Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Death toll in Hong Kong fire rises to 94, hundreds still missing
The fire that destroyed seven high-rise residential buildings in Hong Kong is nearly extinguished, after burning for more than 36 hours. At 9 a.m. Hong Kong time, the Fire Department announced that 94 people had died and 76 were injured.
Those numbers will only continue to rise. The number of missing has not been updated by authorities in 24 hours and still stands at 279. It is now the worst fire in Hong Kong’s history since a warehouse fire in 1948 killed 176 people.
The Wang Fuk Court apartment complex in Tai Po caught fire in the mid-afternoon on Wednesday. The complex was under renovation. Like so much of the rest of Hong Kong its buildings were encased in bamboo scaffolding and green mesh netting. The immediate cause of the fire has not yet been uncovered, but once it began, it tore through the scaffolding and netting that surrounded the structures at breathtaking speed, engulfing seven towers in the conflagration.
Surviving residents report that fire alarms did not go off. The windows were encased in highly flammable Styrofoam. An elderly survivor told the press that his home had been entirely dark, the windows covered from the outside with Styrofoam. He had glimpsed the fire through a chink in the Styrofoam covering his bathroom window and managed to evacuate. Others would not have seen the fire at all.
Prestige Construction and Engineering Company, the firm in charge of building maintenance at the estate, appears to have used illegal, unregulated materials, including Styrofoam and flammable mesh. The Hong Kong Labour Department only keeps a record of the past two years’ infractions by companies on its website, but even in this limited window, Prestige was convicted of two safety offenses on other construction sites in November 2023. It was operating 11 ongoing construction projects at residential estates.
Police arrested two company directors and one consultant from Prestige Construction on suspicion of manslaughter. They seized bidding documents, a list of employees, and computers and mobile phones during a raid on the construction company’s offices.
Flame-resistant mesh costs $HK90 per sheet, flammable mesh, illegal on any building over four stories, costs $HK50. It is probable that illegal cost-cutting measures, designed to save $HK40 (about $US4.50) per sheet, rapidly spread the fire through seven of the eight Wang Fuk towers.
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The Labour Department reported that it had warned Prestige of fire hazards at Wang Fuk Court a week before the blaze. On three occasions, warnings of labour safety violations were issued since July last year.
This begs the question: why was nothing done? What is the significance of repeated government warnings if, when no changes are made, the only outcome is additional warnings. While details remain murky, it is clear that there was, at a minimum, a great deal of government laxity in corporate oversight and regulation, if not outright complicity in the violations.
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At least one Filipino and two Indonesian maids died in the fire. At least eight migrant workers are still missing, according to the Asian Migrants Coordinating Body. The actual numbers are doubtless higher. Facebook posts among the domestic worker community contain appeals to locate those who are missing along with the infants for whom they cared.
Scores of domestic workers are reported as having survived according to their consulates and are now in evacuation shelters. Their visas are contingent upon employment and they will almost certainly be sent home by the Hong Kong government.
Over a thousand residents now reside in evacuation centers and emergency shelters, sleeping on the floor. Many are still frantically inquiring after missing loved ones. There has been an outpouring of support from ordinary people throughout Hong Kong, supplying donations and coordinating aid.
Government aid to the victims has so far been paltry, bordering on insulting. City chief executive John Lee Ka-Chiu pledged that the government would create a $HK300 million ($US39 million) fund to assist the victims, including a cash handout of $HK10,000 to each household. That is the equivalent of one month’s rent for a 300-square foot unit. To move into a unit in Hong Kong requires paying first and last month’s rent, a one-month security deposit, and half a month’s rent to the realtor, three and half times the amount of aid the government is offering.
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The housing crisis is one of the defining social features of Hong Kong, which is consistently one of the most expensive cities in the world. Seven and half million people live in about 80 square kilometers of housing. The hourly minimum wage in Hong Kong is $HK42.1 [approximately $US 5.41] an hour, having gone up just $HK2.1 in 2025, a rise of about 27 US cents.
The housing crisis in Hong Kong is not the product of overpopulation, but of extreme inequality and real estate speculation.
Hong Kong is home to a significant segment of the world’s mega-rich. The rich live in multi-story homes, sometimes even entire medium-rise buildings dedicated to a single family. A single wealthy family may employ 20 or 30 domestic workers: drivers, nannies, cooks, a crew for the yacht. They live on the Peak, or the finance district of Central, they shop for Gucci and Prada in the malls of Tsim Sha Tsui, the most expensive real estate in the world. Maserati and Lamborghini sports cars are not an uncommon sight on the streets of Hong Kong, a city with a highly efficient public mass transit system, where it is difficult to ever drive more than 60 kilometers an hour.
