agents the authority to enter private residences without a judicial warrant, using as its basis for authority, President Trump’s January 20, 2025, Executive Order 14159, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.”
The memo states plainly that DHS “has not historically relied on administrative warrants” to make arrests in private residences, but that the DHS Office of General Counsel “has recently determined that the U.S. Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the immigration regulations do not prohibit relying on administrative warrants for this purpose.”
The memorandum does not make any additional arguments or legal citations in support of this determination, nor does it address how the DHS Office of the General Counsel came to this conclusion, simply declaring that ICE may now arrest people after forcibly entering their place of residence.
The memorandum states that administrative warrants, signed by ICE officers or agents, not federal judges, are sufficient to make such entries. The document exploits a common confusion between judicial warrants and administrative warrants, and treating both as holding the same constitutional weight and power. While the language of the memorandum appears to limit these actions to immigrants with final orders of removal, the rhetoric and actions of the Trump regime has shown no such restraint.
The baldfaced unconstitutionality of this memorandum requires some consideration. The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution states plainly a person’s right to be secure from unreasonable arrest in their homes, and that to make such an arrest, a warrant must be issued, based on probable cause, supported by an oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the person to be arrested.
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Vice President JD Vance defended the memo, stating “[w]e’re talking about different types of warrants that exist in our system…[t]ypically in the immigration system, those are handled by administrative law judges…[s]o we’re talking about getting warrants from them.” He continued that it is the Trump regime’s “understanding” that immigration laws can be enforced through administrative warrants. But these warrants, signed by immigration officials, not federal judges, do not satisfy the language of the Fourth Amendment.
Vance is engaging in intentional doublespeak. Immigration law is a federal administrative field; immigration judges are administrative judges within the federal government. They have no general legal authority, including the authority to sign warrants to enter private dwellings. A 2013 graduate of Yale Law School, Vance knows very well that a secret memorandum issued by the Department of Homeland Security cannot ignore, change, override, or reinterpret the U.S. Constitution, existing judicial precedent, or statutory provisions.
The loudest spokesperson for this fascist policy, Stephen Miller, has also engaged in rhetoric meant to tear up any Constitutional restraints on ICE agents. He has claimed ICE has “federal immunity” in their duties, and anyone “obstructing” those duties is committing a felony. These are clear signals to ICE agents that they are permitted by the Trump regime to act with impunity and in violation of statutory, judicial, and constitutional authority.
5. 250 years since the publication of Tom Paine’s Common Sense
Few revolutionary tracts match in importance Tom Paine’s Common Sense. Published for the first time on January 9, 1776, 250 years ago this month, the pamphlet, a frontal assault on the entire aristocratic world, is widely credited with clearing the way for the Declaration of Independence, which was ratified just six months later.
The anniversary arrives under conditions that make Paine’s assault on monarchy newly relevant. Donald Trump’s unconcealed attraction to the prerogatives of absolute rule and his contempt for the Constitution are not just his own pathologies. He is the chosen leader of a staggeringly wealthy oligarchy and the product of a diseased political order increasingly divorced from popular life, conditions that echo—albeit in modern form—the world Paine confronted. At the same time, mass opposition—expressed in the “No Kings” demonstrations and the eruption of protest following murderous state violence in Minneapolis—has again raised fundamental questions of sovereignty, equality, and the right of the people to resist arbitrary power. Common Sense speaks to this moment.
Also much like the present, in its own time Common Sense addressed a conjuncture in which the central issues had not yet been widely grasped. Until its publication, the public debate about “the Imperial Crisis” between Great Britain and its rebellious North American colonies had revolved around whether Parliament had lived up to its ancient duties under the British constitution, not whether or not the existing order—as in fact constitution was then understood—was itself to blame. The debate was motivated by colonists’ desire to return to an imagined status quo ante, before the ever-greater assertion of the Empire’s authority in the years following the Stamp Act of 1765. This took the form of polemics over Parliament’s right to tax the colonists, who were not directly represented in that body.
Despite its legalistic appearance, it would be a mistake to treat this as a merely “conservative” debate. For beneath the controversy over taxation and representation lay revolutionary stakes—questions of power, liberty, and, above all, equality.
Through 1775 most colonists could not face up to the explosive implications of the positions they advanced, a weakness their Loyalist opponents exploited. The Tories leaned on the great English jurist William Blackstone, who argued that in every government there must be a single, final authority—an “absolute despotic power,” as he put it, that has the last word. In the British Empire that power lay with the “King‑in‑Parliament,” the king, lords, and commons acting together as one sovereign body. To question any part of that body was to challenge the whole.
From this widely accepted premise flowed a direct challenge to the colonial position. If Parliament, the very body that “constituted the Realm,” would not rule the colonies, where then would sovereignty reside?
Paine had an answer. “But where, say some, is the King of America? I’ll tell you, Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain. In America the law is king.” Here Paine predicted what has been called “the American theory of the government”—at least before its complete inversion by the Trump administration. The people, not the monarch, would be sovereign. Paine used a metaphor to describe this transformation in sovereignty from king to citizen, urging that the crown itself be “demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is.”
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Disembarking in Philadelphia on November 30, 1774, just as the First Continental Congress was retiring from the city, Paine found himself in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment. Philadelphia was then still the largest colonial city—though with only 30,000 inhabitants just a large town by our standards. It was also the third busiest port in the British Empire after London and Liverpool, and the most cosmopolitan place in America, with substantial numbers of immigrants from many parts of Europe and a large laboring population of artisans and common workers.
Philadelphia was also home to the most radical politics. Paine situated himself in this milieu, befriending figures such as the scientist David Rittenhouse, the artist Charles Willson Peale, and the physicians Thomas Young and Benjamin Rush, who treated the city’s poor free of charge and advocated the new idea of administering inoculations against disease. It was Rush who suggested Paine take up his pen for independence.
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Common Sense hit with meteoric force. The pamphlet “burst from the press,” Rush wrote, “with an effect which has rarely been produced by types and papers in any age or country.” Paine had “put the torch to the combustibles,” said Edmund Randolph of Virginia. The pamphlet was “like a landflood that sweeps all before it,” wrote a contemporary from Connecticut. “We were blind, but… the scales have fallen from our eyes.”
No part of the debate would ever be the same again. Common Sense sold 120,000 copies in its first three months and went through 25 separate editions in its first year. A comparable publishing run in America today would require some 15 million copies sold over a few months. But at that time, readership meant something more, reaching beyond those who were literate or who could purchase a book. One account from Philadelphia noted that the pamphlet was “read to all ranks” (emphasis added). It was discussed in public squares, in taverns, and in homes. Washington ordered passages of it read to whole regiments of the Continental Army. Common Sense, in short, saturated the population with revolutionary ideas.
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In this unadorned style, Paine stated what was: Reconciliation with the Empire was no longer possible. Not the Parliament, not the Ministry, not even King George as an individual, was to blame. Tyranny and all the threats against the people emerged out of the system of monarchy and aristocracy, the very Empire itself. Revolution, independence, with the goal of creating a republican government, was the only answer.
