Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Trump at the Kennedy Center: The criminal underworld in power
There is a profound link between the persona of Trump and the interests of the capitalist oligarchy. How else is it possible that such a person tightly controls one of the two major parties of big business, having been nominated as the Republican candidate for president in three consecutive elections?
The United States is conducting a major war under the direction of a man who is, in the moment of that war, functionally elsewhere—mentally, emotionally, morally. He is at the breakfast meeting of the heads of auto dealerships. He is at the grand opening of a golf resort. He is wherever his narcissism places him at any given moment, and the war is simply the current backdrop to the permanent performance of self.
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The bankruptcy of the Democratic opposition is not incidental to the crisis. It is constitutive of it. Trump’s gangster presidency is possible precisely because the American two-party system offers no genuine alternative. The tens of millions of Americans who are horrified by what they are watching have no political vehicle through which to act. Their choices are the party of the crime boss or the party that issues press releases expressing concern about the crime boss while funding his wars.
Trump is the representative of a ruling class that has reached the end of the line. The question is whether this class will drag the entire world toward catastrophe as it fights to preserve the capitalist system, which is the basis of its wealth and privileges.
The working class of the United States and of the world has not yet spoken on this crisis. The millions who are horrified, the millions who cannot reconcile what they are seeing with any conception of legitimate governance, the millions who sense that something fundamental has broken—these millions have yet to find their political voice and their political organization.
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The first step in fighting back against Trump’s policies of austerity, war and attacks on democratic rights is to recognize that the working class—and no section of the capitalist class—is the social force that can and must defeat this government. The independent political mobilization of the working class, through a break with the capitalist two-party system and the fight for a socialist and anti-war program, is the task of the hour.
2. Tom Henehan: A revolutionary life
Yesterday would have been the 75th birthday of Tom Henehan, a member of the Political Committee of the Workers League who was assassinated in 1977. The World Socialist Web Site is republishing a tribute delivered by David North at a meeting in 1997.
The murder of Tom Henehan was a political attack aimed at intimidating the Workers League and blocking its efforts to build a socialist leadership in the American working class. The Workers League was at that time involved in an historic investigation of the circumstances surrounding the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky, the founder of the Fourth International.
This investigation, whose findings were published under the title Security and the Fourth International, exposed the decades-long efforts of the police agencies of imperialism and Stalinism to penetrate and sabotage the world Trotskyist movement. Among other things, the investigation revealed the insidious links between Joseph Hansen—who later became a leader of the American Socialist Workers Party—and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In June 1977, Hansen and the SWP published a statement that warned of “deadly consequences” if the investigation continued. Shortly afterwards, Tom Henehan lay dead in a Brooklyn hospital.
This page includes a number of lectures and essays reviewing the immense contributions of Comrade Tom to the Trotskyist movement. See also the collection of the investigation and conclusions of Security and the Fourth International.
3. “We cannot continue to be worked like slaves”: Colorado meatpacking workers strike at JBS plant
The strike at Greeley is all the more significant because the overwhelming majority of the workforce are immigrants, who have launched the strike in defiance of the broader rampage by immigration authorities. It is also the first major strike to begin since the launching of the illegal and unpopular war with Iran. It anticipates a broader conflict pitting the working class against the Trump administration and the corporate oligarchy it defends.
4. American Axle workers speak out against UAW bureaucracy ahead of contract talks
Workers at American Axle & Manufacturing’s (AAM) Three Rivers, Michigan, plant voiced growing opposition to the United Auto Workers (UAW) bureaucracy ahead of contract negotiations set to begin this month. Supporters of autoworker Will Lehman distributed dozens of his campaign statements at the plant on Saturday, sparking discussions with workers about the role of the union apparatus and the need for rank-and-file control.
Lehman, who is running for UAW president on a platform calling for the abolition of the bureaucracy and the transfer of power to workers on the shop floor, has attracted significant interest among workers angered by years of concessions. Many workers stopped to discuss the UAW’s role in the 2008 American Axle strike, which resulted in the halving of wages, the destruction of jobs and set a precedent for subsequent attacks on autoworkers across the industry.
