Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: November 17-23
Peru’s president Alberto Fujimori resigns
Fascist dictator Franco dies in Spain
Archaeologists unwrap mummy of Tutankhamen
2. In the first month of Gaza “ceasefire,” Israel has violated the agreement 282 times
According to information compiled by the Government Media Office in
Gaza and reported by Al Jazeera, the Israeli military has repeatedly
violated the ceasefire that was imposed on Palestinians by the Zionist
state in collaboration with the government of President Donald Trump.
The
Al Jazeera report says that between October 10 and November 10, Israel
breached the agreement at least 282 times, resulting in the death of 242
Palestinians and the wounding of 622.
Through ongoing sustained military offensives and occupation actions, Israel has criminally violated the terms of the ceasefire.
The
Gaza Media Office figures show that Trump’s so-called “peace plan”
amounts to a continuation of the campaign of violence and repression
that began in October 2023 at the outset of the genocide. Cloaked in the
language of “security” and “counter-terrorism,” the ongoing targeted
assassinations and airstrikes have repeatedly hit civilian Palestinian
infrastructure and humanitarian zones, obliterating homes, schools and
medical facilities.
Israeli forces have continued to directly target those attempting to
deliver and receive humanitarian aid, further deepening the starvation
and misery of Palestinians. Despite promises to allow up to 600 aid
trucks daily, actual deliveries have fallen far short, a shortage
compounded by Israeli announcements to further limit or halt
distribution entirely.
*****
Meanwhile, since the Gaza ceasefire on October 10, violence against
Palestinians in the West Bank has surged with frequent raids, shootings,
demolitions and settler attacks. The United Nations recorded over 260
settler incidents in October alone, the highest monthly total since
record-keeping began in 2006.
Israeli settlers have assaulted
Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest, destroyed crops, burned
homes and physically attacked residents, often with the acquiescence or
collaboration of Israeli security forces. Israeli military operations
have included ground raids in cities like Jenin and Tulkarm, resulting
in dozens of deaths and injuries, including children, and thousands of
Palestinians have been arrested or forcibly displaced since October.
These attacks have caused immense suffering and displacement amid an
environment of ongoing militarization and settlement expansion.
*****
In Gaza, the conditions for displaced Palestinians have deteriorated
catastrophically with the onset of winter. Heavy rains and flooding have
swept through makeshift refugee camps, many of which were already
critically overcrowded and undersupplied.
According to multiple
sources, the flooded camps have left thousands without proper shelter,
electricity or sanitation, massively increasing the risk of disease and
exposure-related fatalities.
UN agencies and independent reports
confirm that acute malnutrition is widespread, especially among
children, with an estimated 55,000 facing life-threatening hunger and
more than 16 percent of surveyed children already “wasting” due to
insufficient food and shelter.
The destruction or severe damage to
over 94 percent of the enclave’s hospitals has rendered it impossible
to care for the sick and wounded. Each passing rainstorm becomes a new
disaster for hundreds of thousands of already homeless people, besieged
from all sides.
*****
In a scheme reminiscent of the US occupation of Iraq and as the
ceasefire falls to pieces, the Guardian has reported on American
proposals to cordon off parts of Gaza with a “green zone” patrolled
jointly by Israeli and international troops. The aim is to further
isolate Palestinians, protect Israel’s military outposts and ensure the
ongoing displacement and fragmentation of Gaza’s people.
Whether
presented as “security” or “stabilization,” the plan would mean in
reality the indefinite presence of foreign and Israeli soldiers,
compound the siege and block the return of Palestinians to their homes.
International
security forces would serve to legitimize Israeli military expansion
and shield it from criticism, even as Israeli authorities are pressing
for the UN Security Council to drop any discussion of Palestinian
statehood. Like the ceasefire plan, the green zone proposal has nothing
to do with ending the genocide, instead threatening to create a
permanent garrison state amid the ruins of Gaza.
According to the
most recent data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, the
Palestinian death toll now surpasses 69,000, with tens of thousands
wounded and countless more unaccounted for in the rubble. The scale of
the destruction of the population with neighborhoods erased and critical
infrastructure in ruins confirms that Trump’s peace plan has functioned
as carte blanche for continuing relentless violence and expansion under
the cover of an “agreement.”
*****
The peace plan’s real content has been the legitimization of
occupation and genocide, shutting down any path to self-determination
for the Palestinian people. As the World Socialist Web Site
warned, any plan forged by US imperialism, in alliance with the Zionist
state, will be nothing but a rebranding of genocide and ethnic
cleansing. In short, the ceasefire and peace plan form a new stage in
the decades-long attempt to erase the Palestinian people from Gaza and
the West Bank.
The events of the past month—massacres, aid
blockade, ongoing occupation, military expansion and the trampling of
Palestinian sovereignty—have confirmed these warnings.
3. United States: Immigration Gestapo descends on Charlotte, carrying out mass arrests and drawing protests (videos included)
On Saturday morning, heavily armed federal immigration agents, backed
by a Black Hawk helicopter, began abduction operations in Charlotte,
North Carolina, the 14th largest city in the United States and home to
nearly 1 million people.
While it appears that most of the raids
are centered in Charlotte, with roughly 155,000 residents born outside
the US (more than 17 percent of the population), federal agents have
also been spotted in suburbs and rural communities near the city.
On
Saturday, after five hours of raids on restaurants, churches, Walmart
and Home Depot parking lots, fascist Customs and Border Protection (CBP)
commander Gregory Bovino claimed that immigration agents had arrested
or detained 81 people. Without providing any evidence, Bovino said
“many” of those arrested had “significant criminal and immigration
history.”
*****
In a thuggish video produced and distributed by the Department of
Homeland Security on X, Bovino gave a speech to armed and masked agents
following Saturday morning’s raids, declaring, “This is our f___ing
country... nobody tells us where to go, when to go, how to go in our
f___ing country.”
As was the case in Chicago, Los Angeles, San
Diego and Washington D.C., the flooding of federal immigration agents
into the city has provoked anger among large sections of the population,
regardless of immigration status. Protests against the raids drew
hundreds of people in Charlotte on Saturday and in Raleigh on Sunday. At
the rally on Sunday, protesters held signs saying “defend the people”
and “depose the rulers.” Another said, “ICE melts under resistance.”
*****
In response to federal agents illegally arresting and assaulting
residents, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, Josh Stein, posted
a video Sunday night addressing the situation. Speaking out of both
sides of his mouth, the governor praised CBP’s efforts. “To the CBP: If
you know that we have violent criminals in Charlotte who are
undocumented, we want them out too.”
Stein then added, “But the
actions of too many federal agents are doing the exact opposite in
Charlotte.” He advised that residents continue to “peacefully protest”
the kidnapping operations and film them with cell phones.
These
actions will do nothing to stop the anti-immigrant pogrom or defend
democratic rights. The Democratic Party is not an opposition party and
has refused even to bring impeachment proceedings against Trump, even as
his administration tramples on the Constitution and the democratic
rights of all on a daily basis.
4. Brutal Indonesian dictator Suharto declared national hero
On November 10, in ceremonies held at the State Palace in Jakarta,
Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto officially declared the brutal
dictator Suharto a national hero.
Suharto was a lifelong military man and virulent anti-Communist. In
1965-66 he took power in Indonesia by launching one of the worst mass
murders in the 20th century, orchestrating and overseeing the slaughter
of more than half a million Indonesians accused of being Communists. His
corrupt dictatorship secured the interests of international finance
capital and US imperialism, acting as a bulwark of reaction in Southeast
Asia. For over thirty years, until his ouster in 1998 in a wave of
protests, the Suharto New Order regime maintained capitalist order in
Indonesian society through repression and war.
All of these
events, from his bloody rise to power to his ignominious removal,
occurred in living memory. There is no family in Indonesia that was not
caught up in these events. To declare the architect of the worst crime
in the country’s history a national hero is itself a criminal act of
deception.
The rehabilitation of Suharto in Indonesia is an
expression of the accelerating turn to authoritarian forms of rule, in
response to deepening crisis and mass social anger, by the capitalist
class around the globe. This process in Indonesia is bound up with the
rise to power of Prabowo.
*****
Prabowo was the son-in-law of Suharto and was a commander in the
Indonesian military, serving largely in the special forces, known as
Kopassus, from 1974 to 1998. He was the general commander of Kopassus
during the final years of the dictatorship.
