Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Naming names: Who are graduate student strikers up against at Harvard University?
The strike by 4,000 graduate student workers that began Tuesday, April 21, is not simply a local contract dispute. It is a fundamental collision between academic workers, who are members of the Harvard Graduate Student Union–United Auto Workers (HGSU-UAW), and a self-selected oligarchy of finance capital that runs and effectively owns Harvard University.
The material reality of the graduate workers is a damning indictment of the capitalist university and its board. Teaching Fellows (TFs), who perform the essential labor of instruction, earn a miserable $18 to $21 per hour. In the hyper-inflated Boston economy, these academic workers are routinely driven to apply for food assistance and visit food pantries.
Standing in obscene contrast is the Harvard Corporation, the steward of a $53.2 billion endowment managed by the Harvard Management Company—a financial behemoth that serves as a clearinghouse for global markets and the military-industrial complex.
The President and Fellows of Harvard College, known as the Harvard Corporation, are the university’s true governing power and its highest fiduciary authority. Far from a benign board of trustees, it functions as a superstructural institution where the interests of the imperialist state and finance capital are fused. Its composition reveals a “Committee of Capital” that manages ideological production as an extension of their corporate portfolios.
2. Trump Justice Department indicts Southern Poverty Law Center in frame-up to aid fascist groups
In a politically motivated frame-up by the Trump administration, aimed at criminalizing the exposure of fascist and white supremacist organizations, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday a criminal indictment targeting the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The SPLC has waged legal and political battles to expose criminal actions by fascist groups, beginning with the Ku Klux Klan during the civil rights era.
The charges, announced by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel, turn the SPLC’s use of informants inside violent far-right groups into a supposed fraud against donors, under conditions in which the Trump administration itself is packed with fascist operatives and is seeking to rehabilitate the very forces the SPLC has exposed for decades.
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The cynical character of the prosecution was underscored by the statements of Blanche and Patel themselves. Announcing the indictment, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche accused the SPLC of “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.” Patel claimed the organization used donor money to “actually pay the leadership of these supposed violent extremist groups.” The indictment alleges more than $3 million in payments between 2014 and 2023 to eight individuals tied to groups, including the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi organizations.
But Blanche’s own answer to a reporter exposed the falsity of his claim. When asked about the government’s legal theory, and specifically whether the indictment alleged that these payments benefited the organizations themselves, Blanche admitted that it did not. “To the extent that there’s any link between that individual receiving the money and benefits to that organization, that’s not in the indictment,” he said.
In other words, the administration’s headline accusation, that the SPLC was effectively funding fascist organizations, is not what the indictment actually says. The government’s theory is narrower and more cynical: not that it is illegal to pay informants but that the SPLC did not spell out to donors and banks exactly how its informant network functioned.
This is a fraud case built on innuendo. The administration tells the public that the SPLC was funding neo-Nazi and Klan organizations, while its own acting attorney general admits the indictment does not allege that the money benefited those organizations as such. The real issue for the government is that the SPLC maintained informants inside fascist groups and concealed their identities and payment channels, precisely the sort of method routinely used by the FBI and other state agencies.*****
While the Trump crime family gorges itself on bribes, it seeks to criminalize those who expose the fascist activities of their close political supporters, including the fascist groups that spearheaded the assault on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021.
The indictment dovetails with the broader “Stop the Steal” mythology promoted by Trump, Alex Jones and other far-right figures, who claim that the presence of informants at right-wing events proves that these movements were manufactured by the FBI, “Antifa,” the Democratic Party, the SPLC or other supposed enemies. This is an inversion of reality.
The presence of informants in organizations, such as the Oath Keepers, before January 6 did not prove that the coup was a set-up. It demonstrated that the state had warnings about the scale of the violence, and that powerful elements within the police, military and intelligence apparatus refused to act because they were sympathetic to Trump’s effort to overturn the election.
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The SPLC was founded in 1971 by Morris Dees, Joseph J. Levin Jr. and Julian Bond, at a time when the late stages of the civil rights movement were still marked by Klan terror, church bombings and murders that had gone unanswered or unpunished by the state. The organization became known for litigation that bankrupted or disrupted fascist and white supremacist groups, including the United Klans of America in the 1980s and the White Aryan Resistance in the early 1990s. That history is what the Trump administration is seeking to reverse. Its message is that exposing fascists is itself criminal, while racist thugs and murderers are to be recast as victims.
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The most sinister element of the indictment is its implicit claim that fascist groups were not the organic product of American capitalism, racism, militarism and the decay of bourgeois democracy but were somehow “manufactured” by liberal organizations that monitored them. This is the same conspiracy theory used to explain away January 6. It seeks to whitewash the growth of fascism by claiming that those who documented, infiltrated or exposed fascist organizations were responsible for creating them.
Under conditions in which the president openly threatens to “wipe out” whole countries, neo-Nazis and Christian nationalists direct state policy, and the police and military apparatus is being mobilized against immigrants, protesters and workers, the prosecution of the SPLC marks a further stage in the destruction of democratic rights. The target is not merely one organization. The indictment is a warning to every journalist, civil rights group, researcher and political opponent of the Trump administration: Exposing fascism will be treated as a crime, while the fascists themselves are rehabilitated as victims.
3. United States: Oppose the attempt to silence freedom of speech at Carroll Community College!
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at Carroll Community College (CCC) denounces the college’s recently instituted policy restricting students’ and faculty members’ freedom of expression by placing bureaucratic control over the voicing of political perspectives on campus. As the youth organization of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States, we also strongly denounce CCC’s effort to bar our supporters from its campus on unconstitutional grounds.
This policy and others like it represent a violation of free speech against an entire generation politicized by a world historic crisis. Youth have witnessed in real time the genocide of the Palestinian people backed by American weaponry; ICE agents terrorizing cities and abducting immigrants without due process; and a fascist president, Donald Trump, with open aspirations to dictatorship. Now an unprovoked war on Iran, launched in flagrant violation of international and domestic law, is devastating civilian populations.
As the American ruling class prepares the next phase of war on Iran and confrontation with Russia and China, the foundation is being laid for the reimposition of the draft—clearing the way for bloodshed unseen in generations.
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CCC’s policy is not an isolated incident. A wave of anti-democratic restrictions has swept colleges in the wake of mass student opposition to the Gaza genocide. The University of Maryland enacted a similar policy following historic campus protests. In 2024, the Northern Virginia home of two students in the George Mason University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine was raided by the FBI, the club was banned for a year, and the students were effectively expelled.
Across the United States and internationally, administrations have moved to suppress free speech on campus, hiding behind distorted claims of “disruption,” unfounded allegations of “antisemitism” leveled at anti-genocide protesters, and other pretexts.
These developments cannot be separated from the Trump administration’s accelerating drive toward dictatorship. Having already established the precedent of slashing federal funding to universities that resist its directives, the administration cut grants, froze funds, and imposed punitive measures in 2025 to force compliance with its “national priorities.”