Much of the pamphlet was devoted to a ferocious—and often hilarious—attack on monarchy and aristocracy. To appreciate its audacity, contemporary readers must grasp that only a decade earlier colonists bowed, scraped, and doffed their caps before even the lowest ranks of the British aristocracy represented in the colonies. Royal symbols were everywhere. The King’s birthday was celebrated as a holiday. Monarchy aimed to overawe its subjects.
And now Paine could state, with ruthless humor, that heredity rule violated both reason and nature. “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings is, that nature disapproves it,” he wrote, “otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.”
Paine did not stint in laying out a reasoned case for his contempt for monarchy as a form of rule, writing:
There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of Monarchy; it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required. The state of a king shuts him from the World, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly; wherefore the different parts, by unnaturally opposing and destroying each other, prove the whole character to be absurd and useless.
This description of an increasingly complex society ruled over by entitled ignoramuses applies with even greater force to the America of Donald Trump, ruled by giant corporations with CEOs paid many hundreds and even thousands of times the salary of the average workers, who collectively know the business far better.
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Paine summed up his views of monarchy with a stark calculus that does not have to be changed by one word after 250 years: “Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”
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From the blood spilled at Lexington and Concord, Paine turned outward. Britain’s conduct—“declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind”—thus elevated the conflict beyond a colonial dispute, transforming it into a struggle with universal human stakes. “The cause of America,” he proclaimed, “is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”
Paine’s pamphlet breathed the spirit of revolutionary optimism in its call for American independence from British rule. It told Americans they could take the step that they were on the brink of. “We have it in our power,” he assured, “to begin the world anew.” He explained that it was a moment that would be remembered for ages the world over:
O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her—Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.
America would serve as “the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty” and “a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years, when home should afford neither friendship nor safety.” In Paine’s vision, all those meeting in America were “countrymen,” and the new republic existed to welcome those fleeing oppression— lines that stand as a direct rebuke to Trump’s language of “invasion,” “animals,” and “poisoning our country” when he speaks of immigrants and refugees.
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The imagination of the republican revolutionaries of the 1770s and 1780s, Paine foremost among them, may have been expansive, even universal. But it was not matched, at that moment in history, by the development of the world economy. The material foundations for a genuinely global fraternity did not yet exist. Production remained fragmented, communication slow, and social life overwhelmingly organized within imperial and emerging national-capitalist frameworks that constrained even the boldest revolutionary aspirations.
The present is different. Capitalism itself has created what earlier revolutionaries could only intuit: an integrated global economy and a working class whose labor, supply chains, and struggles cross every border. The idea of universal fraternity is no longer merely a moral appeal or philosophical hope; it is rooted in objective social relations.
Workers today, for the first time in history, possess the material conditions that make Paine’s promise concrete. They have it in their power, in a far more literal sense than Paine could have imagined, “to begin the world over again.”
On Thursday, January 29, the Trump administration issued an executive order titled “Addressing threats to the United States by the government of Cuba.” Absurdly claiming that Cuba poses an “extraordinary threat” to US national security, the executive order directs the government to impose tariffs on any country supplying the island nation with oil unless Cuba agrees to “align sufficiently with the United States on national security and foreign policy matters.”
Following the US government’s abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and its assertion of control over that nation’s oil supply, Trump and his associates believe American imperialism can finally starve the island into submission and bring it back under direct US domination 68 years after the Cuban Revolution as part of Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine” elaborated in last month’s US National Security Strategy.
The Mexican government acknowledged on Tuesday the cancellation of a planned oil shipment to Cuba this month under pressure from the US government over trade talks and threats of military invasion. At a Tuesday press conference, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum claimed, unbelievably, that withholding the shipment was “a sovereign decision” by Mexico’s state-run oil company Pemex, while making mealy-mouthed statements indicating Mexico still supported sending Cuba humanitarian aid.
The Financial Times cited data company Kpler’s estimate that the cancellation of Mexico’s shipment would leave Cuba with only 15-20 days of oil at current levels of demand and domestic production.
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As Cuba relies primarily on fuel oil to power its electricity production, the shortfall has resulted in blackouts of up to 20 hours in many parts of the country, making it almost impossible for many Cubans to maintain refrigerated food or medication. Refuse is collecting on the streets because there is not enough fuel for garbage trucks. Lack of power for fans or air conditioning has led to epidemics of mosquito-borne viruses including dengue and chikungunya, which have reportedly left morgues overflowing.
The reduction in oil shipments has also led to shortages of food, medicine and other basic necessities as the Cuban government had been reselling a portion of the fuel to earn foreign exchange for other imports. Tourism, the government’s biggest source of foreign exchange, has seen visits drop 70 percent since 2018, from 4.8 million tourists down to 1.6 million.
The operations against Venezuela and now Cuba are intimately connected. On January 3, just hours after the kidnapping of Maduro, Rubio threatened the Cuban government saying, “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned at least a little bit.” A day later, he repeated the warning, saying “they’re in a lot of trouble.”
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On January 11, after the seizure of Maduro, Trump wrote on Truth Social “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA — ZERO!” I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.” He continued, writing, “Cuba lived, for many years, on large amounts of OIL and MONEY from Venezuela.”
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Cuban government officials have appeared in public recently wearing military fatigues while issuing claims that the population is preparing for “countrywide war” in the face of a US invasion. It is clear, however, that they have no answer for what amounts to the imposition of an economic siege. Moreover, it is not at all excluded that elements in the Cuban government, like their counterparts in Venezuela, would be willing to collaborate with Washington to secure their own privileges.
The imposition of a total blockade on Cuba and the threats of military aggression must be opposed by the international working class, and especially the working class of the United States. The fight against American imperialist aggression must start with the building of rank-and-file committees internationally to prepare for mass action, including a general strike to stop the Trump administration’s criminal lawlessness at home and abroad.
Workers at the Ford Chicago Assembly Plant are responding with shock after a worker was crushed beneath a vehicle after it fell from an overhead clamshell carrier in the chassis area.
The worker was critically injured and airlifted from the plant. Multiple workers report that management had been warned in advance that the equipment was unsafe but ordered production to continue anyway.
One worker who spoke to the World Socialist Web Site said, “They were in critical condition in the hospital. Management was notified before this happened. The chain or whatever wasn’t secure. Multiple people told multiple managers this was not secure. But they didn’t listen.
“He was standing up securing the bolts on the car like he was used to,” the worker said. “There’s usually six people under the car. But it was just him, thankfully. Normally there’s six people under a car in that area.”
The same worker said the injured man was removed from the line on a stretcher, his neck immobilized. “They watched him get crushed,” the worker added. “He was taken out in a stretcher with his neck secured. Everyone was posting on Facebook they couldn’t believe they had to continue working.”
Workers say management did not stop the line or send employees home after the near-fatal injury. “Not only did they do nothing,” the worker said, “but they did not stop the line. They did not send everyone home. They made people work through that, just like the guy with the seizure. That was traumatic to see for everyone.
“Everybody wanted the line stopped and sent home,” the worker told us. “They couldn’t even work in these conditions.”
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Last April, skilled tradesman Ronald Adams, Sr. was crushed to death while performing maintenance at the Stellantis Dundee Engine Plant in Michigan. Adams’ case would have been buried by management and union bureaucrats were it not for the launching of an independent inquiry by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). Evidence and testimony collected by the inquiry pointed to the use of “cheater keys” by management to override lockout/tagout procedures; after Adams’ death, management quickly ordered all of these keys returned.