Trained in the United
States at Forts Bragg and Benning, Prabowo was directly responsible for
many of the crimes that sustained the New Order regime. He is guilty of
military atrocities against civilians in East Timor, West Papua, and
Aceh. In one instance alone, the Kraras massacre of 1983 in East Timor,
military forces under Prabowo burned villages, ordered the digging of
mass graves, and executed around 200 civilians.
*****
The removal of Suharto in 1998 marked the beginning of a period in
Indonesian politics known as the reform era, or Reformasi. The mass
protests that ousted the dictator secured a certain degree of freedom of
speech, in which public discussion of the crimes of the regime became
possible. But the ruling class figures who took the reins in the
reformasi government were bent on protecting and restoring the apparatus
of military rule.
Presidents Abdurraman Wahid (1999-2001) and
Megawati Sukarnoputri (2001-4) oversaw a continuity of rule between
Suharto and the Reformasi era. They preserved the military apparatus
intact. Golkar, the party of the dictatorship, was not dismantled, and
quickly recovered. The anti-Communist statutes, the legal bedrock of the
Suharto dictatorship, were preserved and remain on the books, allowing
the prosecution of left-wing organizations. There was no reckoning for
the crimes and the criminals of the regime. In 2004, Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono, a military general under the New Order regime, secured the
presidency in an alliance with Golkar.
*****
The Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) was
founded in 1920, the first Communist party in Asia. It confronted
immense tasks, unifying the vast colonized masses and working class of
the Dutch East Indies for the overthrow of colonialism and capitalism.
Leon
Trotsky, in his theory of permanent revolution, demonstrated that only
the working class could complete the goals of a democratic revolution,
including genuine national self-determination and land reform, by
seizing power and taking socialist measures. The capitalist class,
regardless of its nationality, was hostile to the working class and
counter-revolutionary. This perspective guided the 1917 October
revolution and runs throughout the first four congresses of the
Communist International.
*****
The PKI became the largest Communist Party in the world outside of
the Soviet Union and China. In 1965, the PKI had an estimated 3.5
million members, while an additional 20 million people were members of
its affiliated mass organizations. Acting through these organizations
the party leadership repeatedly corralled social anger behind illusions
in Sukarno. They called off mass strikes and prevented the seizure of
land by peasants in an effort to preserve their alliance with the
president.
The volcanic tensions beneath the Sukarno presidency
mounted. In 1963, Sukarno sought to mobilize the support of the military
and the Communist Party behind his military campaign, known as
Konfrontasi, against the British creation of Malaysia. The PKI complied
and directed the anger of the working masses behind the slogan “Crush
Malaysia” in support of the Indonesian military campaign.
*****
The Johnson administration in the United States sought to assert US
imperialist interests in Asia on two fronts in 1965: in Vietnam and
Indonesia. The results were spectacularly bloody, two of the worst
crimes of the twentieth century. Johnson launched the saturation bombing
of North Vietnam and by the end of the year the United States had
deployed 185,000 troops to Vietnam.
*****
Washington also sought the removal of Sukarno and the destruction of the
PKI. Washington had trained over 4,000 Indonesian military officers at
US military academies, and there were intimate ties between certain
sections of the Indonesian military brass and the Pentagon (Jessica
Darden, Aiding and Abetting: U.S. Foreign Assistance and State Violence
(Stanford University Press, 2020) p. 49). The difficulty, from the
perspective of Washington, lay in orchestrating a military seizure of
power without publicly moving against the immensely popular Sukarno.
*****
Historian Bradley Simpson accurately sums this up: “The United States
and Britain unquestionably sought to entice the PKI into a coup attempt
or some other rash action in the hopes of provoking a violent response
by the army and organized covert operations and propaganda efforts to
this end for the better part of a year” (Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-68 (Stanford University Press, 2008)).
*****
Sukarno’s health was rapidly failing. On September 30, in what
scholar John Roosa refers to as the “pretext for mass murder,” a group
of six senior Indonesia Army generals and one lieutenant were detained
and later killed by a conspiracy of junior officers, who claimed to be
acting to prevent a CIA-backed coup against President Sukarno (John
Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’État in Indonesia
(University of Wisconsin Press, 2006)). One of the leaders of the
junior officer coup, Col. Abdul Latief personally visited Suharto hours
before the events and claimed that he informed Suharto of the plot.
Suharto did nothing.
Many questions remain unanswered surrounding
the precise events of September 30. What is clear is that a small clique
of officers played the precise role that the CIA sought to orchestrate,
and that Suharto seems to have known about the events in advance.
*****
Suharto moved against the PKI. While his actions were initially
presented as being in defense of Sukarno, he ignored Sukarno’s orders
and began to implement rule through the military. The military began to
broadcast viciously anti-Communist propaganda, creating the atmosphere
of a pogrom. The CIA produced and supplied at least some of this
propaganda.
Over the next ten months more than half a million people were murdered.
This death toll is the scholarly consensus for a conservative figure;
serious estimates range up to a million (On this point, see Katharine
MacGregor, ed., The Indonesian Genocide of 1965: Causes, Dynamics, and Legacies (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), p.1).
*****
Another fact which recent scholarship has overwhelming confirmed is
that the killings were politically targeted. These were not random
killings, or the explosion of village violence. Those murdered were, or
were alleged to be, members of the PKI or its affiliated mass
organizations. This was a campaign that sought to exterminate anyone who
held left-wing political views. The greatest numbers of killings tended
to take place in areas that were locations of the sharpest social
struggles, around plantations and sites of labour conflict.
The
killings were centrally orchestrated by Suharto. He incited the mass
murder, set the precedent by staging killings, and deliberately selected
military personnel who conducted executions (Roosa, Buried Histories,
p.243). Those who survived were subjected to other atrocities. One
million Indonesians were placed in concentration camps, subject to
forced labor and torture. Many would be held until 1979.
*****
Washington, and to a lesser but significant extent, British and
Australian imperialism, oversaw, funded, coordinated, and assisted in
the mass murder, aware at every step of the death toll. Within weeks of
the launching of the slaughter, the US began supplying covert military
aid to Indonesia. All aid was directed to the military. Washington was
determined to support Suharto without stabilizing Sukarno. The US also
covertly and directly supplied cash to anti-Communist organizations and
paramilitary groups, including the notorious KAP-Gestapu.
This aid
flowed to Suharto while the Johnson administration was not only aware
of, but enthusiastically kept tabs on the death toll. Simpson damningly
recounts, “The Johnson administration’s decisions to extend aid were
made after it had become clear that the United States would be directly
assisting the army, Muslim organizations, student groups, and other
anti-Communist forces in a campaign of mass murder against unarmed
civilians—alleged members of the PKI and its affiliate organizations.
Moreover, U.S. officials knew and expected that the covert assistance
they provided would further this campaign” (Economists with Guns).
The mass murder furthered the interests of US business. A collection of
economists and technocrats trained at UC Berkeley, who later became
known as the “Berkeley mafia,” worked hand in hand with the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) to draw up the economic framework of
Suharto’s New Order, integrating Indonesia into the circuits of
international finance capital. Non-alignment was at an end.
*****
The authoritarian model set up by Suharto in Indonesia was exported
throughout the region. Scholar Matias Fibiger writes, “The New Order
internationalized counterrevolution across the region” (Suharto’s Cold War: Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the World
(Oxford University Press, 2023) p. 283). In my own scholarship I
demonstrated that Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines imposed martial
law in 1972 with the support of Washington in a manner deliberately
modeled after Suharto’s New Order (Scalice, The Drama of Dictatorship: Martial Law and the Communist Parties of the Philippines (Cornell University Press, 2023)).
In a popular recent work, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped our World
(PublicAffairs, 2020), Vincent Bevins demonstrated how Washington saw
events in Indonesia as an immense success and sought to implement them
widely. “Jakarta” became a byword for right-wing murder. In 1973, on the
eve of Pinochet’s seizure of power in Chile and the murder of Chilean
Communist Party members and other leftists—again with the backing and
orchestration of Washington—the threat that was bandied about was
“Jakarta is coming.” Recently discovered military documents, reveal that
the Brazilian dictatorship launched “Operation Jakarta” aimed at the
extermination of the Brazilian Communist Party in 1973.
*****
The crimes of Suharto reveal the depths that capitalism will descend
to defend the system of private property and profit. The rehabilitation
of Suharto is a whitewash by Prabowo of the crimes on which his
administration rests, and of which he himself is guilty. But it is more
than this.
It is a declaration of intent by the capitalist class
and should be treated by the working class in every country as a serious
warning. They are declaring the methods of mass murder and
concentration camps to be socially acceptable; and what’s more, heroic.