Carroll Community College depends on state and federal funding, as well as investment from local wealthy donors, to operate. Its administration understands that permitting genuine free speech on campus—speech that challenges the existing order—could have financial consequences.
The “Freedom of Expression and Public Assembly” policy is the result: a mechanism granting CCC administrators final authority over what political views may be expressed on campus, dressed up as a measure to protect student safety and institutional operations. It does not protect students or workers. It protects the class of billionaire criminals ruling society, increasingly opposed by students and workers.
4. Growing number of potential flashpoints in global financial system
Stablecoins are a form of crypto currency which supposedly provide greater stability because they are tied to an asset, generally the US dollar. The use of stablecoins has been boosted with their promotion by the Trump administration, which last year saw passage of the so-called Genius Act giving them an official stamp of approval by setting up regulations for their use.
But according to the BIS chief the growing use of stablecoins “opens up new avenues for tax evasion.” There are estimates, he said, that stablecoins now account for most illicit transactions within the crypto system.
On their broader implications for the monetary system, he noted: “If widely adopted in their current form, stablecoins would pose policy challenges in several key areas, ranging from credit provision to monetary policy.”
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The issue of the role of stablecoins and their potential to cause financial disturbances is part of a broader discussion in financial circles about what could trigger the next global financial crisis.
In the question-and-answer session during a Harvard economics class on March 30, US Fed chair Jerome Powell was asked precisely this question. His answer focused not on immediate subjects of concern, such as the role of private credit, the possibility that the massive investments in AI are a bubble which will burst or immediate problems of liquidity in credit markets, but on the longer-term stability of the US reflected in the inexorable rise in its debt.
“It will not end well if we don’t do something fairly soon,” he said.
According to Powell, the present level of debt of $39 trillion, having risen from around $9 trillion in 2007 on the eve of the global financial crisis, was sustainable but the rate of increase was not.
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Others share Powell’s views on the rise of US debt which is threatening the status of the US dollar and Treasury bonds as the safe haven for the global financial system.
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The war against Iran has increased interest rates at the longer end of the market and that is set to continue as the Trump administration plans to increase military spending by 50 percent to $1.5 trillion in 2027.
“We are seeing Treasury yields going up again,” Metrick said. “It is clear that we can’t keep borrowing like there is no tomorrow. At some point the market will say that is enough.”
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In his Harvard remarks, Powell downplayed immediate risks, including from the private credit market, which has been the subject of concern of late, saying he was “relatively relaxed” about it because the risk “we know about is something we are already trying to do something about.”
Others, however, are not so sanguine. S&P Global Ratings issued a report earlier this month in which it warned that the exposure of major banks to hedge funds and trading firms with high levels of debt was creating dangers.
The banks’ exposure to hedge fund and trading firms runs into the trillions of dollars, the S&P report noted.
Prime brokerage borrowing, which involves lending by banks to institutional clients, mostly hedge funds to facilitate their leverage and provide the money for their activities in financial markets went over $2.5 trillion in 2024, doubling in the past four years, it said.
One of the areas of greatest activity is the so-called basis trade used by hedge funds to exploit the difference between the price of Treasury bonds and their associated futures contracts. But because the difference is so small, very large amounts of loans from banks are needed to make a large profit.
According to the S&P report: “The surge of this strategy increases second-order risks across the industry. In the event of market volatility or counterparty failure, banks’ prime brokerage and securities financing desks could face substantial risks if these leveraged positions unwind rapidly.”
And the longer the war on Iran continues, the greater the likelihood of increased volatility.
A recent letter to G20 finance ministers and central bankers from Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey in his capacity as the chairman of the Financial Stability Board, a global watchdog, noted that while the war had delivered a “substantial shock” to the global economy, the financial system, so far, had absorbed it.
But the letter went on to warn of vulnerabilities including: “stretched asset valuations; the build-up in the non-bank sector of high and increasingly concentrated leverage; and liquidity mismatches [the use of short-term money to finance long-term illiquid assets], opacity and growing complexity in certain markets, notably private credit.”
It said there was “an increased likelihood that multiple vulnerabilities could crystallize at the same time, thereby amplifying the threat to financial stability and the provision of critical financial services.”
Educators, classified staff and parents across the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) are speaking out against the tentative agreements between the district and three unions. These deals were used to call off what would have been the first unified strike of 77,000 LAUSD employees and are being imposed in direct opposition to the will of rank-and-file workers.
Voting is ongoing for members of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) and the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles (AALA); Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99 has yet to schedule its vote.
The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) is urging workers to reject all three contracts, which impose stagnant wages and pave the way for huge budget cuts. In an analysis published Wednesday, it urged educators “to take the initiative into their own hands by forming a network of rank-and-file committees unifying schools across the city, to prepare independent action to enforce the overwhelming democratic mandate for a strike.
“A new bargaining team, consisting solely of working educators must be formed to fight for what the district’s employees and students urgently need, not what the corporate elite who control the district claim they can afford,” the WSWS concluded.
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“The union gave in,” said one worker on SEIU’s social media. “They should have walked out at 11:59 pm if their demands weren’t met.” Another popular comment declared, “You unions did a TERRIBLE JOB in bargaining. Between not walking out by midnight and settling for so much less when we had so much power—I hope members stand up and vote no.”
The behavior of the unions flows from their material interests. the bureaucracy functions as a labor-management police force, tied to the district, the Democratic Party and the financial interests behind austerity.
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The World Socialist Web Site urges all educators and school workers to vote “no” on these agreements and to take the initiative into their own hands by forming rank-and-file committees at every school—independent of the union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party.
These committees must link up with the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to prepare a genuine, unified strike action that 77,000 workers voted for and to mount a broader political struggle to secure fully funded public education and a living wage for all school workers.
6. Australia: Two workers killed on the job in Brisbane in three days
Last Friday and Monday, two workers were killed on job sites in Brisbane, the Queensland state capital, taking the city’s known total workplace fatalities to five in six months. These terrible deaths point to a rising toll due to unsafe conditions and increased rates of exploitation in Australia and internationally.
Only scant details have been released by the official work safety authorities, but hundreds of people have used social media platforms to send messages of support and condolences, reflecting the concern in working-class households.
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Official investigations invariably take many months or years and cover over the driving forces of dangerous working conditions under capitalism—the systemic subordination of workers’ health and lives to the interests of corporate profit, including through speed-up, subcontracting and casualization.
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Data from Safe Work Australia indicates that by April 9, 30 workers had died nationally in 2026, following 180 deaths in 2025. According to the latest available breakdown of the statistics, in 2024, machinery operators and drivers recorded the highest number of fatalities (61 workers, or 32 percent of all deaths) and the highest fatality rate at 6.7 deaths per 100,000 workers.
Laborers faced the second-highest risk, with a fatality rate of 4.0 per 100,000 workers and 50 deaths in 2024. The industries with the highest number of fatalities were transport, postal and warehousing (54 fatalities or 29 percent), agriculture, forestry and fishing (44 fatalities or 23 percent) and construction (37 fatalities or 20 percent).