These conditions are the product of a political and economic system that subordinates all human life to the interests of corporate profit. Ford Motor Company reported billions of dollars in profits over the past few years while at the same time it has cut costs through layoffs and speedup.
The UAW bureaucracy is deeply integrated into corporate management through joint labor-management committees, safety boards and profit-sharing schemes that align union officials’ interests with the companies rather than the rank-and-file workers. As a result, safety complaints are ignored, incidents are downplayed, and production continues regardless of the consequences.
The injury at Ford Chicago occurred in the middle of a massive outpouring of anger in Minneapolis and across the country against the Trump administration’s campaign of murder and terror against immigrants and workers in every major city.
Popular calls for a general strike are growing in opposition to plans for a dictatorship by the Trump administration, representing the interests of the corporate and financial elite that has carried out attacks on the living standards of the working class.
The sole obstacle to such a movement remains the UAW and the trade union bureaucracy as a whole. While mouthing empty words in support of a general strike, the UAW continues to keep workers on the job and working in unsafe conditions.
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The sole obstacle to such a movement remains the UAW and the trade union bureaucracy as a whole. While mouthing empty words in support of a general strike, the UAW continues to keep workers on the job and working in unsafe conditions.
8. Chancellor Merz demands German imperialism must “learn to speak the language of power politics”
The first month of 2026 has witnessed the explosion of American imperialism. It began with the Trump administration’s invasion of Venezuela and abduction of President Nicolas Maduro, continued with Trump’s demand to own Greenland and control its natural resources and Arctic shipping routes, and is now culminating in the mobilisation of an American “armada” of warships in the Middle East poised to strike Iran.
The extent of the brutality and criminality of American imperialism with Trump at its head often obscures the aggressive intent of the European imperialist powers, or fuels the misguided belief that Germany, France and Britain—the old colonial powers—are more “humanitarian” than their transatlantic rival. The remarks this week by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, which in content were redolent of Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler, should put to rest any such illusions.
Addressing the German parliament, Merz placed his remarks in the context of a new era of “great power rivalry.” He declared, “For several weeks now, we have been seeing more and more clearly that a world of great powers is beginning to emerge. A harsh wind is blowing in this world, and we will feel it for the foreseeable future.” This rhetoric serves to enforce the officially proclaimed “new epoch” in foreign policy, which has seen all parties in parliament unite to spend €1 trillion on preparing for war and impose social spending cuts to pay for it.
Merz’s response to the new world situation he described could just as well have come from one of Hitler’s programmatic speeches in the early 1930s. “We will only be able to implement our ideas in the world, at least in part, if we ourselves learn to speak the language of power politics, if we ourselves become a European power,” he told the deputies. What he means is nothing less than the transformation of Europe into an independent military superpower under German leadership.
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As long as Europe needs time for massive rearmament and, above all, continues to depend on Washington’s support in NATO’s war offensive against Russia, Merz is keen to avoid an open confrontation with the US. This tactical restraint does not alter the fact that German imperialism is ever more explicitly striving for an independent role as a world power.
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Merz’s attempt to portray his bid for world power as a defence of a “rules-based international order” is particularly cynical. In reality, Germany and Europe have supported every war of aggression led by the United States over the past three decades—from Kosovo to Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya. Merz himself boasted in his speech that German soldiers had fought “alongside our American partners” in Afghanistan “after 11 September 2001,” and declared that he would not allow this mission to be “disparaged.”
The German government continues to support US operations and wars that violate international law, as long as they serve its own interests. At the beginning of the year, Merz openly backed US aggression against Venezuela, supports preparations for war against Iran and defends Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.
Against this backdrop, the official Holocaust memorial ceremony in the Bundestag the day before Merz’s speech was pure hypocrisy. With its ritualized “never again,” the ruling class is trying to conceal that it is doing exactly the same again: great power politics, militarism and genocide abroad, and authoritarian politics at home. Significantly, Merz did not say a word about the openly fascist developments in the US, where Trump’s ICE militias hunt migrants and murder counter-demonstrators in cold blood. The reason is obvious: militarism abroad and authoritarian rule at home are also the program of the German bourgeoisie.
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The madness of war has objective causes that the Trotskyist movement has long analyzed. As early as 2014, the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) examined in a resolution the historical and political forces behind the war policies of all capitalist parties and warned of the consequences of the return of German militarism:
History is returning with a vengeance. Almost 70 years after the crimes of the Nazis and its defeat in World War II, the German ruling class is once again adopting the imperialist great power politics of the Kaiser’s Empire and Hitler...
The propaganda of the post-war era—that Germany had learnt from the terrible crimes of the Nazis, had “arrived at the West,” had embraced a peaceful foreign policy, and had developed into a stable democracy—is exposed as lies. German imperialism is once again showing its real colors as it emerged historically, with all of its aggressiveness at home and abroad.
But the same contradictions of the capitalist system that are driving society inexorably toward war—the contradiction between the global economy and the nation-state system, and between the social character of production and its private appropriation—also create the objective basis for social revolution. In the United States, resistance to Trump’s fascist policies is growing, with workers and young people protesting against ICE murders, going on strike and discussing the preparation of a general strike. Workers and young people in Germany and Europe must orient themselves towards this powerful social force—the international working class.
The answer to Trump’s policy of “might makes right” is not the German or European “language of power politics,” but the international mobilization of the working class against all imperialist warmongers. The only progressive perspective lies in the overthrow of the capitalist system and the building of an international socialist society. The Socialist Equality Party and its sister parties in the International Committee of the Fourth International are fighting for this program.
9. Reject the IG Metall union’s nationalist defence of steel production in Germany!
When the IG Metall union calls for a protest outside the Annual General Meeting of Thyssenkrupp AG shareholders in Bochum on Friday, the focus is on the steel subsidiary. For while 11,000 of the 27,000 steelworkers are set to lose their jobs, and thus their financial livelihood in the coming years, the assembled shareholders want to approve a dividend of €93 million for themselves.
But the IG Metall protest is a desperate attempt to distract from its own treacherous role. The dividend that will be decided on Friday is part of the many millions stolen from the pockets of steelworkers through the so-called “social contract” at Thyssenkrupp Steel Europe (TKSE).
Steelworkers know exactly who drafted this sellout agreement and thus enforced the job cuts and the 8 percent pay cut at TKSE: the North Rhine-Westphalia IG Metall district manager Knut Giesler, as well as the union’s works council reps at the steel subsidiary, under the chairmanship of Ali Güzel and in the overall group under Tekin Nasikkol.
Steelworkers must therefore take matters into their own hands and build independent rank-and-file Action Committees. IG Metall, its works council reps and their cronyism with the corporate leaders, which they describe as a “social partnership,” are tools of management and the shareholders against the workforce.
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The federal government under Friedrich Merz (Christian Democratic Union, CDU), who first declared war on the unemployed and now on employees, has adopted the union’s demands for cheaper electricity for industry, new subsidies and protective tariffs against steel from China—i.e., the ability to produce tanks, weapons and armaments in war.