A
repeat of the crimes of 1965-66 is not unthinkable. It is in fact
unfolding. From the genocide in Gaza to the mass roundups by the masked
ICE Gestapo of the US Border Patrol, the ruling class is bringing back
openly fascist methods in defense of capitalism. Rosa Luxemburg’s stark
assessment stands: the crisis of capitalism presents society with only
two alternatives, Socialism or Barbarism.
5. COP30, capitalism and the socialist solution to the climate crisis
The UN’s climate change lead Simon Stiell opened the ongoing COP30 climate summit last week by telling the represented states, “Your job
here is not to fight one another. Your job here is to fight this climate
crisis, together.” But the fine words rang even more hollow than usual.
For years, the World Socialist Web Site
has named the proceedings of the annual conference for the fraud they
are. Whether promises were made or not made, the outcome was the same: a
failure to even approach the measures necessary to limit global warming
to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average—even as record
extreme weather wracks the planet.
In the last year, governments
and corporations have largely given up on the pretence. When it came to
COP30, the largest delegation outside of Brazil was sent by the fossil
fuel lobby, whose 1,600 representatives—a 12 percent rise on last
year—occupied one in every 25 places at the summit. The main actors
could no longer be bothered even to show their faces and left the farce
to their understudies. Only 60 world leaders are in attendance, down
from 165 two years ago.
None of the leaders of the world’s five
largest greenhouse gas emitters—US President Donald Trump, Chinese
Premier Xi Jinping, Indian President Narendra Modi, Russian President
Vladimir Putin or Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi—was present.
Trump, head of by far the world’s largest historic source of emissions,
refused to even send a delegation, after using a speech at the UN in
September to call climate science “the greatest con job ever perpetrated
on the world.” His climate policy is for fossil fuel companies to
“Drill, baby, drill.”
*****
In the United States alone, Trump’s presidency will add an estimated 4
billion more tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere than expected under the
previous trajectory—equivalent to the combined yearly output of the
European Union and Japan, or twice the savings from renewable
infrastructure deployed in the five years up to 2024.
The dire
consequences have been confirmed by UN reports, which show the planet is
on course to heat by 2.6 degrees Celsius by the end of the century,
even based on current climate commitments.
According to
authoritative studies, such a scenario would expose billions of people
to one or more of extreme heat and regular life-threatening heatwaves,
regular droughts and wildfires, coastal and riverine flooding, far more
frequent extreme storms, newly prevalent diseases and food shortages and
price shocks. Each new study and experience suggests that the
predictions of earlier assessments are underestimates.
All of
these phenomena, which will result in widespread death, displacement and
economic damage, fall overwhelmingly on the poorest people of the
world, who have drawn the least benefit from fossil-fueled development,
above all, in sub-Saharan Africa.
*****
This is social murder on a global scale carried out by the capitalist
class, which owns humanity’s productive forces and runs them in its own
interests.
When Trump denounces climate science, he speaks in
his customary brutish style for an entire oligarchy. This fact was
confirmed by centibillionaire Bill Gates’ advice ahead of COP30 for
delegates to reject a “doomsday view of climate change” which focuses
“too much on near-term emission goals.” This social layer has no
intention of abandoning its profits and lifestyles, which are
inextricably bound up with runaway emissions and climate catastrophe.
*****
At the current rate of fossil fuel use, society will reach the carbon
emission limit for a 50 percent chance of keeping global warming below
1.5°C in just four years. With these resources it has delivered: 2
billion people facing moderate or severe food insecurity each year, the
same number living in slums and shanty towns, 2 billion lacking safely
managed drinking water, over 2 billion relying on cooking methods which
produce harmful household pollutants, 4.5 billion people not covered by
essential healthcare services, and three-quarters of a billion without
access to electricity.
These problems must now be addressed under
conditions in which the world’s 41.6 billion net tonnes of carbon
emissions a year must be reduced to zero within the space of decades, if
broadly the same billions are not also to suffer the symptoms of a
superheated planet. Sustainable technologies—triumphs of human
ingenuity—point the way to the solution, but they are insufficient in
themselves, requiring widespread implementation and the parallel
dismantling of fossil-fueled systems.
Resolving this crisis
requires international collaboration on a scale unprecedented in human
history. Instead, the ruling classes are fighting among themselves for
every last cent of profit through trade war and predatory campaigns of
violence and intimidation. A new wave of colonialism is underway. Far
from unifying capitalist states, the development of new green
technologies has created new bloody conflicts for resources, to go with
those that still rage over fossil fuels and which have been intensified
by climate change.
In the last decade, global military spending has increased by more than a
third, accelerating in the last three years since the war in Ukraine.
Even in 2019, the world’s military powers accounted for an estimated 5.5
percent of carbon emissions, more than shipping and civilian aviation
combined.
*****
Billions of people around the world realize the urgency of the
situation; multiple studies report 80-89 percent support globally for
stronger action on the climate crisis. And millions have been prepared
to mobilize in its support. The “Fridays for Future” protest movement in
2019 saw over 7 million people, overwhelmingly youth, take to the
streets in protests across 150 countries.
The world’s governments
have responded by retreating even from their own inadequate targets.
Where Green parties have come to power in coalition governments in
Europe, as in Germany, Belgium, Austria and Ireland, they have
participated in the same politics of injustice and inaction as their
predecessors.
What this experience shows is the bankruptcy of any
and all attempts to address climate change, or any aspect of the
ecological crisis, without trespassing on profits and private property
in the means of production. By this approach, either the costs are
placed on the shoulders of the working class and poor, producing a
backlash, or the efforts are curtailed and abandoned in the face of
fierce resistance by the capitalist class.
*****
Capitalism is based on the division of the world’s productive forces
into private capitals competing in the market for profit, supported by
rival nation states. It inevitably produces levels of social inequality
and the monopolization of vast swaths of wealth which are fatal to
democracy and social reform. Out of these conditions arises an
increasingly degenerate ruling class, of which Trump is only the most
fully developed (or devolved) expression, incapable of addressing social
problems outside of the “solutions” of war, dictatorship and mass
death.
An oligarchy that does not bat an eyelid at sacrificing
millions of lives on the altar of profit in response to the COVID-19
pandemic, governments which risk war between nuclear-armed powers and
which facilitate genocide in Gaza will not act to save the lives and
livelihoods endangered by climate change.
The sole feasible program of action is the expropriation of the
super-rich through world socialist revolution. Reversing climate change
demands a scientifically planned global restructuring of the world’s
energy industry to transition from a reliance on fossil fuels to
renewable energy. This would necessitate a similar restructuring of
transportation, logistics, agriculture and the whole of society. Such
changes would also demand an end to all artificial national boundaries
and the restriction of production to the dictates of accumulating
corporate profits.
The only form of economic life in which the
world’s productive forces can be organized on such an internationally
coordinated scale is socialism.
*****
Karl Marx
In Marx’s words in Volume Three of Capital, written 160 years ago, the freedom represented by socialism
can
only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally
regulating their interchange with nature, bringing it under their common
control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of nature;
and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy under
conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature.
Only
the international working class which sets into motion the world’s
productive forces, gathering around itself the rural poor and the most
progressive sections of the middle class, is capable of accomplishing
this historic task. The desire to safeguard the environment and secure a
livable future for humanity, which animates billions around the world,
will not be fulfilled by 100 COPs, but by building the revolutionary
tendency which can lead this class to power: the International Committee of the Fourth International and its Socialist Equality Party sections.
6. Nordic countries support imperialist preparations for war with Russia in the Arctic and Baltic
Finland’s early winter military exercises began on November 8 and will
run at various locations in the north and south of the country until
December 5. In addition to professional soldiers, conscripts and
reservists from the Finnish armed forces, personnel from NATO allies
Britain, Sweden and Poland will also participate. Underscoring that
these operations aim to prepare a northern front for waging war on
Russia, a press release from the Finnish military declared on October
30, “The exercises ensure integration of lessons identified and learned
concerning the war in Ukraine in training settings.”
*****
Since joining NATO two years ago, Finland’s 1,300-kilometre-long border
with Russia has become a major flashpoint in the imperialist powers’
drive to subjugate Russia to semi-colonial status and plunder its
natural resources. Sweden’s acceptance into the aggressive US-led
military alliance shortly afterwards helped transform the entire Nordic
region into a base of operations for war on Russia. The ruling elites in
both countries had long sought NATO membership but faced the problem of
broad-based skepticism in their populations. A sustained propaganda
campaign following the US-instigated Russian invasion of Ukraine helped
create the political conditions to implement their war plans.