Meanwhile, 220,000 people live in rented spaces, known as “cage homes,” that are smaller than the standard Hong Kong parking space. The number of such subdivided units is growing, particularly in older, working class neighborhoods like Sham Shui Po. A small electric fan and a rice cooker at the foot of the bed, stacks of neatly folded clothes and other slight mounds of possessions sit atop the sheets in the windowless rooms. Each bed space is enclosed in a cage that can be locked when the resident is away from “home.”
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The system of public housing in Hong Kong began after another catastrophic fire in the slums of Shek Kip Mei on Christmas Day in 1953 that left 53,000 people homeless. Needing to shelter the working population, and feeling the ideological and political pressure of the victorious Chinese revolution just across the border, the British colonial government created tenement housing, allocating 120 square feet to each unit, with a system of communal restrooms and wash areas. These were homes, but their architecture resembled prisons.
Current subsidized housing rents at about 30 to 40 percent below market rate, but market rate is among the most expensive in the world. It takes an entire month’s income for a family to pay for subsidized housing; they must live, pay school expenses for children, save for college, conduct their lives out of a second or third income.
Grief over such catastrophes turns to anger. As it is for the working class around the globe, the social and economic conditions in Hong Kong are explosive, and outrage is coming to the surface.
2. European governments oppose any negotiated settlement to Ukraine war
US President Donald Trump’s attempt to negotiate a settlement of the US-NATO war with Russia by striking a deal with Moscow has met with fierce resistance in Europe and is destroying the transatlantic alliance with the US. The days when the US was considered a “partner” are irrevocably over.
Trump has “finally ruined America’s reputation as a reliable and reasonable ally,” wrote Berthold Kohler, editor of the German daily F.A.Z. The fact that Kiev now has to kowtow to Trump is “the punishment for having been grossly negligent in ensuring its own security by making itself dependent on an unreliable partner.” French President Macron was right “in calling for strategic autonomy,” which must now be pursued much more consistently.
There is agreement on this in the most important European capitals. But the pursuit of “strategic autonomy”—the building of armed forces that are equal to the formidable American military machine and capable of continuing the war against Russia—is incompatible with the social conditions that have long dampened class antagonisms in Europe. It puts fierce class struggles on the order of the day.
“Strategic autonomy” requires the transfer of gigantic sums from social to military budgets, the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs in the international trade war and the reintroduction of conscription. Parents must once again prepare to “lose their children,” as French army chief Mandon recently said. In short, “strategic autonomy” requires the “Trumpization” of Europe.
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After the war, the United States rescued European capitalism, which had been completely discredited. At that time, the German bourgeoisie sat covered in blood from head to toe on the ruins of the war it had instigated. The bourgeoisie of Italy and France had collaborated closely with the Nazis. There was a widespread conviction within the working class that capitalism had failed and had to be abolished.
Two factors prevented the overthrow of European capitalism. The first was the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow, which used its influence over the Communist parties to nip any revolutionary initiative in the bud. The second was the US, which needed Western Europe as a bulwark in the Cold War against the Soviet Union and as a market for its products, and helped European capitalism back on its feet with the Marshall Plan.
Today, the US is not a stabilizing factor in world politics but the greatest destabilizing factor. The richest country in the world has become the most indebted. American imperialism is trying to extricate itself from its crisis by imposing punitive tariffs on opponents and allies, threatening them militarily and declaring war on its own working class. This did not begin with Trump but with Ronald Reagan. It continued under Democratic and Republican successors and has reached a new dimension with Trump.
The crisis of US imperialism is not only driving American but also European society towards a revolutionary confrontation. As Trotsky wrote a hundred years ago, “American capitalism is revolutionizing overripe Europe.” The social mechanisms and political institutions that restrained the class struggle in the past are collapsing under the pressure of American punitive tariffs, the profit demands of the financial markets, and the enormous costs of rearmament.
Good education, adequate healthcare, high wages and secure pensions are things of the past. Reformist unions and parties have turned themselves into stooges of capital. Pseudo-left parties such as Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, the Left Party in Germany—and Mamdani in New York—fall into line as soon as they are elected to government office.
The bankruptcy of the social reformist parties has allowed right-wing demagogues to capitalize on growing discontent. But that is beginning to change. The mass protests against Macron’s pension reforms in France, the large demonstrations against the Gaza genocide in Britain and Spain, and the current general strikes in Belgium, Italy and Portugal demonstrate this.
This movement does not yet have a revolutionary character. It is dominated by traditional trade unions, syndicalist grassroots unions and pseudo-left groups. It remains stuck in the illusion that pressure can force the ruling class to change course. But workers and young people are learning fast. The failure of protest politics makes them receptive to a revolutionary, socialist perspective—if it is systematically fought for.