5. 40 years since the People Power ouster of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines
February marked 40 years since a mass demonstration of millions of Filipinos in Manila, combined with a coup plot by a cohort of disgruntled officers, ousted the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. The event, celebrated as People Power or the Edsa Revolution, has been endlessly mythologized as the rebirth of “Philippine democracy,” but it in fact only reorganized and preserved capitalist rule under new political forms.
The regime that fell in February 1986 was the product of the postwar Philippine bourgeois order and its domination by US imperialism. Marcos ruled through systematic terror: thousands were executed extrajudicially, tens of thousands tortured and imprisoned, and entire communities subjected to military repression. These abuses were not the excesses of a rogue autocrat; they were the methods of a state that Washington armed and financed as a key pillar of its Cold War architecture in Southeast Asia. The US secured the use of Clark and Subic military bases and integrated the Philippine military into its global counter‑insurgency operations.
By the early 1980s, however, this order was collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. When Marcos took office in 1965, roughly 28 percent of the population lived below the poverty line and unemployment stood around 9 percent; when he fled into exile on 25 February 1986, some 70 percent of Filipinos were living below the poverty line and roughly one in three workers was either unemployed or underemployed. The economy contracted sharply in 1984 and 1985, wiping out years of per capita income gains, while capital flight accelerated in the aftermath of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr.’s assassination in August 1983. Aquino’s murder, carried out on the airport tarmac as he returned from exile, detonated mass outrage; official inquiries pointed to a conspiracy within the security forces, but the ultimate authors were never identified, and the crime remains politically unresolved.
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Forty years on, the central lesson of People Power is not that the masses “once saved democracy” and must now do so again, but that no advance is possible so long as their struggles remain chained to any faction of the bourgeoisie. In 1986, millions of workers, peasants and youth demonstrated immense courage, but they were politically subordinated—above all through the agency of the Stalinist CPP and the social‑democratic left—to Aquino, the Church and sections of the military. The result was the preservation of capitalist rule and the preparation of new disasters.
The way forward lies in the conscious and organized assertion of the political independence of the working class. This requires an irreconcilable break with all factions of the Philippine bourgeoisie and with their political instruments, including the CPP and its national democratic fronts. It demands the construction of a new revolutionary leadership based on an international socialist program: the expropriation of the oligarchs and foreign capital, the placing of the major industries, banks and land under democratic workers’ control, the abolition of landlordism, and the withdrawal of all imperialist forces and bases.
Such a perspective cannot be realized within the confines of the nation‑state. The Philippine working class is part of a global class whose struggles are erupting on every continent. The fight against the Marcos dynasty, against authoritarian rule and against the decaying edifice of post‑Edsa “democracy” must be linked to the worldwide movement of workers and youth against war, fascism and social inequality. The decisive task posed by the 40th anniversary of People Power is the building of a Philippine section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, which alone embodies the historical lessons of the struggle against Stalinism and the fight for genuine socialism.
6. Australia: Discontent grows among University of Newcastle educators as they strike
An overwhelming vote to strike is a further sign of widespread opposition to the sweeping pro-business and pro-military restructuring of universities being driven by the Albanese Labor government.
A ballot of Australian Education Union members recorded an unprecedented 98 percent vote for stopwork action, expressing widespread anger over appalling wages and conditions in public schools.
8. Australia: 238 jobs axed at Tahmoor Colliery
Workers were given less than 48 hours to decide whether to immediately accept redundancy or take six weeks’ unpaid leave in the hope that the mine is quickly sold.
9. In major concession to Trump, Cuban government opens island to investment by Miami exile capitalists
The Cuban government is openly courting US corporations and Cuban-American exile capital, marking a decisive step toward transforming the island into a semi‑protectorate of American imperialism, with catastrophic consequences for Cuban workers.
In an exclusive interview with NBC News published Monday, Cuba’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Trade Minister Oscar Pérez‑Oliva Fraga announced that “Cuba is open to having a fluid commercial relationship with US companies and also with Cubans residing in the United States and their descendants.”
“This goes beyond the commercial sphere,” Pérez-Oliva, the grandnephew of Fidel and Raúl Castro added. “It also applies to investments—not only small investments, but also large investments, particularly in infrastructure.”