*****
The military escalation against Russia has been accompanied by
sharpening tensions between the erstwhile Transatlantic allies,
expressed in Trump’s efforts to reach an accommodation with Russian
President Vladimir Putin over the heads of the European imperialist
powers and the trade war between the US and Europe. Led by Germany, the
major powers are rearming at breakneck speed, with Berlin investing some
€1 trillion in war spending as it aims to establish the largest and
most capable conventional army on the continent.
Trump’s threat to
seize control of Greenland, a Danish territory, by military force if
necessary is yet another point of conflict between the former
Transatlantic allies. The Danish government, a coalition led by the
Social Democrats and including the right-wing Liberals, has responded
with a huge expansion of military spending since the beginning of the
year. The latest announcement on October 10 included an investment of
more than €4.5 billion in additional 16 F-35 fighter jets to expand air
patrols around Greenland, on top of the 27 planes already purchased. A
further €4 billion was announced for Arctic military infrastructure,
such as drones and radar upgrades for remote parts of Greenland, and an
expansion of Denmark’s Joint Arctic Command headquarters in Nuuk,
Greenland’s capital.
*****
The military build-up throughout the Nordic and Arctic regions is being
carried out within the framework of NATO, but the European imperialists
are increasingly attempting to assert their own aggressive geostrategic
ambitions independently of the US. In October, German Defense Minister
Boris Pistorius visited Iceland to sign a letter of intent for expanded defense and security cooperation. The German navy will gain access to
Icelandic ports and logistics for its frigates, submarines and
reconnaissance aircraft for what a German Defense Ministry statement
termed “situational awareness.” Joint exercises and future cooperation
on the procurement of military technologies were also discussed.
Pistorius declared, “We are ready to assume greater responsibility for
stability and security in the High North.”
7. Stellantis and its European Opel car plants—closure by installments
Stellantis is responding to declining sales figures with attacks on its
production workers. At the Opel plant in Eisenach, where the Grandland
SUV is built, the assembly lines came to a standstill again two weeks
ago. For the second time in a month, 1,100 employees were forced to take
compulsory days off in October.
They are not the only ones: Eisenach is one of six European plants where
management halted production temporarily this autumn. In Poissy near
Paris, assembly of models such as the Opel Mokka, DS2 and DS3 was
suspended for more than two weeks; assembly lines also stopped in
Zaragoza (seven days), Tychy in Poland (nine days), Madrid (14 days) and
Pomigliano d’Arco near Naples (two weeks).
*****
When the Opel plants were transferred from General Motors to PSA in 2017, the World Socialist Web Site warned:
IG Metall and its works council reps play a central role in enforcing
cost-cutting measures. They have been involved in the restructuring
process from the beginning. Their aim is to prepare the newly created
group for the upheavals in the European car market. In times of trade
war, the unions support mergers and acquisitions that allow “their”
companies to retain only the profitable parts of production and cut tens
of thousands of “excess capacities.”
Two years later
in 2019, PSA merged with Fiat Chrysler to form Stellantis, now the
world’s fourth-largest and Europe’s second-largest carmaker (after VW),
which includes Opel, as well as Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Citroën, DS
Automobiles, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep, Lancia, Maserati, Peugeot and Vauxhall.
Since then, the World Socialist Web Site warning has been completely confirmed.
The strategy of IG Metall and the other unions in Europe—to
subordinate workers’ interests to “competitiveness” and a protectionist
nationalist policy—has in no way slowed the decline. On the contrary.
Year after year, employees have given up wage increases, Christmas
bonuses, and holiday pay. Nevertheless, thousands of jobs have been
destroyed and entire plants closed, such as the Opel plant in Aspern in
July 2024 and the Vauxhall plant in Luton in March 2025.
The
threat of closure now hangs over Opel’s Rüsselsheim headquarters in
Germany as well. The toolmaking and vehicle development departments have
already been shut down. The Rodgau-Dudenhofen test track near
Rüsselsheim, which operated for almost 60 years and was widely known
across Europe, ceased operations at the end of October. Its 70 kilometers of specialized test tracks were operated most recently by the
supplier Segula, which had taken over Opel’s ITEC technical development center that once employed 7,000 researchers and engineers. Segula itself is now insolvent.
*****
In Rüsselsheim, everyone is asking the anxious question: How much
longer before the plant closes? In July, the works council and IG Metall
agreed to an aggressive program of “voluntary” severance packages to
implement further job cuts. All measures are carried out explicitly “in
consultation with IG Metall and the Opel works council.”
The
strategy of IG Metall and the works council has proven disastrous: The
bureaucrats have neither opposed the creeping decline nor even slowed
it—rather, they have actively organized it. At the same time, IG Metall
is preventing any effective struggle by dividing workers into permanent
and temporary employees, and into those still employed and those already
dismissed.
Particularly destructive is the division and pitting
of workers of plant against plant and across borders at a time when a
Europe-wide, joint fight for every job is urgently necessary. Works
council reps and union bureaucrats do not represent workers’ interests
but those of management, shareholders, big business and the government.
IG Metall in Germany now openly supports the pro-war policy of the governing coalition of the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD) in Berlin.
While
new cars pile up unsold and Stellantis complains of an 8 percent drop
in European sales, Opel workers can no longer afford the cars they
build. Now, they are also expected to shoulder the costs of the global
tariff war and competition from East Asia, while the government pushes
through a war budget.
Stellantis workers in Canada and the United States recently committed themselves to fighting together, across borders, to defend jobs and wages.
Opposing the sellout by their union leaders—who are just as nationalist
as IG Metall—these workers are building independent rank-and-file
action committees and joining the International Workers Alliance of
Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
These autoworkers face the
reactionary MAGA policies of the Trump administration, which United Auto
Workers leader Shawn Fain also supports. On October 14, Stellantis
announced it would abandon its plan to produce a Jeep model in Canada
due to Trump’s tariff policy and instead revive production at a closed
US plant in Belvidere, Illinois. This puts workers in both countries
under pressure.
Neither the UAW nor its Canadian counterpart
Unifor did anything to stop the layoffs. Like IG Metall, these unions
act as industrial police to enforce the economic war on behalf of the
financial oligarchy. For example, UAW President Fain praised Trump’s
tariffs because they had supposedly “brought thousands of good union
jobs back to the USA.”
*****
The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP)
is fighting to build a new organizational structure of independent
action committees that can give effect to the enormous strength of the
working class. This strength consists of the many millions of workers
who create the entirety of society’s wealth.
Only in this way will
it be possible to stop and reverse the disastrous decline, to link the
struggle against mass layoffs and wage cuts with the fight against war,
based on the principle espoused by Karl Marx: “Workers of all countries,
unite!”
8. US museums face cancellation of government grants, attendance downturn and “deep uncertainty”
As part of its program of cultural counterrevolution, the Trump
administration has declared war on libraries, universities, cultural
institutions, historical sites, museums and individual scholars whose
efforts run counter to chauvinism, militarism and anticommunism.
Like the Nazis before them, Trump and his cronies reach for their guns when they hear the word “culture.”
The
latest “National Snapshot of United States Museums,” issued by the
American Alliance of Museums (AAM), provides a glimpse into the present
conditions. One of its critical findings is that one-third of museums
have lost federal funding under the new Trump regime and two-thirds of
affected institutions have not been able to replace their grant money at
all. Only eight percent have been able to fully make up for the loss of
government funding through other sources.
The AAM tries to put a
good face on the situation, asserting that despite everything, “museums
remain steadfast in serving their communities,” which no doubt is true,
but does not offer any fighting way out of the present crisis. In any
event, the depth of the crisis does find limited expression in the
recent report.
*****
These losses, the AAM asserts, have forced “difficult choices, including
deferring facility or physical infrastructure improvements; canceling
programming for students, rural communities, individuals with
disabilities, the elderly, and/or veterans; and reducing public programs
overall.”
*****
The Trump administration is accelerating its efforts to impose a US version of the Hitlerite Gleichschaltung,
“synchronization,” “coordination” or “integration,” the Nazi regime’s
effort to “bring into line” all aspects of political and cultural life
and subordinate them to the fascist state’s ideology. The devastation or
destruction of museums, which may offer views on society and history
that conflict with the official narrative, is an aspect of that program.
The
logic of the actions points toward a presidential dictatorship and the
attempt to crush dissent and independent thought. The cultural
counterrevolution is aimed at numbing and intimidating the population,
while justifying war, social inequality and fascistic attacks on
democratic rights.