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The conflict with the US is not welding Europe together but exacerbating rivalries between the European powers. The reconciliation between the “arch-enemies” Germany and France, which fought three costly wars against each other within 75 years, was less due to the insight of Adenauer and de Gaulle than to pressure from the US. Today, Paris and Berlin agree on rearmament and continuing the war against Russia—but neither wants to cede leadership in Europe to the other.
A deal between Putin and Trump would not end the Ukraine conflict. It would only be another step on the road to a third world war. Real peace can only be achieved through the independent intervention of the international working class to put a stop to all warmongers.
3. Canadian imperialism plans to militarize the “whole of society” in preparation for global war
Canada’s Liberal government, led by the blue-chip executive and central banker Mark Carney, plans to militarize the economy and embed the armed forces in all areas of social life. This goal was underlined by the allocation of vast new sums in this month’s federal budget to building up the armed forces and Canada’s military-industrial base, and by the recent revelation that Ottawa is planning to create a massive 300,000-strong military reserve for deployment in an emergency.
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The only “sacrifice” possible in a capitalist society in which profits are extracted from the labor power of the working class and appropriated as private profit is the complete subordination of the working class to austerity and war. Alongside its imperialist allies in the United States and Europe, Canada’s ruling class is planning to wage a war or wars of aggression against Russia and China by 2030. This will require a massive increase in the rate of exploitation of labor, as the economy is reorganized for rearmament and war, and the state suppression of strikes and other form of working-class opposition.
There is no significant opposition to this incendiary agenda within the ruling class. All are agreed that Canada must be a protagonist, as it was in the two world wars of the last century, in a new imperialist partition of the world, so as to lay claim to markets, resources, production networks and geostrategic influence.
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Faced with global trade war and mounting layoffs across Canadian industry, the government is touting military spending as a key component of its strategy to “grow” the economy. What a fraud! Rearmament will be paid for through massive social spending cuts and tax rises, will embolden the ruling class in hurtling to the precipice of global war, and only further enrich the arms merchants and various politically well-connected operators.
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he Carney government’s 2025-2026 budget, which parliament approved earlier this month thanks to the connivance of the New Democrats, Greens, and trade union bureaucracy, is meant to kick-start a massive decade-long hike in Canada’s military spending.
In just the current fiscal year, the Carney government has increased defense spending from 1.4 to 2 percent of GDP. But it is also vowing to quickly go far beyond that and hike Canada’s defense expenditure to 5 percent of GDP or $150 billion annually by 2035.
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A further $20.4 billion will be directed towards recruitment of new soldiers and the retention of existing ones through pay raises. The lowest ranks will see their pay increase from $43,368 to $52,044 annually. To put this in its proper, class perspective, the top 100 CEOs whose dominant social position these soldiers will be defending with their lives earn an average of $62,660 in a single day.
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The Ottawa Citizen’s David Pugliese has revealed the existence of a heretofore secret “Mobilization Plan” to enlist up to 300,000 civil servants and civilians into the Canadian Armed Forces “Supplementary Reserve” force. This force currently consists of a mere 4,384 retired or former CAF soldiers. The organized reserves are also to be dramatically expanded to 100,000 from 23,500 today.
These unprecedented plans would put 1 percent of Canada’s population under military command. They are being undertaken entirely behind the backs of the public. The mobilization plan was “signed by Chief of the Defense Staff Gen. Jennie Carignan and defense deputy minister Stefanie Beck on May 30, 2025,” according to Pugliese.
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This poses the question; what foreign provocations is Canadian imperialism planning, along with Washington and their NATO allies, that would result in a missile strike on Canadian soil? The answer is not hard to find. The Canadian military has been at the forefront of imperialist operations against Russia. Canadian forces lead NATO’s international military brigade in Latvia, and have armed and trained Ukraine’s right-led military, including helping to integrate pro-Nazi militia under Operation UNIFIER. Canada is also deeply integrated into the preparations of the US, and its chief Asia-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia, for war with China.
In recent months, Carney has worked closely with Paris, London, and Berlin in the “coalition of the willing” that the principal European imperialist powers have created to ensure the NATO-instigated war on Russia continues. Last week, the head of France’s military, General Fabien Mandon declared that France must be “ready to lose its children,” and “suffer economically” if it is to prevail over Russia. These remarks were met with public outrage, but were defended by French President Emmanuel Macron and his government.
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Military leaders in the imperialist countries are unabashed in demanding a so-called “Whole of Society approach” to fighting wars. According to the CAF’s Mobilization Plan, this requires the creation of a “servant culture around sovereignty and public accountability” that “will necessitate shaping, facilitation and engagement with the Privy Council Office, other government departments and agencies as well as socialization with the Canadian public.”
Translated into plain English, this means that the Canadian government plans a massive propaganda campaign to force the working class to accept its war of choice. The government’s model in this fascistic endeavor is Finland, “a recognized leader in this area.”