No improvement has occurred despite industrial manslaughter becoming a criminal offence in every Australian state and territory as of late 2024. These laws are meant to punish “gross negligence” or “reckless conduct” by employers that leads to a worker’s death.
As of April 2026, there have been only six successful industrial manslaughter convictions across Australia since these laws began appearing in 2017, despite hundreds of workplace deaths being reported each year. These figures also understate the true toll because chronic occupational illnesses and unreported incidents are often excluded from official counts.
Hundreds of prosecutions have occurred for breaches of safety rules, but even companies that are convicted usually escape with token fines, amounting to a tiny fraction of their profits.
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Around the world, the building of rank-and-file committees in opposition to trade union collaboration with management is essential in the fight to assert workers’ control over safety and production. Under the democratic control of workers, these committees could assess site conditions, investigate deaths and injuries, formulate demands and enforce safety measures, including through strike action.
On Tuesday, April 21, at 6:15 p.m., the state of Florida pronounced Chadwick Willacy dead at Florida State Prison near Starke. He was 58 years old and had spent more than three decades on death row for the 1990 murder of his neighbor, Marlys Sather. He was the eighth person executed this year in the US and the fifth in Florida, the latest casualty of an accelerating machinery of death overseen by Governor Ron DeSantis.
Willacy maintained his innocence to the end. In his final statement, he said simply, “I would never kill my friend.” He urged his “brothers on the row” to stay strong, apologized to his family and asked for forgiveness. Whatever the full truth of the events of 1990, the state’s certainty that it was executing the right man—based on evidence now more than three decades old—was not and could never be absolute.
It would be a mistake to understand the current wave of executions in Florida as the product of one governor’s personal convictions. Since taking office, DeSantis has signed death warrants at a pace unmatched by any Florida governor in the modern era, presiding over what death penalty opponents have called the deadliest stretch of state-sanctioned killing in the state’s recent history.
The men executed in Florida share characteristics that are not coincidental: poverty, childhood trauma, intellectual disability, inadequate legal representation at trial. Court records in Willacy’s case note that his father admitted physically abusing him, with beatings beginning in early childhood, and that later mitigation evidence described a background involving abuse and drug problems.
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Willacy’s death is the eighth execution carried out in the US this year, and Florida accounts for five of them. Each of those deaths involved serious unresolved questions of fairness, mental capacity or the reliability of decades-old evidence. Taken together, they reveal a system in which the formal legal machinery of appeal and constitutional protection has been steadily subordinated to the political imperative of maintaining a relentless pace of executions.
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There is a bitter irony at the center of Florida’s position as the nation’s leading executing state: it is also the state with the highest number of death row exonerations. Since 1973, more than 30 people have been freed from Florida’s death row after being wrongfully convicted. The men exonerated were not freed because the system worked but usually due to the work of determined advocates, DNA evidence unavailable at trial or witnesses who recanted. The question that flows from this is: how many people has Florida already executed who did not commit the crimes for which they were condemned?
DeSantis and the state’s political establishment have chosen to answer that question with more executions, not fewer.
The men on Florida’s death row are, with vanishingly rare exceptions, poor. The overwhelming majority were represented at trial by underfunded public defenders carrying impossible caseloads. Many had the misfortune of being tried in jurisdictions where the quality of appointed counsel was determined more by courthouse politics than legal competence. Many, like Melvin Trotter and Billy Kearse, suffered from intellectual disabilities or severe mental illness that should have made them categorically ineligible for execution—but whose conditions were never adequately documented or litigated at trial.
Study after study has demonstrated that the single most reliable predictor of a death sentence in the United States is not the severity of the crime but the race of the victim. Killing a white victim dramatically increases the likelihood of a death sentence. While this is among the most extensively documented empirical findings in the social science literature on criminal justice, it has had essentially no effect on the administration of the death penalty.
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The exonerations, the botched executions, the racial disparities, the executions of the intellectually disabled and the severely mentally ill are not aberrations from a sound system. They are what the system produces when operating as designed. The communities that bear the weight of violent crime are the same communities that bear the weight of mass incarceration and the social conditions that generate violence in the first place. The death penalty does not make them safer, nor does it address any of those underlying conditions. It is a costly performance of state authority, carried out in the name of those communities and against their interests.
8. The US witch-hunt against Chinese scientists and the death of Danhao Wang
Danhao Wang’s death is the direct consequence of a systematic government- and university-sponsored political operation targeting young Chinese researchers. This xenophobic purge, deeply intertwined with the capitalist military-industrial complex, is part of the broader attack on the democratic rights of all immigrants, students and working people.
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Wang stood at the vanguard of semiconductor physics. Working within the laboratory of Professor Zetian Mi, Wang focused his research on a new class of materials known as wurtzite ferroelectric nitrides. Wang had authored over a hundred articles, including a landmark April 2025 paper published in the journal Nature under the title “Electric-Field-Induced Domain Walls in Wurtzite Ferroelectrics.” Wang’s findings essentially mapped the theoretical and physical blueprint for a new generation of transistors capable of vastly outperforming the existing radar technologies currently used by the military.
Additionally, because wurtzite ferroelectric nitride-based semiconductors can integrate both memory storage and logic processing within the same physical material, Wang’s research provides the potential physical substrate for “edge AI” computing. This would enable AI processing to occur directly on local, physically disconnected devices, such as autonomous combat drones, missile interceptors, or isolated battlefield sensors, without ever requiring connectivity to cloud networks.
While Wang’s research has military applications under the control of the Pentagon, the technology itself has vast potential to benefit society. Like artificial intelligence, its impact on humanity depends entirely on which social class is wielding it. Under capitalism, this genius is hijacked to build the machinery of death. Under the democratic control of the working class, these breakthroughs in efficiency and computing power could be used to improve the conditions of society as a whole, optimizing global logistics, revolutionizing medical technology, and laying the infrastructural groundwork for the elimination of scarcity.
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The University of Michigan administration, led by President Domenico Grasso, views the lives of its foreign-born researchers as expendable in the pursuit of federal funding and political alignment with the Trump administration. On March 26, one week after Wang’s death, Grasso testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce at a hearing titled “US Universities Under Siege: Foreign Espionage, Stolen Innovation, and the National Security Threat.” Grasso pledged his administration’s total subservience to the state apparatus.
He said:
As an engineer and an army veteran, who currently holds a top secret security clearance, I’m deeply committed to protecting our nation’s security. … This commitment is illustrated by our decision to end a relationship with a university in China that is seen as a potential threat to America’s interests. We made this decision after discussion with this committee and the House Select Committee on the CCP (Chinese Communist Party).
He boasted of terminating the visas of the five Chinese researchers, telling the committee:
In isolated but serious incidents, a small number of university students and researchers from China have been arrested for unlawful activities… Once alerted, we acted swiftly and decisively—working with federal law enforcement, promptly terminating student and work visas, and severing all ties with those individuals.