9. Tensions between India and Pakistan surge after last week’s explosions in Delhi and Islamabad
Tensions have surged between India and Pakistan, which fought a
four-day war last May, following deadly explosions on consecutive days
last week in their respective capitals, New Delhi and Islamabad.
Pakistan
has blamed India for the November 11 suicide bombing outside the
Islamabad District Judicial Court complex, which killed 12 people, in
addition to the bomber, and injured dozens more.
Almost
immediately after the attack, Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif
said that it had been carried out by “Indian terrorist proxies” and
called on foreign governments to condemn “Indian state terrorism.” Defense Minister Khawaja Asif was even more explicit. He claimed the
bombing in Pakistan’s capital and a November 11 assault by five gunmen
on a Pakistan army cadet school in South Waziristan “were orchestrated
from Afghanistan, at the behest of India.”
*****
Fighting erupted between Pakistan and Afghanistan
along their disputed border last month after Islamabad mounted
airstrikes deep inside Afghanistan, targeting what it called Pakistan
Taliban bases. Only after a week and a half of border clashes and
Pakistani drone and fighter-jet missile strikes across southern and
central Afghanistan did the two sides reach a shaky truce with the help
of Qatar and Turkey.
Not coincidentally, Pakistan launched its
illegal campaign of air strikes inside Afghanistan on October 9, just as
Afghan Foreign Minister Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi was beginning a
week-long trip to New Delhi. There he met his Indian counterpart, S.
Jaishnakar, and India’s National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval, and
signed an “India–Afghanistan Joint Statement” that outlines a framework
for increased trade, humanitarian and military-security cooperation.
In
addition to ratcheting up tensions with India, Pakistan has also made
new bellicose threats against Kabul in the wake of the Islamabad bomb
attack. Defense Minister Asif said the attack shows Pakistan is in a
“state of war,” adding that “in this environment, it would be futile to
hold out greater hope for successful negotiations with the rulers of
Kabul.”
Pakistan’s relations with both India and Afghanistan are now highly
fraught, with a growing danger that renewed border clashes or even a
full-scale war could erupt at any time.
*****
Nothing that the Indian authorities—or for that matter the
Pakistani—say about terrorist attacks should be taken at face value.
Both are up to their necks in reactionary intrigues, including in
India’s case mounting a campaign of assassinations against Sikh
separatists in North America and Europe. New Delhi denies any ties to
the Pakistan Taliban or to Baluchistan ethno-nationalist insurgents
battling the Pakistani state; yet shortly prior to his nomination as
India’s National Security Adviser, Doval boasted about India’s ability
to use Baluchi separatists to neutralize Pakistan.
At Washington’s
behest under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Regan, Pakistan armed, trained and
organized the Mujahedin to fight Afghanistan’s pro-Soviet government.
Later, Pakistan’s military-intelligence apparatus used the connections
and spycraft it had developed in conjunction with the CIA to further its
own strategic conflict with India in Kashmir.
The dispute over
Kashmir, like the broader India-Pakistan strategic conflict of which it
is part, is a product of the reactionary 1947 communal partition of the
subcontinent into an expressly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu
India. Partition was carried out by South Asia’s departing British
colonial overlords in connivance with rival factions of the national
bourgeoisie led by the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League.
Both
India and Pakistan have run roughshod over the democratic rights of the
Kashmiri people. In 2019, to fulfill a long-time goal of the Hindu
supremacist right and strengthen India’s hand against China and
Pakistan, the Modi government stripped Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir
of its special autonomous constitutional status and reduced it to a
central government-dominated Union territory. At the same time, it spun
off the strategic Ladakh region into a separate Union territory to
facilitate its transformation into a forward base of military operations
against Beijing.
*****
The predatory actions and ambitions of US imperialism are a critical
factor in the heightening geopolitical tensions in South Asia and the
danger of a catastrophic war. Under successive presidents, Republican
and Democratic alike, Washington has worked to transform India into a
frontline state in its military-strategic confrontation with China. This
has included giving New Delhi special status in the world nuclear
regulatory regime, access to high-tech US weapons and real-time
intelligence during its ongoing border conflict with China.
Faced
with an increasingly aggressive India, Pakistan has doubled down over
on its “all weather” military-strategic alliance with Beijing. This has
only heightened tensions with New Delhi and Washington and further
enmeshed the Indo-Pakistani and US-China conflicts.
American imperialist support has emboldened New Delhi to take an ever
more provocative stance against Pakistan. Last May’s military clash
with Pakistan was the largest in decades and saw India for the third
time since 2016 demonstratively mount a cross-border attack on its
western neighbor, even at the risk of provoking a broader war.
However,
to New Delhi’s shock, Washington has in recent months taken steps to
significantly improve relations with Pakistan, on the calculation that
it can induce it to downgrade ties with Beijing. Even as it has done so,
it has taken aggressive steps to punish India for its large-scale
imports of Russian oil and continued close strategic ties with Moscow.
*****
The sudden turns in US foreign policy under Trump—as he flails about for
a means through trade war, massive military spending increases and
preparations for war around the globe from Venezuela and the Middle East
to Russia and China to extricate US imperialism from an ever
accelerating decline—are only fueling tensions in South Asia, making war
whether by design or miscalculation more likely.
Meanwhile, Munir and the Pakistani military, encouraged by Trump’s
support and the apparent restoration of relations with the Pentagon,
have moved to tighten their grip over Pakistan’s civilian government.
Last week, in the immediate aftermath of the Islamabad suicide bombing,
Pakistan’s parliament bowed to pressure from Munir and adopted a series
of laws and a sweeping constitutional amendment that constitute nothing
less than a “soft” coup.
As a result of these changes, even
nominal civilian control over the armed forces has been abolished, and
Munir has been given a five-year appointment to the newly created
position of Chief of Military Defence Forces (CMDF). Under the 27th
amendment to Pakistan’s constitution, the CMDF has full authority over
all three branches of Pakistan’s military and its nuclear arsenal. He is
also guaranteed immunity for life from criminal prosecution.
10. Marburg virus disease confirmed in Ethiopia amid regional instability
The first documented outbreak of Marburg virus disease (MVD) in Ethiopia
was confirmed this month in Jinka, a market town in the South Ethiopia
Regional State that functions as a commercial hub with active
cross-border movement from South Sudan and Kenya. A suspected case of
viral hemorrhagic fever was initially reported to Africa Centres for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on November 12, 2025. Ethiopia’s
Ministry of Health confirmed MVD on November 14 following molecular
testing at the Ethiopia Public Health Institute (EPHI). Sequencing
indicated that the virus is genetically similar to previously identified
East African strains.
*****
The first documented outbreak of Marburg virus disease (MVD) in Ethiopia
was confirmed this month in Jinka, a market town in the South Ethiopia
Regional State that functions as a commercial hub with active
cross-border movement from South Sudan and Kenya. A suspected case of
viral hemorrhagic fever was initially reported to Africa Centres for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on November 12, 2025. Ethiopia’s
Ministry of Health confirmed MVD on November 14 following molecular
testing at the Ethiopia Public Health Institute (EPHI). Sequencing
indicated that the virus is genetically similar to previously identified
East African strains.
*****
... In severe cases, multi-organ dysfunction, shock, and death follow eight
to nine days after symptoms begin, often due to profound blood loss.
*****
Jinka, the administrative center of the Ari Zone and gateway to the
Lower Omo Valley, sits at the crossroads of a region grappling with
severe political instability. Recurrent armed conflict and civil unrest
in Amhara, Oromia, and Gambella have disrupted humanitarian access,
strained basic health services, and eroded the state’s capacity to
detect and contain emerging infections. These pressures converge with
widespread economic distress, mass displacement, and simultaneous
outbreaks of malaria, cholera, and measles. An estimated 21.4 million
people require humanitarian assistance. Jinka’s proximity to South Sudan
further heightens the risk of cross-border spread, given South Sudan’s
profound state fragility and near-total health system collapse.
*****
Historically, the Marburg virus emerged sporadically. The first known
outbreak in 1967 in Germany and the former Yugoslavia produced 31 cases
and 7 deaths, traced to imported African green monkeys from Uganda.
Cases occurred in 1975 in South Africa (linked to exposure in Zimbabwe)
and in two outbreaks in Kenya during the 1980s associated with
bat-inhabited caves. A major resurgence in the mining town of Durba in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1998 to 2000 resulted in 154
cases and 128 deaths, with an average interval of about eight years
between outbreaks from 1967 to 2000.
