Apr 28, 2026

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today: 

1. Gunman charged with attempted assassination of Trump: The political issues

According to a statement that he distributed prior to the incident, Allen, aged 31, was horrified by being implicated in the crimes of the Trump administration and sought to target senior Trump officials, though his attempt did not place any of these officials in direct danger. Allen was arraigned Monday on three felony counts, including one of attempted assassination of the president, which carries a life prison sentence.

Marxists oppose such attacks from a principled and political standpoint. Individual acts of violence do not advance the struggle against reaction. They substitute the acts of an isolated individual for the conscious political mobilization of the working masses. Regardless of the crimes of the intended target—and those of Trump are monumental—the overriding issue is the political consequences of such violence. Whatever the motive of the attacker, the result is to hand the government a pretext for expanding repression and the criminalization of opposition.

It is, however, necessary to point to the staggering hypocrisy and cowardice that has characterized the response from the media and political establishment. With its characteristic stupidity, the media treats the event as if it bears no relationship to the pervasive and systematic violence that saturates American life, promoted by the state and the ruling class, headed by a president who wallows in bloodcurdling rhetoric and conducts himself like a mob boss. 

The response of political figures, in the US and internationally, follows the same script. Wrapped in the sanctimonious refrain that “there is no place for violence in politics,” officials issue moralistic platitudes while defending or presiding over governments whose policy is organized violence. 

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As always, the cowardly and complicit response of the Democrats—incapable of saying anything true for fear of legitimizing popular opposition—only encourages Trump and the Republicans to go on the offensive. Party leaders seized on the incident to escalate incitement and repression—denouncing a “radicalized left,” portraying the event as the “inevitable result” of opposition to the regime, and demanding more police powers and expanded funding for the repressive apparatus. 

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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt gave this campaign its most explicit formulation. “This political violence stems from a systemic demonization of [Trump] and his supporters,” she declared on Monday, blaming “elected members of the Democrat party and even some in the media.” 

Leavitt went further, insisting that those who “constantly, falsely, label the president as a fascist … and compare him to Hitler … are fueling this kind of violence” and denouncing what she called a “left-wing cult of hatred.” The aim is to declare political criticism a form of “violence” and to justify a violent crackdown.

In fact, the vast majority of acts of organized political violence in the United States has come from the right—from armed militia networks and far-right extremists. The past decade has seen repeated, escalating right-wing violence: the mobilization of fascistic forces on January 6, 2021; high-profile attacks and assassination plots against public officials; and acts of individual violence carried out by far-right figures like Kyle Rittenhouse. For years, federal assessments and major research centers have identified far-right extremism as the principal source of deadly domestic terrorism and political violence in the country.

At the same time, if anything is “fueling” acts like that attributed to Cole Tomas Allen is, above all, the criminality of the government itself, combined with a political structure that blocks any genuine avenue for the mass opposition of workers and youth to find expression. The deliberate suppression and diversion of popular anger by the Democratic Party and the trade union apparatus only deepens the sense of frustration and impotence, creating conditions in which desperate, ill-advised and destructive individual actions can emerge. 

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The way forward lies not in individual violence, but in the development of the class struggle, which opens the possibility of a far more conscious, collective and optimistic road: the independent mobilization of the working class against war, dictatorship and the capitalist order that produces them.

Settling accounts with Trump is not a matter of individual acts or the removal of one man. It is a struggle against the capitalist state and the ruling class interests it serves—war abroad, repression at home. The only force capable of stopping this descent into barbarism is the working class, acting consciously and independently, mobilizing its social power against the entire apparatus of militarism, dictatorship and oligarchic rule.

2. Gettysburg and the New Birth of Freedom—then and now

World Socialist Web Site contributor and historian Tom Mackaman delivered a lecture to the International Youth and Students for Social Equality at Gettysburg University on April 23.

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Tom Mackaman:

Our moment is also piled high with danger. The counterrevolution spearheaded by the American ruling class, and all of its political representatives, puts in the shade even the designs of the South’s old slaveocracy. It is a ruling class that is seeking to turn back history, as if the past three centuries of human progress had never taken place. No realm is left unmolested—from basic democratic and human rights to the social right to an education, from infrastructure to culture, from history to science. 