This is the first time a Cuban official of Pérez‑Oliva’s stature—widely described as Cuba’s “economic czar”—has used a major US network to directly woo corporations and the Miami exile layer.
Beyond the symbolism of a Castro relative inviting the exiled bourgeoisie, whom Fidel dubbed as “gusanos” or “worms,” to return as investors and potential owners, provides a base of support and operations for mafioso elements that are intent on radical regime change and a vindictive bloodbath.
Fidel Castro repeatedly said barring Cuban‑American capital was a necessary defense against US imperialism and the blockade, denouncing the exiles as instruments of CIA‑backed terrorism who sought to restore the semi‑colonial order personified by the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. In January 1961, he mocked them:
They have come to believe that someday their imperial masters will put them here again with a little flag that pretends to be a national standard … and with a little color on the map to sustain the fiction that the worms govern and command. And worms can only live off putrefaction.
These fascistic forces, who organized bombings of airliners, schools and hotels and launched the Bay of Pigs invasion under CIA protection, are now being invited back as “strategic partners” in ports, tourism, energy, mining and infrastructure, as specified by Pérez-Oliva.
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For the first time in nearly 70 years, Havana has authorized public‑private partnerships, when roughly a third of Cubans already work in private businesses. Now, large private firms are being allowed by Washington and Havana to import 25,000-liter tanks of fuel from Miami and Texas via convoluted schemes through social media and WhatsApp groups, according to El Pais.
In other words, even as the state claims that “no fuel is entering Cuba,” a limited dollar‑denominated fuel circuit is being created for private capital—especially that linked to the exile community—while the impoverished workers who have already braved seven decades of aggression endure unprecedented blackouts and hunger.
The Cuban leadership’s course is not a matter of “reluctant pragmatism” under duress from Trump. It flows from the organic limits of its nationalist program. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of subsidized trade, the regime has oscillated between tightening and loosening pro-business “reforms” and seeking new patrons—first in Venezuela, and now attempting to market itself as a reliable manager for US imperialism.
10. The Secret Agent–the dictatorship as an “open wound in Brazilian life”
The portrait of a ruling class marked by an absolute contempt for collective interests, culture, and human life is the strongest and most universal aspect of Mendonça’s film.
On the afternoon of March 8, a large number of school pupils, students and young workers gathered for an online meeting of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE). Under the title “Stop the war against Iran!” the participants discussed the devastating escalation in the Middle East and the need to mobilise the international working class against the looming danger of a Third World War.
12. Germany’s culture minister cancels presentation of the Booksellers’ Prize at the Leipzig Book Fair
Following his attacks on the recently concluded Berlinale, the German government commissioner for culture and the media (BKM), Minister of State Wolfram Weimer, has set his sights on the book trade. This time Weimer’s censorship measures involve removing three left-wing bookshops from a list of 118 shops compiled by an independent expert jury for the German Bookshop Award. This move has triggered a massive wave of protest and criticism.
In an introductory address for the Bookshop Prize, Weimer had boasted: “Through literature, we can have experiences that would otherwise be impossible for us … That is why freedom of speech is one of the highest goods of our democratic society, which we must preserve and protect at all costs. Owner-run bookshops make an important contribution to this.” His latest decision exposes his highflying rhetoric as perfidious hypocrisy.
Following the massive resistance to his decision, Weimer went further and cancelled the ceremonial presentation of the German Booksellers’ Prize at the Leipzig Book Fair, which begins this week. A spokesperson for Weimer stated last Tuesday that the debate over his removal of the three left-wing bookshops would “increasingly overshadow” the book fair.
Only weeks ago, the minister of state had tried in vain to dismiss the director of the Berlinale and then imposed a code of conduct on her that allows the government to influence the selection of films and control the conduct of the management of the Berlinale. Weimer’s actions in recent weeks constitute massive violations of the constitutional right to artistic freedom and freedom of expression.
His attack on the book trade is viewed by numerous figures from publishing houses, as well as by authors and booksellers, as an extremely threatening assault on democratic rights and has sparked a wide-ranging debate on the legality of such state intervention.