By doing so, the administration stripped its researchers of all institutional protection and triggered the legal ICE traps that facilitated their prolonged incarcerations and deportations.
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The University of Michigan’s institutional complicity is rooted in the financial structure of US academia, which has become heavily dependent on federal research funding from the defense and intelligence sectors. The university is a highly integrated beneficiary of the capitalist military-industrial complex, securing $100 million in direct research support from the Department of Defense for 2025 alone, an increase from $85 million the previous year.
This funding supports critical defense projects, including the development of heat-tolerant silicon carbide semiconductors for military aircraft, the engineering of autonomous off-road vehicles designed for combat zones, and the creation of imaging technology for the detection of nuclear materials. To protect this revenue stream and maintain its institutional standing in a national climate dominated by imperialist war-mongering, the university administration facilitated the purge of its own researchers, acting as accomplices to the FBI and CBP.
The militarization of universities is codified by bipartisan legislative efforts designed to build a fortress around American technological research. At the congressional hearing on March 26 where President Grasso testified, Republican Representative Michael Baumgartner promoted the “Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions Act,” known as the DETERRENT Act. This legislation is designed to increase reporting requirements for universities, using the threat of massive fines and the loss of funding to force academic institutions to police their own faculty and international students.
At the same hearing, Representative Haley Stevens, a Michigan Democrat, promoted legislation to expand the definition of partnerships with “malign foreign talent programs.” This bill, which was passed in the House, exposes an even broader swath of immigrant researchers to federal scrutiny for engaging in what was previously considered entirely routine academic exchange, shared data analysis, or even co-authorship of scientific papers with foreign nationals.
The Democratic Party is completely complicit in this McCarthyite witch-hunt. The war in Iran and the witch-hunt against Chinese researchers are interconnected aspects of a single imperialist strategy, based on the need to control the energy corridors and resources needed by China.
Furthermore, we must understand this assault on international researchers within the context of a general attack by the ruling oligarchy on science itself. The criminalization of basic biological research, treating harmless plasmids and roundworms as threats, is part of the same phenomenon driving the assault on medical science and public health. We see it in the elevation of figures like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the relentless, government-backed promotion of religious obscurantism and anti-vaccine and COVID lab leak conspiracy theories.
Growing sections of the capitalist ruling class are deeply hostile to scientific truth because rational, scientific inquiry exposes the irrationality, profound inequality, and inherent destructiveness of the profit system. They seek to subordinate all scientific endeavor strictly to the needs of militarism, while drowning the broader population in ignorance and backwardness to prevent a unified, scientifically literate challenge to their rule.
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It must be emphasized that appeals to university administrations or to the political establishment, including the Democratic Party, are futile. In every case discussed today, these institutional actors have functioned as willing conduits for state repression. The American state apparatus, fully backed by the corporate press and the institutional defenders of the status quo, has mobilized its legalistic and administrative instruments to bypass democratic constraints. The defense of persecuted researchers, the preservation of academic freedom, and the prevention of a catastrophic global conflict require a fundamental, irrevocable break from these capitalist entities.
The survival of rational, cross-border scientific cooperation depends upon the independent, coordinated political organization of the global working class. The ultra-efficient microelectronics made possible by Danhao Wang’s theoretical breakthroughs must be physically manufactured, etched, and assembled. This process rests entirely on the exploitation of a globally interconnected industrial working class. The workers in the massive semiconductor fabrication plants around the world, at TSMC in Taiwan, at Samsung and SK Hynix in South Korea, at Intel and GlobalFoundries in the United States and at SMIC in China, are the ones who turn theoretical physics into material reality.
This dire situation demands the immediate formation of independent rank-and-file committees across university campuses and within the semiconductor fabrication plants. These committees must operate independently of the pro-imperialist corporate-controlled trade union bureaucracy, university administrations, and the capitalist political parties. We must work to unite the theorists and researchers who design microelectronics with the technicians, logistics workers, and assemblers who physically manufacture them, establishing lines of communication across national borders.
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Therefore, the immediate task is the formation of an independent commission of inquiry, organized and led by rank-and-file researchers, students, staff and faculty, operating entirely outside the control of the university administration and the capitalist state. This democratically controlled committee must demand the unredacted public release of all communications between the university and federal intelligence agencies. It must expose the precise nature of the harassment Dr. Wang endured, and hold fully accountable every official who sacrificed the lives and democratic rights of international scholars on the altar of the imperialist war drive. We must remove ICE from campuses, oppose all collaboration between academic administrations and federal security agencies, and fight for the full restoration of visas and academic positions to those persecuted by the state.
This meeting is a direct appeal to all workers and students, especially the international scientists and students targeted by this campaign. It is a call to understand the revolutionary tasks that stand before us. The central issue of our time is to mobilize the working class and young people, both immigrant and native-born, in a unified political struggle against capitalism, and for workers’ power and socialism. Through sustained international solidarity, armed with a scientific understanding of political economy, the working class can halt the imperialist war drive. Only the socialist transformation of society can ensure that the genius of researchers like Danhao Wang serves the flourishing of all humanity, rather than its destruction.
9. US imperialism’s war on Iran unleashes global economic and social catastrophe for the working class
American imperialism’s determination to consolidate its dominance over the Middle East, one of the world’s most critical energy-producing regions, has already claimed the lives of thousands of Iranians in six weeks of brutal and indiscriminate bombardment. But the economic fallout from the US-instigated war and blockade of the Strait of Hormuz could prove even more deadly.
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The United Nations Development Program estimated in a recent report that the war on Iran could cost 36 countries in the Asia-Pacific nearly $300 billion and plunge up to 8.8 million people into poverty. Five million of these people live in Iran, where the human development index has already lost 1–1.5 years due to the war.
The New York Times worried in a lengthy analysis published April 20 that countries throughout the Asia-Pacific may face “shortages [that] could push several countries into convulsions of unrest, followed by recession,” if the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked for just a few more weeks. Even high-end production, including of semiconductors essential for producing chips built in Taiwan, faces problems. Prior to the war, Qatar produced a third of the world’s helium, a critical component of the semiconductor production process. But it stopped production on March 2 after an Iranian retaliatory attack hit its gas facilities. As the Times put it, cuts to chip production “would roll through everything from electronics to cars.”
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Many African countries depend on imported fertilizers. The surge in natural gas prices has driven up costs for farmers, threatening lower crop yields and outright famine in areas where subsistence farming prevails. At the same time, currency depreciation in several countries is amplifying the impact of global price increases, making imports even more expensive, eroding real wages and pushing up already crippling debt repayment costs for financially strapped governments.
In Europe and North America, fuel prices have also risen sharply, placing yet another burden on working people’s budgets amid stagnant economic growth, mass layoffs and social attacks by the ruling elites in every country to pay for bloated military budgets and the enrichment of the financial oligarchy. In Germany, national airline Lufthansa announced the immediate closure of its CityLine subsidiary amid a strike by thousands of airline workers for job security and pay increases. The continent’s governments are investing trillions of euros in their own war machines to prosecute their predatory imperialist interests at the expense of workers’ livelihoods and social programs.