Consider just one example—the counterrevolution being waged on public health, and think of what this attack means in light of the history of medicine. It is not widely known that the greatest share of the soldiers who died in the Civil War were taken by disease and sickness, in fact, two-thirds, or 500,000 of the estimated 750,000 total deaths. Of the remaining 250,000 killed in battle, about half died after failed medical interventions, particularly amputations. American medicine had not yet adopted the germ theory of disease. The great pioneers who established that theory—Ignaz Semmelweis, who proved that doctors themselves were transmitting fatal infections in maternity wards; Louis Pasteur, who demonstrated that microorganisms caused fermentation and disease; Joseph Lister, who developed antiseptic surgical technique; and Robert Koch, who identified the specific bacteria responsible for tuberculosis, cholera and anthrax—were either just beginning their work or had not yet had their findings accepted by the medical establishment. It was not understood how infection and bacteria spread. There was no concept of antiseptic surgery, so field surgeons often moved between amputations by wiping the blade down with a rag. Here at Gettysburg, it should be added, the “field surgeon” was literally that—at work out of doors or in barns, often with doors on sawhorses converted to tables.

The primitive character of medicine in the war sheds light on a larger reality. Before the Civil War, life expectancy in the US was but 40 years, a figure that was driven down by the large number of youth who did not survive the infectious diseases that culled children at a frightful rate. Even Lincoln’s family was not spared: In 1850 his three-year-old son, Eddie, died of tuberculosis, and in 1862, during the Civil War, Lincoln lost his 11-year-old boy Willie to typhoid fever contracted from the contaminated White House water supply. Typhoid and tuberculosis were but two of the killers. Diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough, cholera, smallpox, influenza and measles also ravaged the population—the last of which is being revived by anti-science “health policies” targeting universal vaccination. 

Life expectancy in the United States grew to nearly 79 years over the next century and a half, gains that demographers attribute overwhelmingly to public health measures, peaking in 2014 before plateauing and setting on a downward decline, even before the COVID pandemic. And this decline in longevity is concentrated entirely in the working class. One new study this year found that those who live in the bottom 50 percent of the American income brackets can expect to live seven years shorter lives than the richest 1 percent. Could there be any greater indictment of this literally diseased social order? The rich have a right to life that workers do not.

Abraham Lincoln eleven days before his Gettysburg Address

Being revived by America’s ruling class is the aristocratic principle. As Lincoln described it,

It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.

We could add, it is the same tyrannical principle in the mouths of capitalist politicians.

The saying that behind every great fortune there is a crime is attributed to Balzac. When we speak of chattel slavery, the criminal aspect of the labor exploitation is obvious to us. Historians estimate that in 1860, three-fifths of the richest 1 percent of all American households were slave owners. But the wealth accumulation of the slavocracy is mere child’s play compared to the fortunes of today’s superrich.

We have by now become familiar with the basic data on wealth inequality in the US, which has been growing inexorably since the early 1970s, more than a half-century ago, aided and abetted by both capitalist political parties. But let me cite one more data point: There are roughly 900 billionaires in the US, about .000026 of the population. They hoard a combined wealth of $8 trillion. This $8 trillion for 900 people is the equivalent of all federal spending on K-12 public education for eight years, which serves about 50 million children per year. And supposedly there isn’t enough money for the schools! We often hear media pundits telling us that “we can’t afford” this or that service—education, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security. This is 180 degrees wrong. The working class can no longer afford the rich. 

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The ruling class’s moral bankruptcy, revealed so nakedly by the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, is the mirror image of its financial bankruptcy. The sovereign US debt now stands at $39 trillion, and will very soon reach $40 trillion. There is no prospect of paying it away, under conditions in which the two parties rally behind ever new rounds of tax cuts for the superrich and vote through ever greater levels of military spending to wage their neo-colonial wars against working people in other countries. The dollar, the preeminent symbol of American power, will inevitably be debased. Workers and retirees, the youth and the elderly, will again be made to pay. 