The Ministry awards annual prizes to support the work of small bookshops, which play an important role in the cultural sector but are increasingly facing competition from large cultural department stores, mass-market bookshops and online delivery services. Along with over 100 other bookshops, the three left-wing bookshops Golden Shop (Bremen), Rote Strasse (Göttingen) and Zur schwankenden Weltkugel (Berlin) were selected by a jury of experts for the Bookshop Award, which comes with financial incentives of up to €25,000. The last of these bookshops in particular stocks a large selection of Trotskyist literature from Mehring Verlag.
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The many outraged statements against the exclusion of the bookshops rightly regard this as a dangerous attack on democratic rights. The fact that the world of books is reacting so sensitively can also be understood against the backdrop of experiences from the Nazi era. After 1933, countless writers and intellectuals were forced to leave the country or were persecuted and imprisoned. Book burnings began in Germany as early as March 1933.
Most recently, a lawyer representing one of the bookshops revealed that Weimer is alleged to have actively misled the three excluded bookshops. According to a whistleblower, the jury had even earmarked two of the bookshops for top prizes, yet the minister’s office told them otherwise.
Weimer has stated: “Freedom of art and freedom of expression are the most important democratic achievements, which I will always defend.” At the same time, he emphasized that prizes funded by taxpayers’ money should only be awarded to institutions “that are above all suspicion.”
Weimer’s remarks are brimming with hypocrisy. Whilst left-wing bookshops are being targeted, the far-right AfD receives around €120 million annually from party funding and Bundestag funds.
It comes therefore as no surprise that Weimer’s actions were expressly welcomed by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). The AfD’s cultural affairs spokesperson, Götz Frömming, stated with satisfaction that Weimer had learned from his own party’s “opposition work.”
Weimer, who has declared himself to be an Independent, is a close confidant of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and belongs politically to the far right. In his book The Conservative Manifesto he attacked “the German left,” which he claimed wanted to replace traditional values with “equality, emancipation and solidarity.” In his book Longing for God, he calls for a return to Christianity.
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In many respects, Weimer’s commitment to “Western Christian civilization” mirrors the ideology of the Trump administration, as recently articulated by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference.
As early as 2022, the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) had warned of precisely such a development in its constitutional complaint against its surveillance by the BfV. At the time, the party stated: “Furthermore, booksellers who distribute Marxist literature, workers striking for higher wages, or peace activists could be criminalized at the stroke of a pen.” The latest events show just how accurate this warning was.
13. Portugal’s “Miracle” of 2025: Profits soar and workers suffer
When The Economist crowned Portugal the “best performing economy of 2025,” it was applauding a model that has turned Portugal into a low-cost platform for global capital. By these measures, the ruling class is thriving. But for workers facing stagnant real wages, precarious employment, soaring housing costs, and austerity-driven public service decline, the so-called miracle is a social disaster.
14. No charges for Israel Defense Forces rapists, original prosecutor faces prison
Israel’s top military lawyer has dropped all criminal charges against five Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reservists who brutally assaulted—including raping—a Palestinian detainee held at the notorious Sde Teiman military detention centre during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
The only person now facing charges and even a jail sentence relating to the events is Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi—the IDF’s previous Military Advocate General who exposed the crime in the first place and initiated the original investigation and indictments. It was Tomer-Yerushalmi who released in August 2024 the infamous video showing the soldiers surrounding and raping a blindfolded Palestinian detainee against a wall for around 15 minutes.
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Despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt, there was no serious investigation of the soldiers involved. Ten soldiers, according to Haaretz, were initially detained in July 2024, but only five were formally indicted. They were never named, and none were charged with rape.
IDF soldiers and right-wing activists publicly defended the accused, gathering outside Sde Teiman and breaking into military bases in order to obstruct arrests. When it became known that the soldiers had been transferred to Beit Lid base for questioning, 1,200 rioters gathered outside, accusing soldiers serving there of being “traitors.” Dozens broke into the base before being dispersed by police, who made no arrests.
Among the demonstrators were armed and masked soldiers, some wearing the Force 100 logo of the unit re-established at the start of the war and tasked with guarding Gazan detainees at Sde Teiman.