Across the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal has announced the era of the “mega layoff,” with job cuts in finance, technology, entertainment and manufacturing.
By contrast, the war is proving to be a bonanza for the corporations and financial oligarchy. According to one investigation, the world’s major oil conglomerates will pull in additional profits of over $230 billion in 2026 alone.
The World Socialist Web Site has insisted that US imperialism’s war on Iran is one front in the early stages of a third world war, which includes the US/NATO war on Russia in Ukraine and preparations for a military conflagration with China. As the imperialist powers in North America and Europe scramble for the upper hand in the redivision of the world, they are totally indifferent to the impact on billions of workers from the global economic and social disaster produced by crisis-ridden capitalism and their crazed policies. But this very disaster creates the material conditions for the development of a working class movement to end the war and the capitalist profit system which is its root cause.
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Today, the world economy is integrated to such a degree that initial expressions of social unrest provoked by the war have already erupted in its first weeks. Beginning on April 10, tens of thousands of industrial workers in India’s national capital region launched strikes and protests against price hikes triggered by the war. Workers demanded wage increases to cover higher rents, fuel costs, and food prices. Protests have also erupted in countries as diverse as the Philippines and Ireland.
Now, as in 1917, the decisive tasks are the fight to develop a conscious, unified movement of the international working class and build a mass revolutionary party capable of leading the struggle for workers’ political power.
The global nature of the crisis demands an international response, transcending national divisions and opposing militarism. Workers in Iran, the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa share a common interest in ending the war and the bankrupt capitalist order that gave rise to it. This requires the independent political mobilization of the working class on a socialist program to place the commanding heights of the economy under democratic workers’ control, ensuring that production is organized to meet human needs rather than private profit.
Under these conditions, the upcoming International May Day Online Rally 2026 assumes critical importance. It will articulate the revolutionary socialist program and perspective workers around the world require to fight imperialist war and its barbaric consequences. Register today to participate, and encourage your work colleagues and friends to do the same.
10. US ramps up boat strikes in Latin American waters amid mounting proof that victims are fishermen
Ecuadorian fishermen aboard the vessel Don Maca have testified that they were subjected on March 26 to what they describe as a “double tap” strike by a US drone and then detained, handcuffed, hooded and held at gunpoint by soldiers aboard a US-flagged patrol vessel.
This campaign of extrajudicial killings has gone largely unreported in the US media, even as it has expanded dramatically in recent months. Not a single major US corporate media outlet has recounted the testimony of the fishermen who survived US strikes.
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The fishermen report being held aboard a US vessel before being transferred to a Salvadoran patrol boat. They were taken to El Salvador after several days at sea, interrogated at a military base, and eventually handed over to immigration authorities. During this time, their families conducted a desperate search for the missing men.
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The Don Maca incident is not isolated. Lawyers are investigating the disappearance of another Ecuadorian vessel, the Fiorella, missing for three months with eight crew members onboard. Survivors and relatives across the region have repeatedly testified that those targeted had no connection to drug trafficking.
Earlier this month, Hernán Flores, captain of the Negra Francisca Duarte II, described a nearly identical attack on March 17 near the Galápagos. A US drone bombed and sank his vessel, forcing the 16 crew members to jump from the burning ship and survive for eight days in lifeboats.
Several fishermen suffered severe injuries. The crew managed to stay afloat and used small boats to escape the flames. After reaching safety, they approached a nearby vessel for help, only to be met with hostility by US soldiers. They were eventually found a week later adrift by a Salvadoran ship.
Jorge Chiriboga, a lawyer representing some of the fishermen told the Ecuadorian news site Primicias, “This is an act of terror against fishermen in the exclusive economic zone of the Ecuadorian state; therefore, it is Ecuador, the state, the government that has to protect the interests of Ecuadorian citizens.”
The right-wing regime of President Daniel Noboa, heir to a billion-dollar banana fortune who holds US citizenship, has shown no interest whatsoever in defending the interests of the fishermen, handing the Pentagon the “right” to murder as many Ecuadorians as it pleases. Government officials have insinuated, without any evidence whatsoever, that the fishermen may have been involved in illicit activity. The United Nations office on forced disappearances, meanwhile, has felt compelled to demand that the government pursue the case of the eight missing crew members of the Fiorella.
In a February 2026 State of the Union address, Donald Trump jokingly remarked that US operations had been so aggressive that “nobody wants to go fishing anymore”—a remark that, in light of these testimonies, takes on a chilling literal meaning. Trump has often repeated his “joke” with apparent sadistic glee over the slaughter of innocent workers.
Since the launch of what has been dubbed Operation Southern Spear in September, the US military has carried out at least 53 recorded strikes, killing no fewer than 181 civilians aboard fishing vessels.
Official press releases by the US Southern Command outline a relentless escalation. Between April 11 and April 19 alone, five lethal strikes took place in the Eastern Pacific. In each case, the justification rests solely on claims that vessels were traveling along “known trafficking routes.”
No verifiable evidence has been provided to substantiate these assertions.
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In the Caribbean, naval deployments continue, alongside intensified reconnaissance drone flights near Cuba, amid preparations for potential military operations for regime change.
The connection between these developments is unmistakable. Under the banner of combating drug trafficking, the United States is asserting military dominance over the hemisphere, treating it as its exclusive sphere of influence while countering China’s increasing investment and trade ties to the region.
The doctrine underpinning this strategy—referred to as “Greater North America” by Hegseth—bears a chilling resemblance to the expansionist ideology of Nazis’ “Greater Germany.” Like its historical predecessor, it combines territorial ambition with the systematic dehumanization of targeted populations.
The methods employed are equally revealing. The extrajudicial killing of fishermen through drone strikes—based on unverified intelligence and without due process—serves to normalize the assertion that the US state has the right to kill anyone, anywhere in the hemisphere, on the basis of mere suspicion, including in the US itself.
No confidence can be placed in any faction of the US political establishment to halt these crimes. House Democrats have filed articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth, including charges related to unauthorized war-making in Iran and the deadly strikes on suspected drug smuggling boats.
However, this effort is a sham. With Republicans controlling Congress, the impeachment has virtually no chance of success and serves primarily as a political gesture. At the same time, the Democratic Party has consistently voted to fund the very military operations it now nominally criticizes, underscoring its complicity in the ongoing bloodshed.
Nor can any reliance be placed on the so-called “left” nationalist governments in Latin America. In October, Colombian President Gustavo Petro and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum denounced the strikes as illegal. “When a missile is used against a boat with unarmed people, what is committed is an extrajudicial execution,” Petro declared.
Yet following the January 3 abduction of Maduro and the subsequent escalation of US aggression, these criticisms have given way to silence. Neither Petro nor Sheinbaum—nor Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—raised any opposition to the ongoing killings during the so-called Progressive summit in Barcelona this weekend.