Steelworkers are supposed to accept wage cuts, extended working hours, job cuts and “flexibility” in order to finance a rearmament policy that is pursued in the interest of German exports and the arms industry.
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Steelworkers can only defend their jobs, wages and social rights if they break with IG Metall and its works council reps and build their own independent fighting organizations. These Action Committees must be elected in all plants—Duisburg, Bochum, HKM, Kreuztal-Eichen, Salzgitter, Bremen, Eisenhüttenstadt, Georgsmarienhütte and all other locations—and be accountable solely to the rank and file.
Such committees must not allow any IG Metall officials or works council members holding responsible positions, as they have long since pledged their loyalty to management, the supervisory boards and the government.
The struggle of steelworkers in Duisburg, Bochum and Salzgitter is inseparably linked to the struggle of steelworkers in India, Italy, the Czech Republic, France, China and worldwide. Corporations like Thyssenkrupp, ArcelorMittal, Salzgitter and Jindal operate globally, play workers off against each other, demand “competitiveness” and the nationalist defense of steel production in Germany—and enforce wage cuts and job cuts everywhere.
The answer to this can only be an internationally coordinated class struggle that rejects such nationalist policies and establishes the unity of the working class across national borders.
10. Israel officially accepts Gaza death toll of 70,000
After more than two years of dismissing the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll as “Hamas propaganda,” the Israeli military has officially accepted that approximately 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. This belated acknowledgment exposes years of systematic lies by the Israeli government, the imperialist powers and the Western media—all of whom worked in concert to conceal the scale of the genocide.
A senior Israeli security official told journalists Thursday that the military accepts the Health Ministry’s figure, excluding the more than 10,000 missing and presumed buried under rubble. “We estimate that about 70,000 Gazans were killed in the war, not including the missing,” the official stated. The Gaza Health Ministry’s count as of January 27 stands at 71,662 killed, with 171,428 injured.
“What other accusations could turn out to be true?” the Israeli newspaper Haaretz asked following the briefing. “The Israeli public must ask itself what this belated recognition indicates about the army and the government’s credibility regarding Israel’s conduct in Gaza.” These are questions the Haaretz editors might ask themselves. For over two years, they and their colleagues in the international press participated in the campaign to discredit the documented scale of the slaughter.
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From the earliest weeks of the war, Israel and American imperialism mounted a coordinated campaign to discredit the Palestinian death toll. In October 2023, just two weeks into the assault, then President Joe Biden declared, “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using. I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.”
At the time, the Health Ministry had documented over 7,000 deaths, including nearly 3,000 children. Then National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby called the Health Ministry “a front for Hamas” whose figures could not be taken “at face value.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed allegations of mass civilian casualties as “blood libel”—invoking the medieval antisemitic slander to deflect from documented war crimes—and bragged in September 2024 that Israel had achieved “the lowest ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in the history of modern urban warfare.” This was a lie, and Netanyahu knew it was a lie when he said it.
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The 70,000 figure Israel has accepted represents only a fraction of the true death toll. The official count includes only those killed directly by Israeli military fire whose bodies have been identified. It excludes the missing buried under rubble. It excludes the hundreds who have died of starvation. It excludes the thousands who have died from lack of medical care as Israel systematically destroyed Gaza’s healthcare system.
Multiple independent studies suggest the true death toll is far higher. A Lancet study in July 2024 estimated 64,260 traumatic injury deaths by June 30, 2024, more than a year ago. The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research estimated in November 2025 that violent deaths had “likely surpassed 100,000” by October 2025.
An independent household survey published in Nature found almost 84,000 deaths between October 2023 and early January 2025. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has cited estimates suggesting the real death toll could be as high as 680,000.
The scale of destruction defies comprehension. Over 20,000 children have been killed—more than one child every hour for 23 months. At least 274 journalists have been killed, more than the combined death total of the US Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Wars and the post-9/11 Afghanistan War. Over 1,700 healthcare workers have been killed. More than 300 UN workers have died—the deadliest conflict for UN staff in history.
Between 66 and 84 percent of all structures in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. Ninety-two percent of residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed. Ninety-five percent of farmland lies in ruins. More than 500,000 people face catastrophic starvation conditions. Life expectancy fell by 44 percent in 2023 and 47 percent in 2024. Ninety percent of Gaza’s 2.2 million people have been displaced, many of them multiple times.
The genocide in Gaza—which is still ongoing, now with the backing of Trump—has been enabled by the systematic lies of capitalist governments and their media. The Biden administration, the U.S. Congress and the major news outlets all worked to shield Israel from accountability by casting doubt on the documented scale of the slaughter. These same institutions now demand that workers support new wars against Iran and other targets of American imperialism. The lies about Gaza expose the lies that will be told about every war waged by imperialism.
11. Journalist Don Lemon, anti-ICE protesters arrested on orders of Trump administration
In a major attack on the First Amendment and the democratic rights of everyone, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Friday on social media that she personally ordered the arrest of four individuals for documenting or participating in an anti-ICE protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota earlier this month.
Bondi wrote: “At my direction, early this morning federal agents arrested Don Lemon, Trahern Jeen Crews, Georgia Fort, and Jamael Lydell Lundy, in connection with the coordinated attack on Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. More details soon.”
Lemon is a former CNN anchor; Fort is a three-time Emmy Award–winning independent journalist. Trahern Jeen Crews is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Minnesota, and Jamael Lydell Lundy is an aspiring candidate for the state Senate.
Lemon and Fort were present at the January 18 protest in their capacity as journalists, documenting the events as they unfolded. This has not stopped Trump’s Justice Department from charging all four individuals with Conspiracy Against Rights—a post–Civil War statute originally enacted to combat the Ku Klux Klan—as well as violations of the FACE Act, a federal law intended to protect access to abortion clinics and places of worship.
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The Cities Church in St. Paul was not randomly selected, but specifically chosen by protesters because one of its pastors, David Easterwood, serves as the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) in St. Paul.
Cities Church is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, a Protestant denomination formed in 1845 to defend slavery and provide religious justification for slaveholding. Joe Rigney, one of Cities Church’s founders, now serves as an associate pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, alongside the church’s founder and increasingly influential pastor, Doug Wilson.
Wilson is a Christian nationalist figure popular among “MAGA” Republicans. He has spoken at Turning Point USA events and the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon). A 71-year-old reactionary, Wilson has referred to women he disagrees with as “lumberjack d*kes” and “c*nts,” and has described the Civil War as “the war between the states.”
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Nothing about the January 18 protest at Cities Church was violent or threatening. Protesters held cell phones and peacefully chanted slogans such as “Justice for Renée Good” and “ICE out of Minneapolis.” After a period inside, they moved outdoors and continued their demonstration, calling for justice “for our neighbors.”
Lemon and Fort documented the protest but did not participate in it. Lemon’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, shared a written statement with the press following his client’s arrest, which read in part: “Instead of investigating the federal agents who killed two peaceful Minnesota protesters, the Trump Justice Department is devoting its time, attention, and resources to this arrest, and that is the real indictment of wrongdoing in this case.”
Lowell added, “This unprecedented attack on the First Amendment and transparent attempt to distract attention from the many crises facing this administration will not stand.”