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The working class must break decisively with these warmongers, and build its own independent, revolutionary socialist leadership, the International Committee of the Fourth International, and its Canadian section, the Socialist Equality Party, so as to put an end to capitalism and the threat of a catastrophic global conflagration.
Berlin-based Italian artist Costantino Ciervo is no stranger to controversy. Over the past four decades, the self-proclaimed political artist and socialist has created artworks that address the plight of some of the most exploited sections of the working class—undocumented workers in Italy, migrants who have died crossing the Mediterranean and the persecution of the Palestinian people. In the course of his work he has often encountered the indifference or even the hostility of cultural institutions.
However, the reaction to his latest exhibition, “COMUNE—The Paradox of Similarity in the Middle East Conflict,” came from an unexpected source. In his introductory speech to the audience attending the exhibition’s opening at the Fluxus Museum in Potsdam (on the southwest border of Berlin) on November 15, the curator of the museum, Tamás Blénessy, expressed his vehement opposition to the content of the exhibition, which seeks to encourage debate and shed light on the background to the persecution of the Palestinian people by Israel and the imperialist powers led by the United States. The World Socialist Web Site has dealt with the content of the exhibition in a previous article.
The artist on conflict in Palestine:
"In my opinion, the only answer is a one-state solution, a federation of two populations living together in one state giving full freedom to two different historical and cultural traditions, based on social equality. I have sought to express this concept in the exhibition in the form of a sewing machine that sews the outline of Palestine from 1917, and in the middle, the territory occupied by Israel. The steady diminution of Palestine at the hands of Israeli expansionism during the past 75 years to the tiny rump state of Gaza and some villages in the West Bank is shown in the background to the portraits on show in the exhibition."
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The artist on his creative technique:
"My approach is metaphorical. I took an existing person from the internet, a photo of a Palestinian, and told the AI to make a copy of this person as a twin, but the characteristics in terms of clothing and symbols should not be so Palestinian but rather Jewish. I want to show that while they differ in their clothing, with regard to their physical and facial features, they are siblings, that in essence, as fellow humans beings living in societies under the same stress and pressure, they have more in common than in mere appearance. The source of their differences is external, in particular, the priorities of the major imperialist powers which seek to divide in order to maintain their rule."
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The artist on AI:
"I think highly of the idea. The problem with AI is private ownership. As long as AI exists and is developed in private hands—I’m talking about people like Sam Altman, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and worst of all, Peter Thiel, a billionaire who owns platforms like Palantir, a powerful company that provides its services to the secret services in the US, for example. AI must be taken out of private ownership and put into the hands of the working class and the exploited. It must be transparent, it must be open source, so that knowledge remains transparent and is used for progressive purposes. And this includes building a new platform, for example, to specifically disseminate Marxist ideas, which are often misused or misrepresented."
5. Germany’s all-party coalition for a war budget
The German parliament, the Bundestag, is debating the 2026 federal budget this week, which is due to be adopted on Friday. As we wrote in an earlier article, it is a war budget.
Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (Social Democrat-SPD) can spend more than twice as much money as last year. While the defense budget stood at €52 billion in 2024, it will rise to €108 billion in 2026. Two-thirds of this will come from the regular budget, one-third from the €100 billion “special fund” approved at the start of the Ukraine war.
But this is only the beginning. According to official financial planning, the defense budget is to rise to €162 billion by 2029, amounting to 3.5 percent of GDP. By then it will be financed entirely from the regular budget. In addition, a further €500 billion will flow over the next five years from the “special fund for infrastructure”–which, like Hitler’s autobahn (motorway) construction once did, is designed above all to make roads, railways and bridges “fit for war.” In this way, Germany is preparing to continue the war against Russia independently of the United States as well.
These colossal sums are being financed through increased national debt. Of the €525 billion total budget for 2026, €98 billion will come from new loans. Added to this are a further €83 billion from the two special funds, bringing total new borrowing to a record €180 billion. Business associations and political parties are unanimous that workers, pensioners and the poor will ultimately be made to pay.
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The growing opposition of the European working class to their governments’ policies of war and cuts was the real elephant in the room during the entire general debate. While MPs were speaking, a general strike paralyzed Belgium in protest against the government’s austerity budget there. In Italy and Portugal, similar general strikes are planned for the coming days. In London, parliament was simultaneously debating the Starmer government’s new austerity budget that brutally slashes social benefits.
The growing resistance of the European working class creates the conditions to stop governments’ policies of war and social devastation. But to succeed, it must be united internationally and armed with a socialist program to overthrow capitalism.
6. Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, known as H. Rap Brown in the 1960s, dies in federal prison at 82
Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, the fiery speaker and agitator known as H. Rap Brown when he led the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee down the path of black nationalism in the 1960s, has died in prison at the age of 82.