A profound shift began in the
twenty-first century. The 2004–2005 Angola outbreak remains the largest
on record, with 252 cases and 227 deaths. Uganda experienced three
outbreaks between 2012 and 2017. From 2020 to 2025, seven outbreaks
occurred—including first-ever events in Guinea (2021), Ghana (2022),
Equatorial Guinea (2023), Tanzania (2023 and 2025), Rwanda (2024), and
Ethiopia (2025). The interval between outbreaks has collapsed to less
than one year, placing the 2020s on track to surpass all previous
decades combined. This surge reflects fundamental shifts in ecology,
surveillance, and the socioeconomic crises reshaping the African
continent.
*****
Although no licensed Marburg vaccine exists, the Sabin Vaccine
Institute, in collaboration with the US National Institutes of Health
Vaccine Research Center, has developed a promising candidate that uses a
chimpanzee adenovirus vector. Phase two trials are underway in Uganda,
Kenya, and multiple US sites, with additional emergency deployment in
Rwanda’s 2024 MVD outbreak, where more than 1,700 doses were
administered within days, largely to healthcare workers.
While the
development of effective countermeasures marks an important advance,
vaccines alone cannot overcome the political violence, economic
pressures, environmental disruption, and global inequities that continue
to drive Marburg’s emergence.
11. United States: Ammonia leak spreads gas cloud in Weatherford, Oklahoma, sends 34 to the hospital
A chemical disaster unfolded in Weatherford, Oklahoma on Thursday
when a tanker truck carrying 25,000 pounds of anhydrous ammonia began
leaking its contents behind a Holiday Inn Express.
The incident
precipitated a mass emergency response, with dozens suffering severe
health injuries. The chemical leak forced the evacuation of over 500
area residents as authorities scrambled to contain and investigate the
deadly vapor cloud.
Photos and videos were posted online showing a thick plume of the
chemical that had engulfed the parking lot of the Holiday Inn Express.
The
tanker truck is owned by Airgas Specialty Products based in
Lawrenceville, Georgia. The anhydrous ammonia onboard also belonged to
Airgas, a major supplier and distributor of industrial gases in the
region. Airgas confirmed its involvement and stated that its crews have
been on-site, coordinating with authorities on environmental monitoring
and cleanup efforts.
*****
Local authorities report that Weatherford Police and fire personnel
first received 911 calls around 10:00 p.m. from the semi-truck’s driver,
who discovered the ammonia leak in the parking lot behind the hotel.
Mechanical
failure in a gasket or valve is believed to have leaked the ammonia in
large quantities, forming the toxic cloud that blanketed both the
Holiday Inn and adjacent residential blocks. Residents within the
evacuation zone east of Washington Street and north of Main Street were
woken by first responders going door to door or by shelter-in-place
alerts sent to their phones.
Public schools and businesses within
the affected radius—including Southwestern Oklahoma State
University—were ordered closed as firefighters and hazardous material
crews worked through the night to dilute the gas and monitor air
quality.
More than 500 residents were evacuated to emergency
shelters as officials established incident command posts and used
approximately 2.4 million gallons of water to suppress vapors and flush
out the contamination. Federal agencies such as the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) were involved in the response and are reportedly
conducting an investigation. No details or preliminary findings of the
investigation were available at the time of this writing.
*****
The human toll of the exposure was widespread. Thirty-four
individuals were treated for serious injuries at Weatherford Regional
Hospital, with eleven in critical condition and five airlifted to trauma
centers in Oklahoma City.
Dozens more suffered respiratory
distress, burns, or loss of consciousness, including first responders.
Hundreds remain displaced as the cleanup continues.
Anhydrous
ammonia is highly effective as a fertilizer that helps farmers grow food
and replenish nutrients in the soil. As a fertilizer, it provides
essential nitrogen for plants, and industry experts report that it must
be handled with a high level of safety awareness and care.
Ammonia gas is both corrosive and highly irritating to all exposed
tissue. Inhalation typically causes immediate coughing, throat and chest
pain, respiratory distress, and burning of the eyes and airways.
Substantial exposure—like that which occurred in Weatherford—can result
in chemical burns, laryngeal swelling, pulmonary edema, and risk of
death from airway obstruction or lung injury.
*****
The Weatherford incident is the latest in a troubling history of
anhydrous ammonia leaks associated with transport and industrial
disasters in the United States. Among the major events is the 2004
pipeline rupture near Kingman, Kansas, which released over 200,000
gallons of ammonia, killing more than 25,000 fish and forcing mass
evacuation.
In other cases, failure to quickly notify the public
or take proper precautions contributed to widespread environmental and
health damage. Between 1,500 and 2,000 chemical transport accidents
involving hazardous materials like ammonia occur each year, with the
Department of Transportation estimating that many stem from inadequate
packaging, labeling, or employee training.
*****
Oversight of ammonia and other chemical transportation lies primarily
with the Department of Transportation (DOT) and its Pipeline and
Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). PHMSA develops safety
regulations covering the classification, handling, packaging, and
emergency response protocols for all hazardous chemicals moved by road,
rail, and pipeline.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety
Administration (FMCSA) also plays a role by enforcing standards for
drivers and vehicle safety. The EPA assists during active emergencies by
monitoring contamination and coordinating cleanup efforts, as occurred
in Oklahoma.
For years, the World Socialist Web Site has
warned about the catastrophic consequences of undermining the US
chemical safety infrastructure, especially the Trump administration’s
attack on any government oversight of corporate practices and the
removal of any restrictions that reduce profitability.
12. “Why are people dying?”: Postal worker speaks out on death of Nick Acker
Many questions remain unanswered in the week since the death of Nick
Acker, a 36-year-old maintenance mechanic at the Allen Park USPS Detroit
Network Distribution Center (DNDC) on November 8. While no official
cause of death has been released, his coworkers are continuing to speak
out about what they know. Workers are demanding answers and an end to
the constant pressure to keep the mail machines running at all cost.
Nick
arrived at work around 11:00 p.m., but his body was apparently not
recovered until 12:30 p.m. the following day. Firefighters told local
media that he had been dead for six to eight hours before he was found.
One of Nick’s coworkers, John, whose name has been changed to protect
his identity, contacted the World Socialist Web Site with information on his death, confirming other reports from workers that the machinery that killed him should not have been running.
*****
He described the relentless pressure applied to postal workers by
higher-ups to keep the mail machines running and the disregard for basic
safety measures to make that happen. “Even me, I have this internal
dialogue like, ‘Oh, this is petty. I’m being petty by wanting to be safe
here.’ And sure, 99 times out of 100, these situations we’re dealing
with are pretty benign, but the thing is, safety should just be the
culture. It should be just the way that we do things.”
“If you’ve got a problem with the machine or mail is stuck,” John
said, “then you shut down the machine, you lock it out, you get your
partner, you go up, you deal with it, you unlock the machine, you come
down. But that’s all considered a pain in the ass because we’ve got this
pressure to keep the plant moving, and that’s our job as mechanics. We
keep the machines in orderly fashion. We repair them, and we clear any
problems during operation. So it can be a real struggle, and sometimes
there’s only two [maintenance mechanics] in a plant that I think is
nearly one million square feet.”
“A few months ago, we got a new
plant manager,” he continued. “When he took over, that’s when this
culture really took a turn for the worse. It’s always been kind of shady
in the safety department there, but not as bad as now.
“They
wanted to run the plant as they were bringing Nick’s body down! They
didn’t give anybody any time off. They’ve never had any conversations
with us about it, about what they’re gonna do, how things are gonna be
different, if we’re safe, or to reassure us. There’s been none of that.
So it’s toxic there right now. It’s real bad.”
*****
John wanted to speak directly to postal workers about the issues they
are confronting. “Working at the Post Office is a really unique job,”
he said. “We don’t have a CEO. We don’t have stock shareholders. Our
shareholders are the American people. I genuinely think that the Post
Office feels that the American people want their mail at all costs, and I
think that that is not correct. I think that the American people would
rather have their mail tomorrow and have everybody safe.
“There’s
this toxic environment at the Post Office from these higher-ups because
their pay is based on incentives. A plant manager gets a bonus based on
production numbers and all these other factors. Postmasters, it’s the
same thing.
“For us workers, there is a devotion to making the
mail go and getting the American people their packages. I don’t do it
for my boss. I don’t do any of this for my boss or anybody that’s above
me. I do this for the American people, because I think that what we do
as a service is super important, and it’s time-tested and true
throughout our history. I think it’s really important, and most people
feel that way who work here. But the higher-ups are always not gonna
care about us.