Joining these thugs were several coalition cabinet ministers, including Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, MK Nissim Vaturi (Likud), and MK Zvi Sukkot (Religious Zionism). No indictments were brought against these political actors, highlighting the exceptional protection afforded to perpetrators of abuse and those defending them.
As a result of this campaign, one of the suspects--Meir Ben-Shitrit--was elevated into a media personality, appearing on far-right Channel 14 as a “hero of Israel.” He gave lengthy interviews on the Fathi and Shai programme, initially appearing with his face concealed before later revealing his identity on mainstream television.
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Evidence of other war crimes at Sde Teiman—known as Israel’s Guantanamo—emerged in October 2025. Palestinian officials in Gaza reported that 135 mutilated bodies returned under the Gaza ceasefire had been held at the military camp. The Guardian reported that many of those killed were blindfolded, with hands tied behind their backs, and some had ropes around their necks.
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Other survivors recently released from Israeli detention recounted gang rapes, beatings, and sexual torture, including assaults with objects or trained dogs. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) highlighted that these were part of a “policy of collective punishment designed to humiliate Palestinians and inflict maximum psychological and physical harm.”
Survivors’ accounts, documented by PCHR, describe extreme psychological terror, repeated rapes, and injuries severe enough to require hospitalization. Men and women were assaulted with sticks, bottles, and dogs; restrained, blindfolded, and left naked for hours. PCHR stressed that the abuse was not incidental but “part and parcel of the ongoing crime of genocide against the Palestinian people in the Strip.”
Moreover, detainees face ongoing threats, including coerced confessions and potential execution under new Israeli legal measures. PCHR warned that thousands face death following a draft law approved in November 2025 authorizing the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners. Coerced confessions extracted under torture could render all remaining detainees vulnerable to mass executions.
The cancellation of charges against the Sde Teiman soldiers graphically demonstrates the brutality of the Israeli state and the sickness of the society over which it presides.
When details of the crime first emerged, the World Socialist Web Site noted, “World leaders and the corporate media have largely remained silent about Israel’s crimes at Sde Teiman, in Gaza and the West Bank because Israel enjoys the support of all the imperialist powers now themselves slashing democratic rights and freedom of speech to suppress all opposition to their domestic and foreign policies.”
The same silence has greeted the exoneration of the IDF torturers.
The film that came away with the best picture prize at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles Sunday night, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, opens with a scene of a left-wing group freeing immigrants from a government detention center.
It proceeds to ridicule a corrupt and cruel military officer, who colludes with white supremacist fascists; to dramatize the brutal hunting down and execution of would-be revolutionaries; and to depict a paramilitary, ICE-type operation, justified by claims about drug enforcement, in an American town. Images of undocumented men, women and children fleeing repression are the film’s most acute and convincing.
As we suggested in a review:
In the most chilling and moving scenes, Anderson and his colleagues represent with great accuracy the drive to police-state rule currently under way. The brutality and fascistic character of the anti-immigrant hysteria and ICE raids in particular receives convincing expression in the film.
That One Battle After Another won six Academy Awards Sunday—best picture, directing, adapted screenplay, supporting actor, editing and casting—is likely the most telling indicator of changes taking place in the artistic world, a complex reflection of important shifts in popular consciousness more broadly.
Overt expressions of political opposition were not in abundance at the award ceremony, but there were some pointed ones. Spanish actor Javier Bardem, on hand to help give out the award for best international feature film, spoke to the audience of 20 million or so in the US and several hundred million around the world: “No to war. Free Palestine.” The Dolby Theatre crowd applauded loudly.
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Attendees representing The Voice of Hind Rajab (directed by Kaouther Ben Hania), a fictional reworking of the cold-blooded Israeli murder of a five-year-old child and her family in January 2024 in Gaza, wore a red “Artists4Ceasefire” pin. The film was nominated for best international feature. “Our struggles are connected. So is our liberation. And we’re so, so honored to be here tonight,” Saja Kilani, one of the film’s performers, told the Associated Press on the red carpet.