Al-Amin, serving a life sentence without parole in connection with the shooting death of an Atlanta sheriff’s deputy in 2000, died in a North Carolina prison hospital. He was reportedly ill with multiple myeloma. Al-Amin had consistently maintained his innocence in the murder case and had appealed the conviction twice, most recently in 2019. He is survived by his wife of 53 years and his two sons.
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H. Rap Brown became one of many figures associated with the civil rights struggle who attracted the attention of the FBI, then headed by the notorious racist and red-baiter J. Edgar Hoover. This was the period in which the COINTELPRO program was used to heavily infiltrate the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and also to infiltrate the Black Panthers and set up the murders of such figures as Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago in 1969. Other Panther leaders were killed or jailed. H. Rap Brown’s name was attached to a 1968 act of Congress entitled “H. Rap Brown Federal Anti-Riot Act,” making it a crime to “incite, organize, promote or encourage” a riot. Brown had not played any public role in the rebellions that had swept Northern and Western cities, including Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles, but the racists and right wingers in Congress ignored that fact. Brown told the press at that time, quite accurately: “We don’t control anybody. … You don’t organize rebellions.”
The targeting and harassment of Brown continued and was intensified from that time, provoked in part by his incendiary language as head of SNCC. He was convicted of robbery in 1971 and, though insisting on his innocence, served five years of a 5- to 15-year sentence at the infamous Attica Prison in upstate New York.
It was there that the former SNCC leader converted to Islam. When he emerged from prison, his name had been changed to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. He moved to Atlanta, Georgia, establishing a mosque, opening a small grocery, raising a family and becoming well-known for community work of various kinds.
The FBI campaign against Al-Amin never ended. After the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, he was questioned but not charged. In 1995, he was actually arrested in connection with a shooting case but released after the main witness admitted that he was pressured to incriminate Al-Amin or else face jail himself. According to documents later uncovered by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the FBI sent paid informants into Al-Amin’s mosque in an effort to link him to various crimes, including the drug trade and 14 murders. Again, despite the huge effort and expenditure, no charges were forthcoming.
Finally, in 2000, after a heavily-armed group of police descended on his home in the dark of night to serve a warrant on a relatively minor charge, the authorities nailed their target on a murder charge. One sheriff’s deputy was killed and another was slightly wounded. The wounded deputy testified that Al-Amin was the killer, although the defense pointed out numerous holes in the prosecution case. The witness claimed that he had shot Al-Amin in the stomach, for instance, but when the defendant was arrested four days later, there was no sign of a wound or of blood on his clothes. There were other contradictions, but the prosecution secured a conviction, although the jury mandated a life sentence instead of a the death penalty.
During his trial in 2002, Coretta Scott King was among numerous prominent figures who expressed concern that Al-Amin would not receive a fair trial. Among them was Andrew Young, the former mayor of Atlanta and one of the leading figures in the political establishment. An advertisement in the Atlanta newspaper along similar lines was signed by folksinger Pete Seeger, Congressman and former SNCC leader Julian Bond, poet Sonia Sanchez and others.
All the evidence, beginning from the murders of the 1960s and continuing through the revelations of the role of Cointelpro, the harassment of Al-Amin in particular, and the shaky evidence at his 2000 trial, points in the direction of a frame-up. As Al-Amin himself declared, in an interview from prison with the New York Times on the eve of his 2002 trial: “The F.B.I. has a file on me containing 44,000 documents. At some point they had to make something happen to justify all the investigations and all the money they’ve spent.”
The phrase perhaps most often associated with Al-Amin is that violence is “as American as cherry pie.” It is somewhat ironic that his death occurs almost simultaneously with the airing of Ken Burns’ latest series, The American Revolution. The 12-hour program depicts, among other things, the extreme violence of the revolutionary struggle conducted by the American colonies against the British King George III from 1775 to 1783. Al-Amin was not wrong in recognizing the reality of violence and above all the responsibility of the oppressor for this violence. His program, however, was a bankrupt and reactionary one. It rejected socialist internationalism in favor of black nationalism. Nevertheless, Al-Amin’s death requires a reaffirmation of the need to defend democratic rights in the face of the reactionary onslaught of a decaying social order.
7. Australia: Thousands of Queensland teachers join second one-day strike
On Tuesday, thousands of teachers across the Australian northern state of Queensland joined their second 24-hour strike and protest rallies in less than four months.
But at the rallies they were offered no perspective by union officials except to keep appealing to right-wing Premier David Crisafulli for an unspecified deal or accept arbitration, which will prohibit any further industrial action on their fight against low pay and intolerable conditions.
This is the first time since 1997 that two stoppages have been held, highlighting the severity of the crisis facing teachers, as well as the mounting difficulty that the Queensland Teachers Union (QTU) bureaucrats are having in containing the anger and concerns of educators.
At the strike rally in Brisbane, the state capital, QTU leaders told the 2,000 teachers who joined the event that the strike could have been avoided if only Crisafulli had picked up the phone.