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What is unfolding in the waters of the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean is not a “war on drugs,” but a campaign of terror against workers. The evidence makes clear that the bloodiest and most shameless mass murderers and criminals are not hidden in remote jungles or at sea—they are seated in positions of power in Washington D.C., directing a campaign that treats human life as expendable in the pursuit of US hegemony.
11. Bulgaria’s parliamentary election returns Radev’s Progressive Bulgaria with an absolute majority
Parliamentary elections in Bulgaria held on April 19 returned former President Rumen Radev’s Progressive Bulgaria (PB) as the clear victor, with almost 44 percent (43.91 percent) of the vote. PB will hold 130 seats in the 240-seat National Assembly. Progressive Bulgaria was established in March as a coalition of three smaller existing parties, described as being on the “left” wing of the political establishment, specifically as a vehicle for Radev’s electoral project. It only formally became a unified political party on April 17. Radev resigned the presidency in January, one year before the end of his term, in order to run in the elections.
This result gives Progressive Bulgaria an absolute majority and will allow Radev to form a government without the need for an alliance.
The snap elections come after the coalition government of GERB and the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) resigned in the wake of mass protests in December against its proposed 2026 state budget. The draft budget was supposed to be the country’s first budget in euros, with Bulgaria joining the eurozone on January 1, 2026. The budget entailed a massive expansion of the security apparatus and a record debt ceiling fueled by military credits.
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The vote, with a turnout of 50.2 percent, relatively high for Bulgaria, represents above all a broad rejection of the traditional political establishment. GERB had been the leading political party in the country since 2009, while the BSP has been left outside parliament for the first time since the restoration of capitalism.
Radev is being described in Western media as “pro-Russian” because of his verbal misgivings about the war against Russia in Ukraine. His election-night declaration that he hoped for “practical relations with Russia, based on mutual respect and equal treatment” has reinforced his portrayal as President Vladimir Putin’s next “Trojan horse,” after Hungary’s former president Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico.
Radev has himself cultivated an ambivalent attitude toward the war in order to appeal to widespread anti-war sentiment in Bulgarian society. His campaign projected the image of a moderate figure, opposed to the worst excesses of EU-imposed austerity and war preparations.
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That Radev was able to benefit from widespread discontent is due in no small part to the active or tacit support of many figures from the collapsing BSP and the pseudo-left formations that traditionally gravitated around it.
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The character of the next administration can be glimpsed from Radev’s political past and his presidential terms.
A high-ranking military aviation officer, Radev completed extensive training courses in the United States as part of a generation of officers orienting the Bulgarian military toward US imperialism. His political rise in 2016 was tied to the post-Stalinist BSP and its increasing adoption of extreme right-wing positions. In a process that took place throughout Europe, Radev and the BSP normalized and elevated the fascistic anti-refugee positions of street groups such as Ataka.
In a period of intensifying international crisis, Radev emerged as an important political anchor for the Bulgarian ruling class.
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In his election victory declaration, Radev stated, “We have defeated apathy” and that “This is only the first step toward restoring trust and the social contract.” He is, however, fundamentally incapable of and unwilling to resolve any of the issues that have provoked mass protests in recent years.
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Neither the advanced war preparations, nor the attacks on living standards that accompany them, nor even the “state capture” by the oligarchs are uniquely Bulgarian phenomena. Workers and youth will soon confront a Radev administration determined to defend the interests of the imperialist powers and the Bulgarian ruling class. The way forward lies through the international class struggle and the founding of a Bulgarian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).
12. Ricky and Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo): “Society is also something real...”
Coincidentally, two films we discussed last year after viewing them at the San Francisco Film festival online are opening this month in theaters in the US: Ricky (directed by Rashad Frett) and Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo), from Joel Alfonso Vargas.The two films present some of the same problems, some of the same problems that a good number of American (and not simply American) “small,” “realist” dramas exhibit.
They contain truthful moments and sequences, but on the whole they sidestep vital social contradictions and accept too much of the world as immediately given.
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As we have argued before,
Realism about life in any meaningful sense surely involves more than simply turning on a camera. Passivity and the inability or unwillingness to criticize or render serious judgment have all too often been passed off in recent decades as evenhandedness and “lack of bias.” To look at the world with an artist’s eyes and draw no important conclusions has nothing in common with genuine objectivity.
“Since real people live on earth and in society,” the 19th century Russian critic Belinsky noted, “and not in the air, not in the clouds, where only phantoms live, the writers of our day are naturally portraying society as well as people. Society is also something real, and not imaginary, therefore its essence is made up not only of costumes and hairstyles, but also of customs, habits, concepts, relations, etc.”
It’s worth repeating: Society as such is something real, and its essence is made up not only of clothing, externals, the surface of everyday life, but also of more profound customs, habits, concepts, relations and so forth. Among the artists we need more realistic historians of contemporary society.
The new Military Service Modernization Act being introduced by the German government imposes far-reaching restrictions on travel freedoms for young people, demonstrating how extensive its plans are for the reintroduction of conscription and the militarization of society.
A central, hitherto little-noticed paragraph stipulates that persons of conscription age—i.e., between 17 and 45 years—must obtain permission from the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) for longer stays abroad. Specifically, this affects stays of more than three months. The military is thereby being given control over whether and for how long young people are allowed to leave the country.
This regulation was initially barely discussed in public. That changed abruptly when it became known on social media following an article in the Frankfurter Rundschau. Within a few days, a broad wave of outrage developed, particularly among youth and young adults.
The Defense Ministry reacted to the criticism with an attempt to downplay the significance of the regulation. Reference was made to the fact that similar provisions had already existed during the Cold War and had not had any major impact at the time.
This comparison is misleading. Today, longer stays abroad—for example, through gap years, work and travel or study visits—are frequently part of the life plans of many young people. In school exchanges alone, the numbers have been in the tens of thousands for years.
Even more important, however, is that the ministry has not withdrawn the regulation. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius merely announced that an administrative directive would be issued temporarily suspending the authorization requirement—as long as military service remains formally voluntary.
This means that the legal basis remains in place. As soon as conscription is reintroduced on a mandatory basis—which is being actively prepared by the government—the restriction on freedom of travel can be put into effect at any time.
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What is happening in Germany is part of an international trend. In view of growing geopolitical tensions, neocolonial wars and the preparation of new major military conflicts between the great powers, governments worldwide are once again resorting to conscription and coercive measures.
In the US, the reintroduction of the draft is being prepared in response to falling recruitment numbers. France is expanding programs for military service. In Ukraine, men of conscription age, who are being consumed as cannon fodder in the NATO war against Russia, are prohibited from leaving the country.
These measures are part of the preparations for an escalation of global conflicts, up to and including a possible direct war between major powers.