The development of AI, far from opening broad new horizons for capitalism, only deepens its crisis. In the hands of a democratically, cooperatively run society, that is, under socialism, AI and robotics will be used to alleviate human beings from the most taxing, monotonous and dangerous jobs. Production will increase and necessary labor time will decrease, as it should. The deployment of augmented human intelligence will conquer broad new vistas in science. 

But under capitalism, AI will be used to slash jobs and benefits, immiserate new millions, and tighten police state surveillance. Moreover, it will only exacerbate the gathering profits crisis, as surplus value, as Marx long ago showed, can only be extracted from human, living labor. The contours of a major financial crisis are already beginning to come into relief. Trillions of dollars have been spent to develop a massive AI buildout. But profits so far derived from productivity increases emerging out of these facilities, as opposed to profits cornered from financial speculation on the manipulation of tech share values, have been minimal. This is nothing new. Through wave after wave of technological innovation, from globalization, computerization, to AI, from container shipping to the development of just-in-time production, to the internet, there has been one constant: the relentless, remorseless decline of American capitalism.

The horizons of the American ruling class are crowding in all around it. It sees no way out, other than war and police state repression. As stated on the World Socialist Web Site, the second Trump administration signals the violent realignment of the forms of political rule with the actual physiognomy of the society. And this, in the final analysis, is the origin of the Frankenstein monster of American politics, Donald Trump, a creature of the shady borderlands of real estate, casino gaming, entertainment and organized crime. And it is this crisis that is the origin of the counterrevolution that Trump leads—not by accident, but because he has been placed there, selected by the decisive sections of American capitalism.  

One of the questions long posed by historians is why it was that the slave oligarchy of the South risked everything in seceding from the Union and launching a war to perpetuate and expand slavery. The outcome of their counterrevolution was the complete opposite of what the masters expected. As the great historian of the American Civil War, James McPherson, puts it: “Seldom in history has a counterrevolution so quickly provoked the very revolution it sought to preempt.” Lincoln, as is well known, began the war first as a means of preserving the Union with slavery intact—though, like the founding fathers, he believed that if slavery were hemmed in it would ultimately perish. But the ferocity of the slaveowners’ counterrevolution propelled Lincoln to reach for revolutionary solutions: Emancipation and the destruction of the entire southern social order.

The Trump administration has likewise launched a preemptive counterrevolution. It has deployed military-style crackdowns on major American cities, most notoriously in Minneapolis and St. Paul, where ICE Gestapo assassinated peacefully protesting citizens. There has never been such a far-reaching attack on basic constitutional and democratic principles as that leveled from the centers of power in Washington D.C., with the criminalization of immigrant workers only the stalking horse for the much larger target: the working class as a whole. 

There is today no mass socialist movement. And yet everywhere the ruling class raises the threat of “socialism.” Trump does not mean by this the “socialism” of his chum Zohran Mamdani, who has abandoned all of the radical phraseology that he used to lure New York’s workers and youth to vote him into office. In fact, even Mamdani’s most milquetoast reform proposals, such as cheaper bus fares, are also in the scrapheap. The nightmare that haunts the minds of the ruling class is a politically conscious, politically independent working class, fighting for a political program that actually expresses its real needs: for international solidarity with workers everywhere, for an end to capitalist wars, for good jobs and good pay, for healthcare, a clean environment, for access to culture and beauty.

This is why the fundamental task confronting the youth here at Gettysburg and everywhere else is to turn to the working class, the only social force that has both the power and the need to stop the world’s descent into barbarism and planetary destruction; why the revolutionary duty is now more essential than ever: to tell the truth.

3. Global military spending surges to record $2.887 trillion

Global military spending hit a record $2.887 trillion in 2025—the highest level ever recorded and the 11th consecutive year of growth, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reported Monday.

The surge in military spending comes as the Trump administration is waging war all over the world, from Venezuela to Iran, and as the European imperialist powers and Japan are carrying out a massive rearmament drive coupled with a systematic attack on social spending.

The United States, with $954 billion in 2025 military spending, remained the largest military spender on earth, accounting for one-third of global military expenditure.

“Spending approved by the U.S. Congress for 2026 has risen to over $1 trillion, a substantial increase from 2025, and could rise further to $1.5 trillion in 2027 if President Trump’s latest budget proposal is accepted,” said Nan Tian, the program director of SIPRI’s military expenditure work.