However, another of the film’s actors, Motaz Malhees, explained on Instagram several days before the event:
Our film The Voice of Hind Rajab is nominated for an Academy Award. I had the honor of playing one of the lead roles in a story the world needed to hear. But I will not be there. I am not allowed to enter the United States because of my Palestinian citizenship. It hurts. But here is the truth. You can block a passport. You cannot block a voice. I am Palestinian, and I stand with pride and dignity. My spirit will be with The Voice of Hind Rajab that night. Good luck to all of you. Our story is bigger than any barrier, and it will be heard.
In the end, this important film lost out to Norway’s Sentimental Value, an insipid and unchallenging work.
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A muted note of disquiet and opposition ran throughout the program. There is no need to overestimate it, but it would be wrong as well to ignore the changes in mood and sentiment in this particular social layer. Host Conan O’Brien spoke early on of these “very chaotic and frightening times.” He went on,
We pay tribute tonight, not just to film, but to the ideals of global artistry, collaboration, patience, resilience, and that rarest of qualities today—optimism. So, let us please celebrate the days ahead—not because we think all is well, but because we work and hope for better.
The emphasis on globalism and universality was a recurring theme and seemed sincerely meant.
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It would be as wrong to exaggerate the degree of conscious political understanding and opposition demonstrated Sunday night as it would be to downplay it.
The failure to reward The Voice of Hind Rajab and inordinate acclaim for Sinners, Hamnet and Sentimental Value reflect the ongoing cultural and political problems. The awards ceremony was hardly free from complacency and self-congratulation. The 11,000 Academy voters are relatively privileged professionals, as membership often requires a body of work in major motion pictures. Actors are the largest single group (1,307), but executives, marketing and public relations and producers make up some of the most substantial branches, each of them outnumbering both the writers’ and cinematographers’ branches, for example.
A good portion of the Hollywood crowd remains susceptible to identity politics and shallow, pragmatic responses to the deep problems of American and world society.
The recent almost doubling of the Academy membership, driven largely by racial and gender quotas, has not changed its social composition.
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The striving for privileges by already affluent layers is never attractive. Sinners’ Michael B. Jordan, a limited actor, and director Ryan Coogler also made largely unfavorable impressions in their comments. Coogler began his career by making the valuable Fruitvale Station, about the killing of Oscar Grant III by a transit policeman in the Bay Area. His subsequent work, much of it with Jordan, has consisted of tripe: the Rocky spinoff Creed, Black Panther, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and now Sinners.
However, the dynamic of the awards ceremony has moved in a positive direction in the following sense. Starting in the mid-2010s, the grotesque emphasis on race and gender made simply viewing the Academy Awards painful at times. The events seemed to swoop from one elaborately staged, ecstatic celebration of identity politics to the next, with a related, intensely selfish mood dominating each event. There’s no doubt this played a role in the shrinking of the television audience for the ceremony.
Not so last year and this. There is no 180-degree turn, of course, but now the speeches of Arkapaw, Coogler, Jordan and, to a certain extent, Jessie Buckley (for best actress in Hamnet) are something of the exception. They stand out as false and backward. A great many in the film world rightly so have bigger, more pressing concerns.
After all, how does the race and gender obsession help anyone in a world where genocide is supported by every leading government or a country presided over by a would-be dictator, seeing to the fascistic oppression of immigrants and murder of people on the streets of major cities, dragging the entire population into a catastrophic war? In its own limited and tentative manner, the Academy Awards provides clues about the direction social life is taking.
16. Turkish independent union leader Mehmet Türkmen arrested
Mehmet Türkmen, general secretary of the independent rank-and-file union BİRTEK-SEN (United Textile, Weaving and Leather Workers’ Union), was arrested on Monday at a court appearance following a speech he had delivered. Türkmen was detained in the early hours of Sunday morning during a gendarmerie raid on his home in Gaziantep, and all electronic devices in his residence were confiscated.
Ulaş Sevinç, chairman of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi—Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party—Fourth International), condemned his detention in a statement posted on X, which was reported by the daily Evrensel. He wrote: “The detentions of Türkmen and other workers’ leaders are aimed at intimidating the broad masses of workers who are entering into growing struggles against the problems stemming from the capitalist system and its defenders. All workers must oppose this repression, which eliminates the basic democratic rights including freedom of speech, and demand the immediate release of Türkmen.”