14. Genetic evidence suggests that human evolution accelerated with the development of agriculture
A just-published article in the journal Nature—“Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia,” (Akbari et al, 15 April 2026)—describes how the development of agriculture in Europe and the Middle East resulted in an acceleration in human evolution in those regions over the last 10,000 years. The article was coauthored by 17 researchers from Germany, Austria, Iran and the US, headed by David Reich of Harvard University. Sophisticated statistical analyses were employed to tease out recognizable patterns from “noise.”
This research is a valuable contribution to a materialist understanding of the mechanisms that drive evolution. At the same time, it has prompted a rabid, racist response on X (formerly Twitter) which focuses on one tenuous finding that the posters distort as demonstrating European racial superiority.
The data on which the study is based consists of DNA obtained from nearly 16,000 human remains ranging over the last 18,000 years, encompassing roughly 10,000 ancient (from fossils) and 6,000 modern individuals. This substantial database, the largest available from any region of the world, permits a detailed examination of changes in specific gene variant (allele) frequencies (i.e., evolution) ranging from a time when the peoples of the region lived exclusively by hunting and gathering through the development of agriculture. That fundamental and all-encompassing change in the economy had profound implications for human health, as well as social and political organization.
Hunter-gatherers tend to live in relatively small, more-or-less mobile groups relying on the seasonal abundance of particular plant and animal species for food and other useful materials. Population densities are relatively low and interaction between groups is usually limited. One result is that infectious disease transmission is restricted, technology is simple and hunger is possible if natural food sources fail. Also, social and political organization tends to be egalitarian, with different roles generally based on age and sex. This all changed with the adoption of agriculture.
With agriculture, the scale and reliability of food is more controllable and predictable, though still subject to fluctuations. As a result, group size increases, settlements become permanent, inter-group trade develops and social and political organization become more complex. One of the negative effects is that disease transmission, both within and between groups, is increased. The period during which agriculture developed in Eurasia and Africa is known as the Neolithic (c. 10,000–2,000 BCE).
All of this is likely to affect the health and lifespan of individuals as well as their likely reproductive success, i.e., via natural/directional selection. This would be expected to affect the relative frequencies of particular gene alleles in the population that were more or less suited for survival under the changed conditions created by the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture.
Indeed, the new study found this to be the case in a significant number of examples. A total of 479 genetic variants were found to increase or decrease in frequency during the time span under examination. This strongly indicates that adaptation due to natural selection was taking place in many of these cases.
Among the characteristics observed in agricultural populations were traits associated with increased tuberculosis resistance and lower body fat. The former is apparently a consequence of enhanced disease transmission resulting from larger and denser settlements and increased inter-group contacts. The latter would presumably reflect a change in the reliability of the diet. For hunter-gatherers, the uncontrollable natural variations in the abundance of wild food resources would make it advantageous to “stock up” when possible. Since food preservation and storage techniques were limited or nonexistent for most hunter-gatherers, the only available “storage” location was in the individual’s body (i.e., fat). With agriculture, the food supply would become more, if not totally, reliable, and the negative effects of obesity, such as diabetes susceptibility, would be reduced.
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The article has been distorted by some right-wing commentators, notably on X, to support the conception that since populations in Western Eurasia have evolved at a greater pace than in the past, they are more “advanced” than people in other regions of the world. In particular, this research is misrepresented as evidence of a strong influence of genetics on supposed relative intelligence of different “races.”
One racist observes approvingly, “So now David Reich of Harvard has gone public about it, is it now socially acceptable to state the fact that black average IQ is far lower than white for genetic reasons?” And another, “Mass immigration from the third world will undo 18,000+ years of human evolution.” There are many more, equally foul.
What all of these commentators conveniently ignore is that the agricultural revolution took place not only in Western Eurasia but also independently in East Asia, Africa, and North and South America. And, in each area, great civilizations developed. If the advent of agriculture was a trigger for such evolutionary developments in one area, why not in the others? The lack of an equally robust body of available genetic data from the other areas is ignored in order to support the spewing of racist filth.
These racist interpretations are manifestations of an ideology of the ruling class that seeks to divide and oppress the working class by fomenting all sorts of socially constructed mechanisms of race, language, gender, etc. These ideas will be sustained, despite all evidence to the contrary, as long as capitalism exists.
15. London Underground drivers strike against longer shifts under four-day week plan
Around 1,800 train drivers are taking part in two days of strike action this week on London Underground against the introduction of a compressed four-day week by Transport for London (TfL), overseen by Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan.
The two 24-hour strikes, running from midday Tuesday to Wednesday and Thursday to Friday, are the opening stage of industrial action, with further two-day stoppages scheduled for May and June.
The Tube drivers, members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT), are opposing TfL’s restructuring agenda, which would mean longer shifts across fewer days, increasing shift lengths to eight hours 45 minutes, risking greater fatigue and concerns over safety.
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The bureaucratic methods the RMT has relied on to demobilize opposition are coming apart. There is growing unease and anger among tube workers toward the RMT’s collusion with TfL and Khan.
In waging a week-long strike last September, tube workers were not seeking “peace” and concessions but laying down red lines. The strikes were part of a wider fightback against the Starmer government over deepening inequality, austerity and its scapegoating of migrants for the collapse of public services.
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The unity of London Underground workers must be asserted against the union apparatus and the sectional divisions it sows. United action is needed to win workers’ demands for pay restoration, adequate staffing, decent hours and safe working conditions.
As the World Socialist Web Site put forward:
“This fight requires forming rank-and-file committees to link up all grades across London Underground to renew the struggle for a shorter working week abandoned by Dempsey. It must include an appeal to ASLEF drivers to oppose their leadership and build a united struggle.
“The claim that there is no money for a genuine shorter working week must be rejected. London is the seat of the financial oligarchy, embodying the divide between those who produce wealth and those who live off it.
“London Underground operates as a profit-making concern, with government subsidy withdrawn in 2018 and running costs covered by passenger revenue based on the highest fares of any metro system in the world.
“A properly funded public system means ending tax giveaways to big business and the billions diverted to war—expenditures set to escalate further through the government’s participation in the illegal war against Iran.”
16. Right-wing led fuel protests bring Ireland to a halt
The recent fuel protests in Ireland, involving farmers, hauliers and small business owners, underscore mounting social tensions driven by the deepening global crisis. Though rooted in legitimate grievances over soaring costs, the absence of an independent working-class movement allowed right-wing and even far-right forces to dominate.
In March, just weeks after the outbreak of the US-Iran war, the Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil coalition government led by Taoiseach Micheál Martin announced a temporary package of €250 million which reduced petrol by €0.10 per liter and diesel by €0.20. This was obliterated by further price increases as the Middle East crisis intensified. By early April, petrol cost around €1.91 a liter and diesel €2.14, compared with €1.70 and €1.69 as recently as January.
In response, for four days, ports, motorways, central Dublin and the country's only oil refinery were blockaded by hundreds of vehicles driven by farmers, agricultural contractors, hauliers, builders, bus operators and taxi drivers. At one point, a majority of petrol stations were reported as running dry.