After he was released on Friday, a defiant Lemon said he would “not stop covering” the news, adding, “There is no more important time than right now, this very moment, for a free and independent media that shines a light on the truth and holds those in power accountable.”
After she was released Friday afternoon, Fort posed one central question: “As a journalist who has worked in media for more than 17 years, I leave this federal courthouse with one question: Do we have a Constitution?”
These arrests, and the ongoing occupation of Minneapolis by federal agents, are part of a broader Trump administration effort to criminalize not only political opposition, but activities guaranteed under the First Amendment.
In addition to journalists, earlier this week Bondi announced that 16 people were facing charges for allegedly assaulting, resisting or impeding immigration Gestapo. They face up to 20 years in jail.
None of the claims from the federal government should be believed.
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Far from retreating, the Trump administration is advancing its agenda to establish a dictatorship. Claims of a “retreat” promoted by the Democratic Party and the media are a political fraud, designed to disarm and disorient opposition.
In this context, the role of the Democratic Party is particularly despicable, which has worked over the past week to reach an agreement with Trump. This includes keeping the Department of Homeland Security funded and facilitating war preparations.
12. New York City Mayor Mamdani prepares for austerity following NYPD raid against anti-ICE protesters
On Wednesday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), announced in a special address to the public that the city faces a budget shortfall of $12.6 billion over the next two fiscal years. A final budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2027 is due from the mayor’s office by February 17. In recent years, the city’s budget has been approximately $115–$120 billion.
“Today, we are going to be sharing the truth with New Yorkers that has sadly been hidden from them for far too long,” Mamdani stated, blaming the previous administration of Eric Adams for a $12 billion fiscal deficit—“at a scale that eclipses what we saw here in New York City during the Great Recession.”
While claiming to “reject austerity politics” and insisting that “the excellence in public services our city depends on should not be sacrificed,” Mamdani immediately raised the prospect of cuts to essential services, stating that “cuts to libraries, parks, and schools” are “last resort.”
Mamdani added, “We will not balance the budget on the backs of working people while the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the world sees one in four of its residents living in poverty.”
The day after his remarks rejecting austerity, Mamdani signed an executive order aimed at initiating spending cuts. The order established the position of Chief Savings Officer (CSO) within every city agency, to be filled by an existing senior employee. Each CSO has been tasked with delivering a plan to City Hall within 45 days outlining how to make their respective agencies “more efficient.”
In announcing the order, Mamdani declared, “Delivering public goods requires public excellence. That means a government that respects New Yorkers by using every dollar wisely.” Far from rejecting austerity, the mayor is preparing to implement it through a rebranding of cuts as “efficiency.” His declaration that CSOs will “take direct aim at waste” and “cut through bureaucracy” employs the standard language used to justify the slashing of jobs, wages and social services.
Publicly, Mamdani has pledged to address the deficit by “taxing the rich,” though he has advanced no serious proposals in this direction. Aside from a symbolic gesture to defund a faulty city chatbot at a cost of $500,000, his main proposals amount to mild adjustments that depend entirely on the support of the Democratic Party establishment at the state level. These include a 2 percent personal income tax surcharge on incomes over $1 million, impacting roughly 34,000 filers, and an increase in the corporate tax rate from 7.25 to 11.5 percent on the most profitable companies, matching New Jersey’s rate.
Together, these measures would extract only a fraction of the immense wealth hoarded by New York’s ultra-rich, including 116 billionaires and more than 16,000 individuals with net worths exceeding $30 million.
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Mamdani has met with some of the richest New Yorkers since his primary victory in June and has appointed dozens of officials from the Bloomberg, de Blasio, and Adams administrations—many of them deeply involved in school closures, budget cuts and the reopening of city services, including schools, during the pandemic. He has assembled an administration well prepared to implement austerity.
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The most overt expression of Mamdani’s prostration before and political integration into the capitalist establishment is his ongoing relationship with Donald Trump. Even as the Trump administration directs a nationwide campaign of ICE murders, violent repression of dissent, and a conspiracy to establish a presidential dictatorship, Mamdani maintains open lines of communication with the fascist president.
In an interview aired Sunday on ABC’s This Week, Mamdani said he has “directly conveyed” his concerns over ICE operations in Minneapolis to Trump. Mamdani called the actions of federal agents “horrific,” without addressing Trump’s own responsibility.
He then declared that while he would oppose Trump if he pursued policies that “hurt” New York, “When the president is going to pursue policy to help the city, I’ll embrace that opportunity for working together.”
He portrayed his relationship with Trump as pragmatic, stating: “It’s less about the maintenance of a personal relationship, it’s more about delivering for the people of the city.”
Mamdani did not explain how a president who operates nakedly in the interests of the financial oligarchy, who is overseeing the murder of immigrants and citizens alike, would “help” the population of New York or any other city.
On Thursday, Trump returned the favor. In a press briefing, he offered effusive praise for Mamdani, declaring, “I told everyone New York was being run into the ground. Now the new mayor is finding out exactly what I have said for years.” He continued, “Adams left a mess, but Zohran is finally being honest about how bad it really is. It’s a smart political move. You always blame the guy before you. In this case, he’s actually right—Adams was a disaster for that city.”
Mamdani’s collaboration with Trump in November—when they held a closed-door meeting in the Oval Office—signaled to the political establishment that Mamdani could be trusted to “deliver” without challenging the underlying interests of capital.
Mamdani’s relationship with Trump belies the DSA’s posturing as a political alternative to the establishment. It reveals the real function of such “left” figures within the Democratic Party: to channel opposition into safe, controlled paths, while facilitating the implementation of the very policies they claim to oppose.
13. A conversation with hip-hop artist Sole
The World Socialist Web Site spoke recently with independent rap artist Sole after the latter published a video on his social media page denouncing the Trump administration’s deployment of ICE in America’s cities and the brazen murder of Minneapolis resident Renée Nicole Good.
Sole (born Timothy Holland, September 25, 1977 in Portland, Maine) is a pioneering figure of the American underground hip-hop scene, whose work, over more than two decades, has fused experimental musical form with a critique of elements of capitalist society and imperialist war. Emerging at the end of the 1990s as a founding member of the California-based Anticon collective, he helped carve out a new tendency in independent rap that was hostile to commercial formulas, intensely literary and consciously opposed to the degradation of culture experienced in capitalism.
Albums such as Bottle of Humans and Selling Live Water (2000 and 2002 releases on Anticon Records) are widely regarded in serious music circles as landmark statements of this oppositional current. In the years since, Sole has combined a prolific musical output with an explicit engagement with generally left-wing views. Our differences with some of those views emerge in the discussion.
In his response to the ICE murder of protesters in Minneapolis, Sole-Holland speaks bluntly, stating that the US government is seeking to build a dictatorship and likening the population to “frogs slowly cooking in an authoritarian soup.” He notes that “people are getting killed, cities are under military occupation … you’re not going to be able to just keep your head down and hope everything goes back to normal. There is no ‘normal.’”
The WSWS reached out to Sole asking him to speak more about the situation. He agreed, despite recovering from a recent illness. The following is the result of that conversation, edited for length and clarity.