Türkmen’s arrest was met with protests from numerous organisations and workers. A refinery worker who spoke to Evrensel said: “We watched the raid [video] on Mehmet Türkmen’s home. The door being broken down, the house being searched, electronic devices being seized. Those images are not merely images of an operation. They give a picture of the repression that the labour struggle faces in this country.”
The formal charge brought against Türkmen is “inciting the public to hatred and enmity”—a charge that has been increasingly and arbitrarily deployed by the government in recent years against workers’ leaders, journalists and opposition politicians.
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What the court has chosen to treat as a crime is a stark, plain-spoken description of wage theft. That these words have been made the pretext for an arrest reveals this fact with unmistakable clarity: The brutal capitalist offensive—which makes it ever more difficult to contain class tensions through democratic forms of rule and the official trade union apparatus—necessitates the construction of an authoritarian regime in which basic rights are abolished. The ruling class’s assault on democratic rights and its assault on the living and working conditions of the working class are inseparable.
Following his arrest, Türkmen exposed the class-based nature of this ruling:
From now on, whenever an employer files a complaint [against me], just arrest me and send me straight to prison. Don’t play these [court] games. Skip the statements, the trials, and the hearings—just get past all that. Implement whatever the employer decides immediately. In this country, ten workers die every day in factories, losing their arms and hands. Not a single employer is even questioned, yet a union representative is arrested based on an employer’s complaint simply for speaking out about it.
Türkmen has repeatedly become a target of the state attacks—as have many other workers’ leaders—precisely because he leads a workers’ movement emerging from the rank and file. In February 2025, during a wave of mass wildcat strikes encompassing more than 20 factories in the Başpınar Organised Industrial Zone in Gaziantep, Türkmen was detained twice, held for 36 days and subsequently subjected to approximately a month of house arrest. During that period, the Gaziantep Governorship issued an unconstitutional decree banning all demonstrations across the province.
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Both the emergence of a rank-and-file workers’ movement and the state repression aimed at crushing this movement are global phenomena. As Will Lehman stated in his solidarity message with the Polyak miners, the issues facing workers in Türkiye— “unpaid wages, unsafe conditions, attacks on seniority, erosion of benefits—are the same issues facing workers in auto plants, warehouses and factories in the US and internationally. Corporations operate globally,” Lehman said. “Our response must also be global”—and he added: “No worker should stand alone.”
Workers and youth in Türkiye and around the world must defend Mehmet Türkmen, who has been imprisoned for his leadership of workers’ struggles and demand his immediate release. The fight for his freedom is an inseparable part of the broader struggle for democratic and social rights.
17. Israel begins its long-planned ground invasion of Lebanon
Israel’s US-backed war against Lebanon has entered a new and bloody stage with the start of a long-prepared ground invasion conducted under the umbrella of the widening imperialist war against Iran.
Humanitarian and press reports confirm that Israel has moved from intensive air and artillery strikes into ground operations across southern Lebanon, expanding beyond the cross-border attacks it has conducted since late 2024.
A humanitarian briefing from Assessment Capacities Project (ACAPS) on March 4 reports that Israel “initiated a military operation within Lebanese borders” on March 1, 2026, concentrating on southern Lebanon and deploying ground troops beyond at least five positions it has occupied since November 2024.
TRT World, citing Reuters and Lebanese sources, has reported that Defence Minister Israel Katz publicly authorized incursions into Lebanon and stated that he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered the army “to advance and take control of additional strategic positions in Lebanon in order to prevent attacks on Israeli border communities.”
As the offensive escalated, Axios reported that Israeli officials are planning a large-scale invasion to seize the entire area south of the Litani River—roughly the southern third of Lebanon—based on the claim that it intends to “dismantle Hezbollah’s military infrastructure.” Axios described the incursion as the largest operation in Lebanon since 2006.
However, one senior Israeli official, quoted in that report, bluntly stated, “We are going to do what we did in Gaza,” explaining that the goal is “to take over territory, push Hezbollah’s forces north and away from the border, and dismantle its military positions and weapons depots in the villages.”
This statement makes clear that the invasion of Lebanon is not a limited border security action but a planned occupation of Lebanese territory combined with the systematic destruction of entire towns and villages and the murder of civilians modeled on the genocidal campaign in Gaza over the past 29 months.