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Worldwide, governments are slashing social spending to fund rearmament. SIPRI researchers warned that the diversion of national resources will mean cuts to social services, healthcare and development assistance. Trump’s $1.5 trillion Pentagon request would be paid for in part by a 10 percent cut to non-defense discretionary spending—healthcare, scientific research, housing and education.

At a private White House Easter luncheon on April 1, Trump put the trade-off in plain terms. He told Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, in his retelling, “Don’t send any money for daycare, because the United States can’t take care of daycare.” He explained: “We’re fighting wars.”

4. US unions’ “May Day Strong” seeks to neuter May Day

In an effort to contain the political radicalization of workers and young people, the AFL-CIO bureaucracy is intervening with its own “May Day Strong” campaign. It consists of a series of events throughout the country, ranging from picnics and “labor fairs” to demonstrations in major cities. In Chicago, it has an official character. May 1 has been designated a “day of civic action” in the city’s school district, with voluntary participation in rallies, and the events are officially backed by Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former Chicago Teachers Union official.

That thousands will take part in these demonstrations is a significant milestone in a country where May Day was all but banned from the official calendar, and anticommunism has long functioned as a state religion, including inside the unions.

There is also a profound historical significance to mass participation in Chicago. It was the site of the first May Day in 1886, where a mass demonstration for the eight-hour day ended in the bloody police massacre known as the Haymarket Affair.

May Day, founded on a world basis three years later, is a revolutionary and socialist holiday. Rosa Luxemburg explained its significance in 1913: “The brilliant basic idea of May Day is the autonomous, immediate stepping forward of the proletarian masses, the political mass action of the millions of workers who otherwise are atomized by the barriers of the state in the day-to-day parliamentary affairs.”

But while Luxemburg’s words will resonate with the large majority in attendance Friday, the goal of the official speakers and organizers is precisely to reinforce “the barriers of the state.” They are attempting to turn the events into platforms for stumping for the Democratic Party.

For well over a century, the American union bureaucracy was overwhelmingly hostile to May Day and largely ignored it, instead observing Labor Day as a nationalist and non-political alternative in the fall. This flowed from the bureaucracy’s explicit support for capitalism and its intense anticommunism and “America First” nationalism.

If they are now partly changing their tune, it is because they want to get in front of the growing movement to the left, dilute the radicalization and divert it into harmless channels.

In the weeks leading up to May Day, the union bureaucracy has carried out a series of betrayals, keeping hundreds of thousands of workers off the picket line. 

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Earlier this year, with growing demands by workers and young people for a general strike against ICE occupation of Minneapolis, the unions declared strikes were illegal under the terms of the pro-corporate labor agreements they signed. Instead, they diverted opposition into “No work, no school, no shopping” protests, which largely turned out to be consumer boycotts and impotent appeals to Target and other corporations. By doing so, the union apparatus not only stumped for the Democrats but played directly into Trump’s hands by suppressing organized resistance from below.

Here, too, there is a bitter historical irony. Minneapolis was the site of the 1934 general strike, led by Trotskyists in the Teamsters, which marked a turning point in the growth of industrial unionism during the Great Depression. Workers defeated attempts by police and the city’s business elite to drown the strike in violence.

While opposing a general strike in 2026, UAW President Shawn Fain is promoting a “general strike” on May Day in 2028, timed to correspond with the Democrats’ campaign for president. This was first announced after the sellout contract in 2023, which cost thousands of workers their jobs. It is safely placed in the distant future, allowing the bureaucracy to posture without taking action.

Fain’s defenders claim that a general strike now is unrealistic because they “take time” to organize. This is a fraud. The union bureaucracy, tied by a million threads to the corporate and political establishment, has no intention of organizing such a fight. A general strike will only emerge through the development of a movement of rank-and-file workers in every factory and workplace—in a rebellion against the pro-corporate bureaucracy. 

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As for the Democrats, they refuse to take any action to fight Trump because they are terrified that a mass movement would threaten capitalism itself. On Iran, they oppose only Trump’s incompetence, not the war aims themselves. In major cities across the country, they are carrying out massive austerity. They are a party of Wall Street and US imperialism. 