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Tim Holland:
After 9/11, I was in New York on the way to pick someone up at the airport and saw the smoke. The night before, I had this weirdly prophetic dream. So when I saw the smoke, I just had this instinct that now I had to educate myself on history, politics and philosophy. I may have been turned off by where political hip-hop went in the early 2000s, but I needed to educate myself. I didn’t see any reason to just sing about my feelings or to sing about the music industry.
I sought to educate myself. So you want a revolution? What does a revolution look like? I really have put myself through an educational course and put myself and my music in the interest of revolution, of forwarding revolutionary theory and politics. I like art too, I just can’t babble and I can’t make love songs.
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Tim Holland:
Trump is just unleashing so much chaos. He is continuously sticking his finger in beehives. It’s like shock doctrine on steroids. If you care about the world you live in, you might want to fight for it, because it might not be there next year, or it might not be there for your kids.
14. Thailand’s election highlights deep crisis of bourgeois rule
Thailand’s February 8 general election highlights the political crisis facing the ruling class. None of the major bourgeois parties expects to secure a parliamentary majority, with opinion polls showing a sharp collapse in popular support compared to the 2023 general election.
Since the formal end of the military junta in 2019 and the much vaunted “return to democracy” by sections of the political establishment after the defeat of military-backed parties in 2023, the parliamentary apparatus has become increasingly discredited. Now alongside the present election, an effort is being made through a constitutional referendum to contain popular opposition by give the profoundly undemocratic political system a democratic facelift.
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The two prime ministers who led the unstable Pheu Thai-led government were ousted through judicial and parliamentary manoeuvres that amounted to coups by the conservative Thai establishment centered on the military and monarchy. On the grounds of “ethics violations” the Constitutional Court removed PM Srettha Thavisin in August 2024 and a year later his replacement Paetongtarn Shinawatra was removed in August 2025 amid a nationalist and militarist campaign over border clashes with Cambodia.
The MFP’s successor, the so-called progressive, democratic People’s Party (PP), propped up parliamentary rule by supporting the minority government of Anutin’s pro-military, pro-monarchy Bhumjaithai Party on condition that it hold elections within four months as well as a toothless, constitutional referendum.
The PP explicitly abandoned any attempt to reform the lèse-majesté law, infamous legislation that declares any criticism of the monarchy a crime punishable by up to 15 years in jail. The PP’s predecessors had won significant support among broad layers of youth particularly during mass demonstrations in 2020.
In the final analysis, the leadership of the PP fears provoking a mass movement of the Thai youth and working class far more than the repression by the capitalist state. To this day 44 members of the former MFP are facing charges by Thailand’s anti-corruption agency over their sponsorship of a bill to amend lèse-majesté.
Both PP and Pheu Thai—parties formed by wealthy business families—function as safety valves for opposition to the traditional ruling elites making populist appeals to young people, workers and the rural masses.
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The ruling class faces a new political crisis as the next government will be compelled to preside over a program of austerity and rising social tensions, all compounded by the global geo-political instability fueled by the fascistic Trump administration’s economic warfare and militarist rampage.
The Bank of Thailand has maintained its 2026 growth forecast at just 1.5 percent, a projection echoed by Siam Commercial Bank’s Economic Intelligence Center. This follows flagging growth of 2.2 percent in 2025 and 2.5 percent in 2024, the weakest performance in three decades.
This slowdown is part of a broader global downturn over which the Thai bourgeoisie has no control. It is compounded by escalating trade tensions with the United States, including punitive tariffs of 19 percent that threaten Thailand’s export-dependent economy.
Official inflation figures conceal the reality facing working people. While headline inflation remains low, the price of essential goods—particularly food—has risen sharply over the past decade, far outpacing wage growth. At the same time, Thailand’s households are among the most indebted in the region. Total household debt stood at around 86.8 percent of GDP in mid-2025, a clear measure of the extent to which families are already stretched merely to survive.
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With no progressive answer to mounting social tensions, the Thai ruling class has sought to deflect internal tensions outward through a border dispute and military clashes with Cambodia. Last year saw over a hundred soldiers and civilians killed, with an estimated 640,000 civilians fleeing border areas according to World Vision.
The People’s Party’s promotion of the constitutional referendum as a supposed democratic breakthrough is a fraud. The referendum does not propose a new constitution, the abolishment of military’s overriding veto powers, or curtail the political role of the courts. Instead, it merely authorizes a drawn-out process tightly controlled by parliament and the judiciary.
15. Fire spreads in Victoria as heatwave grips Australia’s south east, air quality plummets
The Carlisle River fire, burning in steep forest more than 150 kilometres southwest of Melbourne, has become the latest expression of a system that leaves regional communities exposed to escalating climate extremes with inadequate resources, belated warnings and threadbare national support.
The blaze began on 10 January but surged into a major emergency from 24 January, when temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (104˚F) and strong winds drove it out of containment lines toward the small town of Gellibrand.
By 28 January the fire had grown to more than 11,000 hectares, with multiple active fingers running through native forest, plantations and farmland in the Greater Otways.
Authorities issued evacuation or “leave now” orders for more than 1,100 properties, encompassing Gellibrand, Kawarren, Beech Forest, Forrest, Barongarook and other townships and farms on the northern flank of the Great Otway National Park.
Damage assessments are still underway, but early tallies confirm at least 16 structures destroyed around Gellibrand, including farm buildings and at least eight family homes, with further losses of sheds, fencing and livestock on properties near Larralea and Lismore. In Larralea, the same system destroyed two structures and killed animals on ten properties as spot fires jumped ahead of the main front.
So far there are no confirmed deaths from the Otways fires, but tens of thousands across western and southwestern Victoria have faced blackouts, toxic smoke, forced evacuations and the continuing threat of renewed fire runs as conditions shift.
This inferno is tearing through a region that only days earlier had been hit by destructive flash flooding, underscoring the “whiplash” character of climate-driven extremes now confronting Victoria.
On 15 January, a “rain bomb” dumped up to 180 millimeters of rain in under five hours across the Otways, a tourist hotspot on the Great Ocean Road, turning creeks into torrents that smashed bridges, swept cars into the sea and inundated caravan parks and holiday accommodation. Hundreds were evacuated from Lorne, Wye River and Apollo Bay as the highway closed and disaster assistance was belatedly activated, leaving communities still clearing silt and repairing roads now told to flee again or face a megafire.
Fire authorities themselves concede that they do not expect to contain the Otways blaze quickly.
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At the federal level, Emergency Management Minister Kristy McBain has announced that Canberra deployed a Black Hawk helicopter to assist aerial firefighting and provided Australian Defence Force ration packs to firefighters. Additional firefighters from other states and territories, and teams from New Zealand and Canada already in Victoria, have been directed to support operations in the Otways under mutual-aid arrangements.
This is the sum of the so-called national response: a single military helicopter, rations, and the redistribution of the same overstretched workforce across multiple fronts weeks after the fires first began.
There is still no permanent, federally owned national aerial firefighting fleet or unified professional bushfire service; instead, aircraft and personnel are stitched together each season, leaving communities like Gellibrand and Lismore dependent on a fragile patchwork at the height of the most dangerous conditions.