The same propaganda used during the barbaric destruction of Gaza—claims that “terror tunnels,” “human shields” and the “violence” of Hamas was the reason for the Israeli slaughter of more 70,000 Palestinians—is now being reproduced almost verbatim to justify the onslaught against Lebanon with Hezbollah being held responsible this time.
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For years, Israeli officials, think-tank strategists and retired generals have argued for a renewed “security zone” in Lebanon, closely resembling the occupation regime Israel maintained through its proxy South Lebanon Army from 1978 until its formal withdrawal in 2000.
The declared strategy of “what we did in Gaza” exposes the propaganda about “precision” targeting of “terror infrastructure” as a fraud. Israel is using mass bombardment and the depopulation of broad swaths of Lebanese territory to create a buffer zone for Israel and a strategic staging ground in the broader war against Iran.
The offensive of March 2026 is the culmination of more than a year of steadily intensifying Israeli attacks on Lebanon that began in the immediate aftermath of the October 7, 2023, and then was massively escalated with the onset of the US–Israeli war against Iran. Since late 2024, Israel has carried out near-daily strikes on targets it claims are Hezbollah-linked, while keeping troops in at least five positions in southern Lebanon after the ceasefire that was negotiated in November 2024.
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun has denounced these attacks as violations of Lebanese sovereignty and “a fully-fledged crime,” emphasizing that they target civilians and force mass displacement. UN agencies estimate that between roughly 750,000 and nearly 1 million people in Lebanon have been displaced so far by the latest Israeli offensive and mass evacuation orders.
The cumulative toll on the Lebanese population—especially children—has been devastating. TRT World, citing UNICEF data, reports that over the past 28 months 329 children were killed and 1,632 injured by Israeli air strikes in Lebanon. Child fatalities stand at 412 in the last six days alone.
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The timing and character of the Lebanese ground invasion cannot be understood apart from the broader regional strategy being executed by US imperialism and its Israeli ally. It is in this context that Israeli leaders have authorized what they describe as an “offensive campaign.” Israeli commanders have told news media they intend to conclude the campaign by significantly degrading Iran’s regional position, implicitly presenting Lebanese territory as a battlefield in the war against Tehran.
Israeli officials present the offensive in Lebanon as a necessary means to restore security for northern Israel. However, as international experts and analysts have pointed out, the Lebanon campaign is a reproduction of the logic of the Gaza genocide.
Humanitarian organizations warn that the combination of air strikes, artillery barrages and ground invasion is destroying infrastructure, displacing massive sections of the population and creating conditions of famine, disease and social collapse reminiscent of Gaza.
The present assault is part of a decades-long pattern of Zionist and imperialist crimes against the Lebanese and Palestinian people. In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, advanced to the outskirts of Beirut and imposed a brutal siege lasting nearly three months, forcing the evacuation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from the city under a US-brokered agreement.
Immediately after the PLO’s departure, Israeli forces, in coordination with the Lebanese fascist Phalangist militia, oversaw the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacre in September 1982, in which more than 3,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were slaughtered in the refugee camps of West Beirut.
During this period, the US deployed Marines as part of a multinational force and brought in naval firepower, including the battleship New Jersey that shelled positions in and around Beirut, killing large numbers of civilians and openly aligning US military power with the Israeli invasion and its Lebanese allies.
As it has done consistently since 1948, the US government functions as a direct participant in the attempt to crush Palestinian and Lebanese resistance and secure a client regime in Beirut. While the Democratic and Republican Party supporters of the war against Iran have claimed that Iran is responsible for the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983, which killed 241 American servicemen, it was the US-Israeli mass murder in Lebanon that was responsible for the bombing.
The official narrative has always served to cover up the underlying reality that the US barracks were a military target in a country ravaged by invasion, occupation and massacres carried out with US complicity.
18. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Chile:
Canada:
Thousands of Nova Scotia long-term care workers move toward strike
Equador:
Workers protest attacks on labor rights
Peru:
Truckers protest over lack of fuel
Paraguay:
Teachers protest attacks on Social Security
United States:
Portland Community College faculty and staff strike over wages
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.