“So the message I really want everybody to hear
is: You’re not gonna lose your job ever over being safe and taking care
of yourself. Why are people dying? It’s a very important job but nobody
should be miserable at work. And nobody should die. Us postal workers
across the country have to take care of ourselves and our coworkers at
all costs, because nobody else is going to do it for us.”
*****
Workers attended a meeting of the International Workers Alliance of
Rank and File Committees (IWA-RFC) on Sunday afternoon to discuss a
strategy to fight against unsafe working conditions, layoffs and hunger.
Another postal worker from Pennsylvania joined the meeting and spoke on
Nick’s death, as well as the deaths of mail carriers due to lack of air
conditioning in extreme heat.
Nick’s horrific death is the
product of a system that prioritizes profit over the lives and safety of
workers. Workers around the world spoke on this at the IWA-RFC meeting
and are beginning to draw the necessary conclusions.
The fight to
uncover the truth about Nick’s death and to prevent future tragedies
requires the building of rank-and-file committees in every workplace,
democratically controlled by workers themselves and independent of the
union apparatus.
13. Japan’s new far-right PM threatens war with China over Taiwan
In the month since coming to office, Japan’s far-right-wing Prime
Minister Sanae Takaichi has sharply escalated tensions with China,
particularly over the issue of Taiwan. Recent comments by the prime
minister openly demonstrate that Tokyo is preparing for war against
China.
On November 7, while speaking to the National Diet’s lower house
budget committee, Takaichi discussed a situation in which Japan’s
military, formally known as the Self-Defense Forces (SDF), could be
dispatched against China. If Beijing were to impose a military blockade
around Taiwan, she said, “No matter how you think about it, it could
constitute a survival-threatening situation [for Japan].”
She
stated, “Simply lining up civilian ships to make passage difficult would
not be a survival-threatening situation. If it is a wartime blockade,
with drones flying and various other developments, then the situation
could be seen differently.” She also added that an attack on US warships
attempting to break a blockade could also justify dispatching the SDF.
The
carefully-chosen phrase, “survival-threatening situation,” is a legal
term bound up with Japan’s remilitarization. Japan is barred from waging
war overseas by Article 9 of its constitution, informally known as the
pacifist clause. In 2015, the government of then-Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe, from whom Takaichi draws her political inspiration, rammed military
legislation through parliament despite mass anti-war protests. It
allows Japan to go to war so long as these deployments can be justified
as “collective self-defense” in a so-called “survival-threatening
situation.”
According to its latest Defense Ministry White Paper, Tokyo defines a
“survival-threatening situation” as one “where an armed attack against a
foreign country that is in a close relationship with Japan occurs,
which as a result, threatens Japan’s survival and poses a clear danger
of fundamentally overturning Japanese people’s right to life, liberty
and pursuit of happiness.”
This deliberately vague definition
could be used to justify any number of military actions and there is
nothing defensive about Tokyo’s position. Takaichi is the first sitting
Japanese prime minister to explicitly state that Japan would go to war
with China over Taiwan. In doing so, she is building on the positions of
her predecessors, who, while speaking more vaguely, claimed that a
conflict over the island would threaten Japan’s economic interests and
be a danger to its islands in the East China Sea. Japan’s Yonaguni
Island is just 110 kilometers east of Taiwan.
*****
Beijing fears that if Taiwan declared independence, it would set a
precedent for a further carve-up of Chinese territory, recalling the
division and subjugation of China by the imperialist powers in the 19th
and early 20th centuries. Taiwan would also quickly become a US military
base posing a threat to mainland China along with existing bases in
Japan and South Korea, which are home to approximately 80,000 US troops
in total.
US imperialism regards China’s economic rise as the
chief threat to its global domination and is prepared to resort to any
means, including military, to subordinate it to US interests. Japanese
imperialism, which has slipped from the world’s second largest economy
to fourth, is likewise determined to prevent its eclipse by China. The
two allies are deliberately undermining the “One China” policy as a
means of goading China into military action against Taiwan, in a similar
manner to how the US and NATO provoked Russia into war in Ukraine.
*****
Beijing’s relations with Tokyo quickly deteriorated last week. China’s
Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian last Monday criticized Takaichi for
“seriously damaging bilateral ties and challenging the post-war
international order” while conducting “blatant interference in China’s
internal affairs.” The People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist
Party’s official newspaper, published a commentary on Thursday, stating,
“The Taiwan question is the core of China’s core interests.”
*****
A war over Taiwan would not take place in a vacuum. The US is already
conducting a war against Russia in Ukraine while also backing Israel’s
barbaric genocide of the Palestinian people, and using it to justify
bombing Iran in June. Trump is now on the verge of launching another
illegal war against Venezuela, having amassed an armada off the South
American coast. Amid all of this, Trump is seeking to undermine China by
carrying out an economic war against it. The outbreak of hostilities in
the Indo-Pacific would mean a major new front in what is rapidly
evolving into a world war.
14. Australia: Queensland Teachers Union stages token rallies instead of strike
Instead of a promised strike, for which its members had voted, the
Queensland Teachers Union (QTU) held after-school rallies in some places
across the state last Thursday. The official QTU line of these rallies
was to appeal to the right-wing Liberal National Party (LNP) Premier
David Crisafulli to “intervene in our ongoing pay dispute.”
A QTU media release last Friday claimed that members had turned out
“in huge numbers” to “call on this government to provide fair pay and
working conditions that value teachers and school leaders, address the
teacher shortage crisis, and keep us safe at work.”
The rallies were a “huge success,” according to the “members’ newsflash.” This is a fraud.
First
of all, pleading to the government is a political dead end—and a
preparation for a rotten sellout. Teachers voted last month by nearly 68
percent to reject a government “best and final” pay offer.
This
vote was also a blow to the QTU leadership, which had endorsed the deal
in an October 27 “campaign update,” falsely describing it as an
“improved offer.”
That offer was for an 8 percent nominal pay rise
over three years, far below the latest official inflation rate, which
sat at 5.2 percent a year in the most recent September quarter.
Secondly,
the truth is that the QTU’s bankrupt appeal to Crisafulli attracted few
teachers to the main rally outside the state parliament building in
Brisbane.
About 400 people, counting various trade union
bureaucrats and politicians, attended the event. That was tiny compared
to the more than 4,000 teachers who crammed into a Brisbane auditorium
on August 6, during the first strike called by the QTU for 16 years.
That
strike, which won widespread support among students and parents, and
throughout the working class, was meant to be just the first of a
“series of 24-hour strikes,” for which teachers had voted. But the QTU
then “paused” industrial action and finally called off a strike last Thursday.
*****
During the week, the QTU spent undisclosed amounts on advertisements
in newspapers across the state, urging Crisafulli to “Step up Premier,
and be the leader you promised to be.”
This pitch to Crisafulli and his LNP government must be another warning of preparations for a sellout.
It also comes as teacher unions across the country face growing unrest
among educators, reflected in stoppages by teachers in Tasmania and
protests in Victoria, against Labor and Liberal-National governments
alike. But the union bureaucrats nationally, represented by the
Australian Education Union (AEU), have opposed any unified struggle.
The
AEU is backing the Albanese federal Labor government, which is starving
public schools and universities of adequate funding, while pouring
billions of dollars into military spending for the AUKUS pact against
China, backing the Gaza genocide and supporting the US-NATO war against
Russia in Ukraine.
The Committee for Public Education (CFPE), the
educators’ rank-and-file network, is urging teachers to draw the lessons
of these experiences and set up their own committees to organise
independently of the trade unions. Rank-and-file committees are needed
across the public sector, and throughout all workplaces, to take up the
fight against intolerable conditions and the preparations for war.
15. United Kingdom: Residential doctors begin strikes against Labour government and real-term pay cuts
Fifty-thousand resident doctors employed by the National Health Service (NHS) in England began a five-day strike Friday in
pursuit of a pay increase. The strike is the 13th walkout out since the
doctors first took action in March 2023 against the then Conservative
government to address years of pay erosion, with the lowest paid doctors
on just £14 an hour.
The resident doctors (previously known as
junior doctors) also demand an adequate number of training places be
made available by government, with 30,000 doctors applying for just
10,000 places this year. Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s offer of just
1,000 more training places means that thousands of qualified doctors
will still not be able to get an NHS job.
The strike followed the breakdown in talks last month between the
Labour government and British Medical Association (BMA). Streeting has
refused to budge an inch, refusing demands that the pay of resident
doctors be increased to a level which reverses years of pay restraint.