More than 400,000 hectares have burned across Victoria this month, destroying about 400 homes, mostly in the state’s centre. These are being presented by the political establishment as an unavoidable “natural disaster” driven by extreme weather beyond human control. This is a conscious lie. The disaster unfolding across Victoria is the entirely mitigable and preventable outcome of decades of government refusal to act on climate change or commit adequate resources to fire preparation.
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The protection of communities in fire-prone regions, the defense of agricultural land, native forests and natural ecosystems, and genuine action on climate change cannot be achieved within capitalism's profit-driven framework. They require the expropriation of the energy corporations, banks and agribusiness interests that dictate government policy, and the establishment of a workers' government committed to socialist planning. Only then can resources be democratically redirected from military spending and corporate enrichment to the comprehensive fire protection, climate action, and resilient infrastructure that the lives and futures of ordinary people in Victoria and across the world demand.
More than a month after the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) announced it had reached tentative agreements with Canada Post, the full proposed contracts remain under lock and key, keeping rank-and-file postal workers in the dark about the language that would govern their jobs and working lives until January 2029.
However, the selective “highlights” released by the union bureaucracy make clear that the agreements constitute a sweeping sellout, paving the way for mass job destruction, intensified exploitation and the transformation of Canada Post into a precarious, Amazon-style logistics operation. They underline the repeated warnings made by the World Socialist Web Site: that Mark Carney’s Liberal government wants to use Canada Post as a test case for a massive across-the-board onslaught on worker rights and conditions, and second, that the CUPW leadership and entire trade union bureaucracy is fully complicit in this process.
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In September, the Liberal government—which banned the 2024 postal workers’ month-long strike by invoking anti-democratic provisions in section 107 of the Canada Labour Code—authorized Canada Post to end door-to-door mail delivery, expand the use of community mailboxes, lengthen delivery standards for letters and close or convert post offices to private franchises, particularly in rural and suburban areas. Canada Post management has openly discussed eliminating up to 30,000 jobs by 2035.
President and CEO Doug Ettinger promised that the corporation will “break even” by 2030 during testimony before the House of Commons government operations committee in December. Asked when Canada Post would become financially sustainable, he stated that the corporation’s plan had been shaped around the government’s September restructuring announcement. He insisted that government bailouts must end, and that “investment” was required to make Canada Post more “competitive.”
Given that the company has posted approximately $5 billion in losses since 2018, such a turnaround will only be done on the backs of workers and through the gutting of postal services. The CUPW leadership fully endorses the aim of returning Canada Post to “profitability.”
The content of the tentative agreements aligns seamlessly with this agenda. New job classifications such as Permanent Flex Employees (PFEs), Part-Time Unstructured (PTU) workers and Parcel Delivery Part Time (PD PT) employees are explicitly designed to erode established routes, eliminate overtime and replace stable full-time employment with precarious labour in both the urban postal operations and rural and suburban mail carrier units.
These classifications mirror the two-tier schemes imposed in the auto industry, which were sold as temporary compromises but permanently degraded conditions for younger workers, while dragging down standards for all workers and boosting corporate profits after the 2008 global financial crisis.
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What’s more, there is nothing inevitable about the hopeless dead end where postal workers currently find themselves. The CUPW leadership has systematically led the contract struggle into the sand by blocking any appeal to all delivery workers and public sector workers whose jobs and conditions face the same threats. Earlier this month, it was revealed that close to 10,000 federal government workers have received warning notices that their jobs could go. On Friday, 1,200 workers at GM’s Oshawa assembly plant worked their last shift as the highly profitable automaker imposed long-announced mass layoffs. CUPW has done nothing to unite postal workers with these workers in a common fight against layoffs and austerity but has worked tirelessly to prevent such unity by invoking the inviolability of the pro-employer “collective bargaining” system, which government officials, management executives and union bureaucrats use to ram concessions down workers’ throats.
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CUPW and the broader union bureaucracy from the Canada Labour Congress (CLC) on down have worked systematically to conceal the political character of this struggle. Prime Minister Mark Carney has openly declared Canada Post “unviable.” But he considers it “viable” to gut worker rights in order to fund tens of billions of dollars in additional military spending so that Canadian imperialism can ruthlessly pursue the profit interests of the financial oligarchy in wars around the world.
The issues at stake for postal workers—the defense of the right to strike, whether emerging technologies like AI will be used to intensify exploitation or ease the burden of labor under workers’ control, the fight for job security and wages that keep pace with the cost of living—are issues that all workers would fight for if they were armed with the necessary political understanding and organizational framework to participate in the struggle.
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The defense of Canada Post as a public service and the defense of decent, secure jobs cannot be reconciled with the CUPW-backed profit mandates of the government and management. Only through the independent mobilization of the working class, guided by a socialist perspective, can this onslaught be stopped. Postal workers should decisively reject the tentative agreements and join the fight to build rank-and-file power in Canada and internationally.
17. Labour’s blueprint for a centralized police-state apparatus in Britain
The British Labour government’s newly published white paper, From local to national: a new model for policing, is being marketed as a long-overdue “modernization” that will deliver “better policing for local communities.”
In reality, the document outlines a qualitative restructuring of the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state, aimed at centralizing command, expanding surveillance, and enhancing the capacity to suppress social and political opposition. Far from a technocratic reform, it constitutes a strategic preparation for intensified state repression against an emerging movement of the working class.
Announced by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, the white paper is presented as the biggest transformation of policing “in nearly 200 years.” It advances familiar justifications—fragmented structures, inefficiency, inconsistent standards, and the challenge of “digitally enabled” crime.
But the timing and content of these reforms can only be understood in the context of the global crisis of capitalism, marked by economic decline, deepening social inequality, escalating imperialist conflict, and a resurgence of working-class struggle internationally. The ruling class confronts growing hostility, to worsening social conditions, Britain’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the costs of militarization.
The centerpiece of the reforms is the creation of a National Police Service (NPS). This new force would absorb the National Crime Agency, Counter Terrorism Policing, and Regional Organized Crime Units, while assuming national “strategic leadership” and “standard setting.” The white paper makes explicit that its purpose is to replace the current “weak” policing structure—where authority is dispersed among multiple local forces—with a centralized command capable of enforcing the priorities of the government across the country.
The government plans to reduce the current 43-force structure in England and Wales, moving toward fewer, larger regional forces following an independent review, while reorganizing day-to-day policing into “Local Policing Areas” beneath these larger entities. Beneath the language of “efficiency” and “avoiding duplication,” the restructuring is designed to facilitate rapid, large-scale deployments against strikes, protests, and social unrest.
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British police forces are already among the most aggressive adopters of facial recognition technology internationally, deploying it through secretive watchlists and without meaningful parliamentary oversight.
Millions of individuals have been scanned. A joint investigation by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates—the investigative journalism unit of the civil rights organization Liberty—found that police in England and Wales scanned nearly 4.7 million faces using live facial recognition cameras in the year leading up to May 2025, more than double the figure recorded in 2023.
Liberty described the expansion of facial recognition as “one of the most significant threats to civil liberties in the history of British policing.” The white paper institutionalizes this infrastructure, transforming extraordinary surveillance measures into a permanent feature of everyday policing.