The refusal of Ireland’s trade unions to mobilize workers against the coalition government has enabled right-wing influencers and politicians to fill the void. Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) general secretary Owen Reidy issued a statement on March 24, saying the government’s paltry relief package was “welcome” and calling for measures such as “remote working to save on petrol costs” as “a cost-free response for employers and the Exchequer”! He warned that failure to act would make heightened wage demands “a real risk”. The ITCU represents unions with 600,000 members.
The protests stemmed from a meeting in the Midland Hotel, Portlaoise, March 29, attended by around 400 people. Farmer and contractor James Geoghegan, who emerged as one of the protest leaders, has repeatedly appeared on the social media channels of far-right, anti-migrant, anti-vaxxer “citizen journalist” Philip Dwyer.
Geoghegan was involved in large protests earlier this year in Athlone against the EU-Mercosur trade deal which threatens to undermine much of the beef farming industry in Ireland, with cheaper meat imports to the trade bloc.
Geoghegan reported a committee was formed with representatives from agricultural contracting, farming, plant and bus hire, and the haulage sector. There were “100 - 200 men driving trucks,” who were “ready to park up their trucks in the middle of the roads, wherever they are told to go and at whatever time they are told to do it...”
The meeting was addressed by the Independent Ireland party's founder and member of parliament, Michael Collins, who highlighted the share of fuel revenue taken by the government in taxation. Taxation makes up more than half the price of both diesel and petrol in Ireland.
Independent Ireland is a right-wing, anti-migrant, anti-abortion party committed to law and order and business deregulation. Much of their pitch is to small business owners, precisely those layers squeezed by the fuel crisis.
Days later, an Irish Haulage Farming Construction Contractors Amalgamation was formed. The new grouping sent a letter to the government demanding a fuel price cap, the suspension of carbon tax on fuel and financial support for households and business.
Protests began to be organized on social media around Facebook pages such as “The People of Ireland Against Fuel Price Protest”, a long-standing page run by tow truck operator and anti-migrant campaigner Sonny Boyd.
Other prominent figures include Christopher Duffy, an agricultural contractor, whose Facebook page includes vile comments about Muslims and that he would not care if environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg was “raped or beaten”. Numerous far-right social media commentators, in Ireland and internationally, offered support to the protests.
On April 7, rolling roadblocks were reported on major motorways, including the M6 from Galway, M8, M7 and M1, as protestors made their way to Dublin and to protests in dozens of rural towns and villages. Over 150 trucks, tractors and heavy goods vehicles blockaded Dublin's O'Connell Street where a rally of hundreds of people was held. Luas tram and bus services were disrupted across the city. Large assemblies of vehicles and protestors were also reported in Midleton, Tullamore, Cashel, Castlebar and Rosslare.
A blockade was set up at the Whitegate oil refinery in Cork, which supplies about 40 percent of Ireland's petrol. The refinery entrance was blocked by trucks and tractors and around 60 people.
Another blockade, maintained by up to 100 demonstrators, was set up outside a fuel depot in Galway. For four days, no fuel left the depot, although all other traffic was allowed to pass. Rosslare harbor and Europort were also closed by protestors.
The blockades stopped fuel deliveries to Ireland's 1,200 or so petrol stations, with as many as 700 running out of fuel over the next few days. By April 10, health services were running out of fuel, appointments were cancelled, medicine deliveries impacted, and water treatment and animal feed supplies were delayed. Bus services to Dublin Airport were impacted by rolling roadblocks, leading to passengers walking along the motorway hard shoulder to the airport.
A panicked coalition government announced further limited palliative measures, worth €500 million, while moving to clear the protests. Measures announced included a 10-cent reduction in petrol and diesel tax, a delay in implementing carbon tax increases and support schemes for farmers and fisheries. Prices at petrol stations began to fall slightly over the following days.
Irish state finances—heavily dependent on tech company headquarters—are unusually healthy, with a budget surplus of €12.4 billion (3.7 percent of gross national income) recorded in 2025, so the sums dispensed were the least required to quell the protests.
Despite crushing housing costs, an overstretched health service and countless indicators of social stress impacting the population, the coalition—which coined €33 billion in corporate tax receipts last year—chose to divert much of its surplus into sovereign wealth and savings funds.
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Millions of workers are being hit by the same fuel price increases and a surge in the cost of living. However, the fact that protests over fuel cost increases were politically dominated by the far-right is a dangerous situation. One brought about by the role of the trade union bureaucracy in suppressing independent class action by the working class.
Bus drivers working for Stagecoach in Bow, East London, are holding the second of three one-day strikes on Friday April 24, following a three-day walkout last month. They are fighting schedules that are causing dangerous levels of fatigue. A further strike is planned for May 15.
The Unite members are facing a concerted strike-breaking operation by Stagecoach. Scabs have been recruited from other cities, and the company had offered a bribe to any Bow driver willing to break the strike. Pickets shouted, “shame on you!” and “£50!”, the sum for which they sold out their colleagues.
On the picket line last Friday, workers raised the need for unity across London if the strike breaking operation is to be defeated and working conditions defended. But Unite is following the opposite strategy, even blocking a joint fight with Stagecoach drivers at nearby Lea Interchange Bus Company.
World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke with drivers on the picket line at Bow. They described the conditions they face and their determination to fight.
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Joe [a driver] said, “The problem that we are facing is more or less, drivers are not united. We are not united at all. We are not like the trains, the Underground. We are not like them. Which is very, very sad indeed. All because of all this privatization that came in Margaret Thatcher’s time. So, it’s brought some sort of divisions.”
Privatization had proven a disaster, “It’s all about profit making. That’s it. The only way they can make their profits is to squeeze drivers. And we suffer. We are the driving force for their success, so why do they have to squeeze a lot from us? That is not right.”
Another driver joined the discussion to add, “It’s not only us we are looking after. It’s the new drivers that are coming in. It’s important for them also.” New drivers are placed on inferior pay. “A lot of them come in and find that the conditions are not good. A lot of people leave and a lot of them have accidents also.”
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The needs of bus workers and passengers for a high quality, safe and affordable public transport system must be prioritized against the profit requirements of the private transport operators and the austerity diktats of a Starmer government that is slashing public spending to prepare for escalating wars of aggression.
18. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe & Middle East
Africa
Kenya:
Mozambique:
Nigeria:
South Africa:
Zimbabwe:
Europe
Belgium:
Thousands of national postal workers in Wallonia continue strike against cost-cutting job reforms
Norway:
Thousands of hospitality workers strike for better pay and conditions
Portugal:
Tens of thousands march in Lisbon against proposed changes in labor laws
Spain:
Air traffic controller stop work over staffing levels and poor working conditions
United Kingdom:
London Underground train drivers strike over threat of imposed four-day working rota
Support staff at Cambridge University, England strike over pay
Teachers at London school walk out over workload and to protest unfair practices
Teachers at Weymouth school, England walk out
Middle East
Israel:
Iran:
19. 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.