For weeks, the union bureaucrats had pleaded for an agreement from him for a below-inflation 3 percent interim pay rise and a narrowing of issues to be determined by arbitration in the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission (QIRC).
The Liberal National Party (LNP) government has dismissed these pleas, however. Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek told the media that the government was keen to begin the arbitration process, and the strike would make no difference.
QTU officials are trying to prevent debate and suppress opposition by teachers to their repeated efforts to impose another sellout agreement with the state government, just like those under the previous state Labor government from 2015 to 2024, that will do nothing to address the poor wages and onerous workloads, and the resulting severe staff shortages.
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Similar discontent with pay and conditions is brewing among teachers nationally, including stoppages and protests in Tasmania and Victoria. But the QTU and other teacher unions, all affiliated to the Australian Education Union (AEU), are trying to keep the struggles isolated to individual states.
The union bureaucrats want to avoid a conflict with the federal Labor government, which is continuing to systematically underfund public schools, while pouring billions of dollars into AUKUS and other preparations for war.
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In pleading for a deal with the government, the QTU bureaucrats have refused to specify any demands on salaries or conditions. In their negotiations for a new agreement with the government, they are adhering to “interest-based bargaining” (IBB) which junks the previous union process of submitting a log of claims. Instead, it consists of “exploring the common interests” with management and devising means of satisfying those interests at workers’ expense.
This is a corporatist partnership. It takes to a deeper level the enterprise bargaining system that was imposed by the Keating Labor government and the unions during the early 1990s, to split the working class into individual workplaces, ban most industrial action and subordinate workers to the profit demands of “their” employers.
The IBB process is another stage in the decades-long transformation of the unions into industrial policing agencies, functioning as nothing but instruments for helping to inflict the agenda of the corporate elite on their members.
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The Committee for Public Education (CFPE), the educators’ rank-and-file network, urges teachers to set up their own school committees, independent of the Labor and trade union machine. Across the working class, these committees can initiate a political fight against the subordination of all human needs, including education, to the profit demands of big business.
8. Australian Labor government demands deeper austerity cuts
Recent developments show that the Albanese Labor government is increasingly cutting essential social programs—including public hospitals, disability services and science. It is seeking to meet the demands of the corporate elite for cuts and higher productivity, while pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into military spending in preparation for war.
In the government’s latest move, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher’s department ordered federal departments and agencies to provide details of spending cuts worth up to 5 percent of their annual budgets. This cost-cutting, to be imposed in just the next 12 months, is in addition to a mandatory 1 percent annual “efficiency dividend.”
The demand for 6 percent budget savings in one year will inevitably mean cuts to jobs and services. According to a report in the Australian Financial Review, departments are already reducing their workforces through natural attrition and freezes on hiring for non-essential roles. The relatively small Treasury department plans to cut 250 jobs, or 15 percent of its workforce, over two years. Much larger cuts are likely for the big health and social services departments.
Key government departments, including Health, Climate and Energy, Social Services and Attorney-General’s, have reportedly sounded the alarm in their briefs to ministers, warning of budget cuts as large as 50 percent in coming years and asking where they should plan to cut workers.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Gallagher are preparing to deliver a mid-year budget update in December, endeavoring to meet corporate demands for “budget repair” to reduce projected deficits totaling around $40 billion a year for the next decade, according to Parliamentary Budget Office estimates.
“Budget repair” is a euphemism for axing social and health programs as part of an agenda of austerity under conditions of anemic economic growth of less than 2 percent a year, historically low levels of corporate investment and the global volatility fueled by the Trump administration’s tariff war and slowing economic growth rates.
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Labor’s war-related spending is accelerating. This year’s budget, issued in March, committed Labor to increase military outlays to nearly $59 billion this financial year, or about 2.04 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), rising to $74 billion or around 2.23 percent of GDP in 2028–29. The AUKUS military pact with the US and Britain, directed against China, requires the expenditure of at least $368 billion by Australia over a decade.
Nonetheless, the ruling class is demanding that the government step up its measures. A November 24 editorial in the Australian Financial Review declared the necessity to “make the economy more productive and resilient” to “withstand and respond to global shocks.” This will mean an accelerated offensive against the jobs and conditions of the working class and deeper cutbacks to social spending.
9. Elevated Australian inflation rules out further interest rate cuts
Australian home buyers battling to pay off mortgages have no possibility of even any limited relief through a cut in interest rates for the foreseeable future. The latest inflation numbers released on Wednesday have taken that prospect off the agenda and made it likely that the next move will be up rather than down.
The annual inflation rate in the year to October jumped to 3.8 percent, up from 3.6 percent in September, well above the Reserve Bank of Australia’s (RBA) target range, with a major factor being the 37.1 percent increase in electricity prices following the withdrawal of subsidies by state governments.