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The authoritarian character of Labour’s agenda is already being demonstrated in practice. In July 2025, the government passed a proscription order under the Terrorism Act banning Palestine Action, making “support” for the group—through slogans, placards, and symbols—criminally punishable. Since the ban came into effect, arrests of people for declaring their support for the direct action group have reached almost 3,000.
The recent hunger strikes by imprisoned Palestine Action-affiliated defendants—charged over actions including daubing military aircraft with red paint at the Brize Norton Royal Air Force base—has underscored the punitive and political character of the prosecutions. Activists face months, and in some cases years, on remand before trial.
The construction of a National Police Service, the strengthening of Home Office intervention, and the expansion of AI-driven policing constitute an open declaration that the state intends to treat mass opposition by workers, above all anti-war opposition, as a “national security” threat.
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Britain’s trajectory is not unique. In the United States, the Trump administration has escalated the operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) gestapo squads against immigrants and political opponents, mobilizing quasi-military forces in major cities.
In Germany, the government is expanding domestic intelligence resources and digital surveillance capabilities, including facial recognition and automated data analysis.
In Australia, the Labor government has exploited the Bondi Beach tragedy to impose sweeping restrictions on public assemblies and extend police powers over demonstrations.
In Canada, the Liberal government has introduced legislation granting law enforcement unprecedented powers to spy on individuals without warrants.
These developments represent the necessary preparations for class conflict as capitalist ruling elites confront intensifying struggles by workers over jobs, wages, austerity, collapsing public services, and imperialist war. A national command structure and a high-tech surveillance infrastructure is being constructed to confront the inevitable eruption of social opposition.
18. Architect explains why Australian public housing towers should be fixed, not demolished
The Victorian Labor government is pressing ahead with its destruction of 44 public housing towers in the state capital of Melbourne. In a number of the towers, residents have already been displaced, and demolition works are being prepared.
The policy is a massive assault on the working class, dictated entirely by the interests of property developers. Poor and vulnerable layers are being thrown out of their homes, while prime inner city locations are being turned over to rapacious corporate interests. This is a continuation and deepening of a nationwide assault on public housing over decades.
In a cynical attempt to justify what amounts to social cleansing, Labor has claimed that the towers are not habitable and must be demolished. That lie has been opposed by residents, including those who have joined the Neighborhood Action Committee, a rank-and-file group of residents and workers initiated by the Socialist Equality Party to fight the demolitions.
As part of this struggle, the World Socialist Web Site recently spoke to architect Simon Robinson of the OFFICE group. It produced a comprehensive report, establishing that refurbishment of the towers is a viable option, and thus refuting a central pretext for the attack on public housing residents.
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WSWS: What is your estimation of the motives behind the government’s refusal to consider refurbishment of the towers despite all the reasons you have explained?
Simon Robinson: Unfortunately, it appears that the government no longer wants to supply and manage public housing. Like so much of our public infrastructure the provision of homes is being handed over to the private sector and the government is relieved of its responsibility. It is something we have found through the release of four reports, that it doesn’t matter how much evidence is produced if the government doesn’t want to do it, they won’t. And this is clear, we’ve put forward alternatives that are supported by the residents, cheaper to deliver and will avoid huge social and environmental damage yet public housing estates are still being demolished.
19. Australia: Union officials stop striking health workers speaking to SEP members at Melbourne rally
Around 300 public health workers joined a rally in Melbourne on Tuesday January 20, as part of a statewide strike against the Victorian Labor government and its assault on the workforce, which includes orderlies, cleaners, kitchen staff, theater technicians and administration staff.
Thousands of workers across the state walked off the job, in opposition to the government’s offer of a 3.75 percent per annum pay “rise,” which is not enough to cover current inflation, let alone make up for previous real wage cuts. Labor’s proposed enterprise agreement would also do nothing to improve the dire conditions confronted by workers throughout the public health system.
The rally, however, was designed by the Health Workers Union (HWU) to let workers blow off steam and to divert their anger into appeals to the very government that is attacking their wages and conditions.
The demonstration was originally scheduled to occur outside the newly renovated and expanded Frankston Hospital in Melbourne’s outer southeast, where the HWU proposed to “disrupt” the hospital’s official opening by state Premier Jacinta Allan.
Victorian health workers have entirely warranted concerns about the Frankston redevelopment. Like other public hospital construction and expansion operations across the state, it has been carried out through a Public-Private Partnership arrangement, in which a consortium of major corporations will be contracted not only to carry out the building work, but provide ongoing facilities maintenance and other non-clinical services.
This longstanding policy of the Victorian Labor government effectively means the privatization by stealth of swathes of the health workforce, prompting concerns over job and wage security. But the HWU’s slogan, “BILLIONS for buildings. SCRAPS for the people inside them,” is not a rallying cry against privatization. It is a diversion, falsely counterposing the needs of health workers, for decent wages and conditions, to those of the working class as a whole, for modern high-quality hospital infrastructure.
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Socialist Equality Party (SEP) members attended the rally to campaign for an alternative to the HWU’s perspective of plaintive appeals for more behind-closed doors negotiations with the state government. SEP members raised the call for a turn to broader layers of the working class, who all confront an assault on their working conditions and living standards, spearheaded by the pro-business Labor government.
The presence of such a perspective was intolerable for the union bureaucracy. In a blatant attack on the democratic rights of their own members, HWU officials stepped in to break up discussions between striking workers and SEP campaigners.
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The union leadership is terrified of any challenge to its subordination of the health workers’ struggle to pressuring the Labor government, which is currently engaged in gutting public health. Rather than mounting a struggle against the Allan government, the HWU is seeking to block one from emerging, straitjacketing workers into impotent appeals to Labor and stunts like Tuesday’s rally.
The HWU’s attempt to exclude SEP members from the rally is the sharpest expression of this agenda. By attacking the SEP, the union bureaucracy is attacking the workers they claim to represent and their democratic right to have a discussion on how their fight must be directed.
The fact that the union resorts to utter lies, slandering the SEP as “scabs,” demonstrates their weak position. Far from opposing the industrial action, the SEP calls for its expansion, to include other sections of workers and the preparation of a full-frontal assault on the Labor government and the capitalist system it represents. The political force that is seeking to undermine and restrict strikes by health workers is the thoroughly corporatised, Labor-aligned HWU bureaucracy.
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Last week’s strike and another by these workers in December were the first called by the HWU in more than 25 years, reflecting an explosion of anger among workers who have been hit with one wage cut after another for decades.
The current industrial action, after such an extended period of dormancy, is being used to promote illusions that the HWU has turned over a new leaf since its previous secretary, Diana Asmar was sacked last year, accused of appropriating nearly $3 million of union funds.
But behind the pantomime militancy, last week’s rally showed that, under the HWU’s “new” leadership, health workers can only expect more of the same: Sell-out union-government deals brokered behind closed doors and utter contempt for the democratic rights of the membership, as displayed in the attack on the SEP.
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The attack on health workers is part of a nationwide assault on the public sector and the working class as a whole. Overseen by the federal Labor government, state governments are systematically starving essential services of funds, while channeling billions into the coffers of big business, the corporate elite and the military.
20. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Australia:
South Australian public health nurses and midwives to strike in February
Bangladesh:
India:
Pakistan:
Sri Lanka:
New Zealand:
21. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
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.