Instead, he has imposed a take it leave it offer of 5.4 percent for the
2025-26 financial year.
In rejecting the offer, the BMA stated
that under its terms “pay erosion against RPI [Retail Prices Index
inflation measure] will be at 21%. Or, put another way, resident doctors
are still working more than a fifth of their time for free. A pay
uplift of 26 percent is needed to reverse it.”
*****
Streeting has support from across the political spectrum, with Labour government-supporting Guardian
columnist Polly Toynbee denouncing the resident doctors in a column
headlined, “This week’s doctors’ strike is another test of Wes
Streeting’s mettle. He is right not to buckle”. Praising Streeting rock
bottom offer of a 3.6 percent pay deal for nurses, midwives and
physiotherapists, Toynbee wrote, “The doctors have done better than
others, which is why Streeting can’t and won’t give in.” She claimed
that Streeting “has been eager to settle with them but has been snubbed
by the BMA’s ungracious haste to strike.”
The pro-Conservative Telegraph
saluted the health minister in a piece published Saturday, “Wes
Streeting vs the toxic union behind Britain’s doctors strikes”, lauding
him for “not hiding his contempt for militant BMA bosses”. The newspaper
cited a former NHS trust chairman, Martin Gower, denouncing the
“extremely militant” BMA who “clearly don’t give a damn whether anyone
dies because of their strikes, or indeed how many die because of their
strikes.”
Streeting became the Telegraph’s poster boy
for his pledge—when in opposition to the ruling Tories—to implement NHS
cuts and to escalate its privatization in defiance of workers he
denounced as “obstacles” to his “reforms”. He received glowing praise
for a glut of right-wing statements including, “We are not going to have
a something-for-nothing culture in the NHS with Labour”; “I’m not
prepared to pour money into a black hole”; and the NHS is “a service,
not a shrine,” which is “going to have to get used to the fact that
money is tight”.
The Telegraph’s latest endorsement comes
amid speculation that Streeting is priming a leadership bid to replace
Prime Minister Keir Starmer, with Labour’s support polling at record low
levels.
*****
The struggle by resident doctors must be the spearhead of a fight by
all NHS workers fighting for a living wage and better conditions. But
this cannot be won under a leadership seeking a change in course from a
government operating as the tool of big business pledged to austerity
and public spending cuts—and a ruling elite which wants an end to a
public health service freely available to all, with an annual budget of
around £200 billion.
NHS FightBack,
initiated by the Socialist Equality Party, calls on all health workers
to defend resident doctors and take the fight into their own hands. We
call for the building of a network of rank-and-file committees across
every hospital, trust, and department, independent of the union
apparatus, democratically controlled by workers and committed to the defense of pay, conditions, and patient care.
16. UK resident doctors speak from the picket lines: “It's about us making a stand for the future of the NHS”
Resident doctors spoke with World Socialist Web Site reporters on the picket lines at hospitals around England on Friday at the start of a walkout for five days in the National Health Service (NHS). The doctors are fighting for pay restoration and tackling widespread unemployment in the profession.
Those
gathered on the picket lines under pouring rain explained the reasons
why they were renewing the strike against the Starmer Labour government
with discussion over the NHS FightBack statement widely circulated, “Make resident doctors’ strike a united NHS fightback against the Starmer government” .
Doctors stressed the same core issues: pay that has fallen sharply in
real terms, impossible workloads, and a training system locking out tens
of thousands of fully qualified doctors while patient waits grow longer
and services deteriorate. They described an NHS starved of staff and
resources, with creeping privatization and a government refusing to
provide the funding needed to sustain a safe, functioning health
service. The strike, they made clear, is a fight to defend both their
future as doctors and the future of a publicly funded NHS for all. There
was also opposition expressed to social inequality and the wealth of
the billionaires, the growth of the extreme right and scapegoating of
immigrants, the Gaza genocide and billions being diverted for war.
*****
NHS FightBack is holding a Zoom meeting on Tuesday November
18 at 7 p.m., “Defeat Starmer–Streeting Budget Cuts and Privatization”.
We encourage resident doctors and all NHS workers to attend; Register here.
17. UK Leonardo and BAE Systems workers strike for pay rise
More than 3,000 aerospace workers at weapons manufacturer Leonardo
struck Wednesday and Thursday after rejecting a revised pay offer. The
Unite members struck at sites in Yeovil, Luton, Basildon, Newcastle and
Edinburgh. Further strikes are being held to November 28.
The
strikes went ahead eight days after Unite called off action, just hours
before an initial round of strikes were to go ahead from November 5.
Workers were originally offered a pay deal of just 3.2 percent from
Leonardo, a company raking in huge profits—with the CPI rate of
inflation at 4 percent and RPI at 4.5 percent.
Unite gave no details at the time of the “improved offer” under which it
tried to end the dispute. It was no such thing, as Leonardo workers
proved in rejecting it. The initial pay offer was for just 3.2 percent
for Year 1 and 3 percent for Year 2 with a potential RPI trigger to 4
percent (below where RPI is at now!). The second offer was just 3.6
percent for Year 1 and 3.75 percent for Year 2. This equates to a pay
deal of under 3.7 percent for each year, well below rising inflation.
*****
Leonardo is seeking to preserve its position as one of the largest
global arms manufacturer and over €1.5 billion euros profits on revenues
of nearly €18 billion. The company produces helicopters, aircraft,
aerospace parts, electronics and cybersecurity products at its 129 sites
worldwide and employs over 60,000 workers.
*****
In the knowledge of Unite’s long record of ending token strikes with
sellout deals of their members, Leonardo responded, “We welcome Unite
back to the negotiating table in a bid to reach a resolution.”
Unite
played a central role in ensuring that workers employed by arms
companies in the UK were not mobilized against the Starmer government’s
complicity in Israels’ genocide in Gaza—in which Leonardo have played a
key role. Leonardo’s Edinburgh factory manufactures parts for Apache
helicopters and components used in the laser targeting systems for F-35
fighter jets, with the plant repeatedly targeted by anti-war activists.
Leonardo’s
helicopter manufacturing facility is vital to its revenues and profits.
In a July 2024 press release Leonardo noted of Yeovil, “Since 2013,
Leonardo has generated almost £6.8 billion in helicopter exports from
the UK to customers across North America, Asia-Pacific, Europe, and
North Africa. This includes over £500 million of export sales in 2023.”
Shoring
up future profits from the Starmer government in defense contracts is a
central issue for Leonardo and is being weaponized in the current
dispute.
*****
Unite openly declares a “Buy British” agenda and seeks to dragoon its
members behind a cross-class campaign claiming that workers in the arms
industry have the same interests as the firms that employ them. South
West Regional Officer for Unite, Shevaun Hunt told the BBC, “The strike
isn’t going to impact the government’s decision [on a new helicopter
contract] but our message is very clear to the government—Yeovil is the
home of British Helicopters.”
This corporatism chimes perfectly
with Leonardo’s boast that it is the “only company… in the New Medium
Helicopter competition that has the skills and infrastructure onshore to
provide a ‘Made in Britain’ helicopter to the UK Armed Forces”.
Unite
has tens of thousands of members who are employed by the arms
manufacturers and their supply chain and is working overtime to ensure
there is no joint offensive against them. Britain’s largest arms
company, BAE Systems, is seeking to hold down pay offering just a 3.6
percent rise in September. This after BAE Systems raked in over £5.7
billion in profits over the past two years, with shareholders in line to
receive £1.5 billion in dividends this year.
*****
Unite’s action is designed to do the least economic damage possible
to a company it has maintained the coziest relations with, under
conditions in which it provides 15 percent of the components for F-35
fighter jets dropping 2,000lb bombs on Gaza.
The token action at BAE Systems confirms the pro-forma nature of the motion the bureaucracy allowed to pass at Unite’s Policy Conference in August,
as anger mounted among workers at the Starmer government’s complicity
in Isreal’s genocide in Gaza. Presented by the United Left faction as
backing a workers’ boycott of arms supplies to Israel, the motion
avoided any direct reference to the UK-based arms firms enabling these
war crimes—especially BAE Systems. No mention was made of targeting any
specific Unite-organized workplaces involved in the manufacture or
shipment of weapons.
Leonardo and BAE Systems workers cannot leave
their struggle in the hands of the union bureaucracy. Rank and file
committees, acting outside the control of the union bureaucrats, would
be able to make contact with other workers in key industries—including port workers throughout Europe—to stop the flow of British arms to Israel and defeat the Starmer government’s complicity in the genocide.
18. 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.