The biggest increase in the index was housing, up by 5.9 percent, which includes the cost of electricity as well as rent and building costs. But this figure is a vast understatement because it does not include the cost of mortgage payments. They are excluded because the cost of buying a home, putting a roof over the head of one’s family, is considered a capital expenditure item, not a current expense.
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Echoing the recent call by the International Monetary Fund for greater fiscal discipline and advancing the demand for social spending cuts, an Australian editorial said that “reliance on taxpayers to pay for everything from childcare to more HECS debts, health, aged care and National Disability Insurance Scheme services comes at a price—inflation, higher interest rates and higher tax.”
As with all such calls, it did not even mention the major increases in government spending on the military as the Labor government integrates itself more deeply into the war preparations by the US against China.
The betrayals that shaped Tanzania’s postcolonial trajectory cannot be understood outside the international struggle waged by the Trotskyist movement against Pabloism, a revisionist and opportunist current that emerged within the Fourth International led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel.
The revolutionary upsurge that followed the catastrophe of the Second World War shook both Europe and the colonial world. In Europe, large sections of the bourgeoisie, discredited by their collaboration with fascism, would have been unable to reestablish their power and stabilize capitalism without the decisive political intervention of the Stalinist bureaucracy and the economic might of US imperialism.
Moscow instructed the Communist parties in France, Italy, and Germany to support bourgeois governments, disarm the resistance fighters, and suppress any independent initiative of the working class. In Greece, Stalinism ensured the victory of the bourgeoisie in the civil war by withholding vital support from the workers and partisans who had fought the Nazi occupation. These betrayals saved European capitalism from collapse and allowed it to reassert its grip on its colonies.
It was in this context that Pabloism arose within the Fourth International. Confronted with the temporary stabilization of capitalism and the creation of deformed workers’ states in Eastern Europe, Pablo abandoned Trotsky’s insistence on building independent revolutionary parties of the working class. He called for dissolving Trotskyist organizations into the “mass movements” led by Stalinist, nationalist, or petty-bourgeois forces. Any attempt to characterize such movements by their class nature, he insisted, reflected “old-type Trotskyist immaturity.” Trotskyists must integrate themselves “unconditionally” into national-liberation movements even when these were bourgeois in leadership.
The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) was founded in 1953 in opposition to this revisionism. Led by James P. Cannon of the American Socialist Workers Party, Gerry Healy of the British Socialist Labour League (SLL), and Pierre Lambert of the French Internationalist Communist Party, the ICFI defended the program of Permanent Revolution and the need to construct independent Trotskyist parties.
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While recognizing that leaders like Nyerere, Nkrumah, Mboya, Nasser, or Nehru could strike harder bargains with imperialism, Trotskyists insisted that they acted as buffers between imperialism and the mass of workers and peasants. “The dominant imperialist policy-makers both in the USA and Britain recognize full well that only by handing over political ‘independence’ to leaders of this kind […] can the stakes of international capital and the strategic alliances be preserved in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”
For Marxists, the decisive question remained the political independence of the working class, secured through the building of a revolutionary socialist party. The SLL concluded:
It is not the job of Trotskyists to boost the role of such nationalist leaders. They can command the support of the masses only because of the betrayal of leadership by Social-Democracy and particularly Stalinism, and in this way they become buffers between imperialism and the mass of workers and peasants. The possibility of economic aid from the Soviet Union often enables them to strike a harder bargain with the imperialists, even enables more radical elements among the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaders to attack imperialist holdings and gain further support from the masses. But, for us, in every case the vital question is one of the working class in these countries gaining political independence through a Marxist party, leading the poor peasantry to the building of Soviets, and recognizing the necessary connections with the international socialist revolution.”
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The SLL insisted that no solution could emerge from within the confines of bourgeois nationalism or Stalinism. “Other nationalist groups making more radical demands will only be driving a harder bargain with imperialism, not fighting to smash it.” The only viable perspective lay in “A Marxist leadership, basing itself on the working class”, one that would consciously link the African revolution with the struggles of workers in the imperialist centers.
The elevation of bourgeois nationalism by Pabloism to the role of revolutionary leadership cut off the most militant layers of the anti-colonial movement from the program of Permanent Revolution. The fragmentation of Africa into more than fifty states along colonial borders was not the “inevitable” outcome of a bourgeois-democratic stage, but the direct product of the counterrevolutionary role of Pabloism.
Today, the ICFI’s defense of Permanent Revolution stands vindicated. Nationalist movements like the MPLA, FRELIMO, the ANC, the FLN, KANU, ZANU-PF, once hailed by the Pabloites, have all demonstrated their bankruptcy. They have either collapsed, been overthrown, or survive as ruling elites presiding over regimes enforcing IMF austerity, privatization, and the violent suppression of workers and rural masses. Trotsky’s warning that history would “not leave one stone upon another” of the old Stalinist and social-democratic parties now applies equally to the national-liberation movements.
The fight waged by the ICFI remains decisive: the struggle for genuine national liberation and socialism in Tanzania, as in every country, requires the construction of a revolutionary Marxist party rooted in the working class and oriented to world socialist revolution.
11. Attendees speak on London public lecture by David North, and announcement of Socialism AI
World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke to some of those who attended the Socialist Equality Party event held in London on November 22,“The American Volcano: Towards Fascism or Socialism”.
12. United Kingdom: Corbyn’s Your Party bars World Socialist Web Site reporter from founding conference
The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has been barred from reporting at the founding conference of Your Party in Liverpool on November 29-30. Our application was refused Wednesday evening with a message which read:
Dear applicant,
Thank you for your interest in attending the Founding Conference of Your Party. Unfortunately, your application has been unsuccessful.
We have a limited capacity for media in the ACC, and sadly that means we are not able to approve accreditation for all those who apply.
You will be able to follow debates on a livestream via our social media - so keep a look out for that.
Kind regards,
Your Party Press TeamThis is a risible justification. The ACC is an enormous complex, hosting the M&S Bank Arena with a capacity of 11,000; the Exhibition Centre Liverpool with 8,100 meters squared of subdivisible floorspace; and the BT Convention Centre with a 1,350 seat auditorium, a further 3,725 meters squared of floorspace and 21 breakout rooms.
Yet apparently no space can be found for a single journalist from the WSWS, recognized internationally as an authoritative source of Marxist comment, analysis and news reporting. Published since 1998 and available in over 30 languages, the site has a regular readership of hundreds of thousands of socialist-minded workers and young people from every continent.
While blocking the WSWS, Your Party officials have made space for the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, two of Britain’s leading right-wing tabloids. Both newspapers confirmed Your Party has accredited their reporters. During the 1930s, workers dubbed Viscount Rothermere’s newspaper The Daily Heil due to its support for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The Express promotes the most vile and fascistic forms of anti-immigrant racism.
The BBC, the Guardian, and countless other media organisations that have been at the forefront of witch-hunting the left, including through manufactured claims of “left-wing antisemitism”, will doubtless be present. The denial of press credentials to the WSWS is an act of targeted political exclusion carried out by the Corbynite apparatus which runs Your Party.
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For all their fraudulent claims to “openness”, “accountability” and “doing politics differently”, the Corbynites in the leadership, led by Jeremy Corbyn himself, are ferociously hostile to this sort of scrutiny. Unable to justify their political positions and actions, they resort in time-honoured fashion to the methods of bureaucratic censorship and exclusion.
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Despite Your Party’s efforts, the WSWS will be reporting on the founding conference in the coming days. In the meantime, we encourage workers and young people to read the coverage its organisers wish they could stop:
- Corbyn’s new left party—What it is and what it isn’t
- Corbyn’s new party and the lessons of Syriza
- Corbyn and Sultana’s new party—In their own words
- Zarah Sultana’s bid for leadership of Britain’s new left party: “Corbynism capitulated”
- The UK’s “Your Party” implodes—build the Socialist Equality Party
- Zarah Sultana speaks in Sheffield as Britain’s pseudo-left reaffirms full support for Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party
- Corbyn’s “Your Party” reboot at The World Transformed: Europe’s pseudo-left politicians display their bankruptcy
- An open letter to supporters of Corbyn’s Your Party
- Your Party’s factional warfare: The real issue for workers is reformist delusions or revolution
Messages of protest to Your Party demanding the overturn of their ban on the WSWS should be sent to: press@yourparty.uk
13. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Nigeria:
South Africa:Health workers in Gauteng march to demand funding for collapsing healthcare system
Tunisia:Doctors walk out over health system in decline
Security guards at Cape Town building project strike over wage arrears
Security guards at Cape Town building project strike over wage arrears
Europe
Belgium:
Workers in fourth general strike this year to protest government austerity cuts
Italy:
Metalworkers strike and demonstrate against major job losses as government seeks buyer for main steel producing company
Kosovo:
Public broadcast television workers strike after weeks without pay
Portugal:
Thousands of public service workers strike against proposed anti-worker legislation
Spain:
Primary health and care workers in Galicia strike and protest for improved pay and conditions
United Kingdom:
Tate gallery staff strike over inadequate pay offer
Hospitality workers in Glasgow, Scotland set to begin five-week stoppage over pay and conditions
Further strikes by Transport for Greater Manchester workers over pay
Hospitality workers in Glasgow, Scotland set to begin five-week stoppage over pay and conditions
Further strikes by Transport for Greater Manchester workers over payIran:
Protests continue across country over deteriorating living standards and social conditions
14. 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.