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One of the chief lessons of May Day is that the emancipation of the working class requires a struggle for independence from capitalist politics in all forms, and from the agents of capitalism in the union bureaucracy.

Massive struggles are on the horizon in the United States. It is impossible for a country with this level of inequality and such open criminality by the political elite to suppress social tensions indefinitely with dishonest phrases and maneuvers. The logic of the development is towards a mass political strike, unifying the struggles of the working class against exploitation into a broader fight against American capitalism.

To realize this potential, an alternative leadership must be trained and developed. Such a leadership must be guided by a historically and internationally grounded perspective. May Day is imbued with the struggle for socialism and an end to capitalism and war. These powerful traditions must be revived under conditions of a growing movement of resistance around the world, which is increasingly taking the form of a rebellion against the pro-war and pro-capitalist union apparatus.

5. Little Lake City teachers continue strike, while UTLA claims LA teachers ratified new contract

Around 200 teachers in the Little Lake City School District (LLCSD) have been on strike since April 16.

The district serves students in Santa Fe Springs, Norwalk and Downey in Los Angeles County. The vast majority of students come from low-income and disadvantaged households, and most qualify for free or reduced school lunches and other assistance programs. Teachers are demanding better healthcare, smaller class sizes and special education support.

While the strike has wide support, it is being isolated by the union bureaucracy. Only two days before Little Lake City teachers walked out, union officials canceled a far larger strike in Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest. The strike was called off in the dead of night, following last-minute talks which included LA Mayor Karen Bass, a Democrat.

Last Friday, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) claimed its members ratified a new three-year contract with a 92 percent vote in favor. The size of the outcome raised eyebrows among many educators, who were opposed to the deal’s inadequate pay increases, with newer teachers receiving higher raises than older ones, pitting teachers against each other. Worst of all, the contract paves the way for the district to move towards closing an $800 million deficit over the summer.

Having isolated LLCSD teachers, the UTLA bureaucracy covered its tracks by by calling for UTLA members to show up at LLCSD pickets last Friday, when all LAUSD schools were already closed for Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. 

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Diana, a special education teacher:

“In special education, we had four teachers in our program, and now we only have three. So I have 18 students right now, sixth graders, with behavioral needs, with severe educational needs. And they need support, and I don’t have an aide. I haven’t had an aide since January this year.

“The rich keep getting richer, and it’s like the cost of living goes up but everything else goes up around us except for our pay. So it’s really unfair. That $1,400 in extra healthcare costs, that’s nothing to [billionaires]. That’s probably a night out or a dinner to them, but to us that’s rent, that’s food, that’s groceries, that’s car payments. So, yeah, that’s a huge effect on us, and from what we’re seeing, they could care less.” 

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The struggle is reaching a new phase with the ongoing LLCSD strike and austerity coming soon in Los Angeles. Opposition must be organized from below through the formation of rank-and-file committees, consisting only of teachers, parents and students that will fight for independent action. Not only must Los Angeles teachers unite with teachers in Little Lake City, but they must reach out to workers across other districts to fight for a broader movement in defense of public education.

6. Peruvian far-right stages scandal over elections as nominally “left” candidate climbs to second place

Peru’s nominally “left” presidential candidate Roberto Sánchez Palomino is poised to advance to the second round after securing second place in the national vote on April 12.

According to the ONPE (National Office of Electoral Processes), which had counted only 95.97 percent of the ballots two weeks after the elections, Keiko Fujimori received 2,753,825 votes (17.06 percent), Roberto Sánchez of Together for Peru 1,943,155 votes (12.04 percent) and the far-right Rafael López Aliaga of Popular Renewal 1,918,981 votes (11.89 percent).

With a difference of 24,174 votes, what until last week was considered a virtual tie now makes it highly unlikely for López Aliaga to overtake Sánchez.

The media, controlled by a handful of aristocratic families, diligently went to work to cast doubt on the results, publishing large front-page headlines: “Fraud,” “ONPE’s incompetence in counting votes,” and “New election.”

Television news programs were not far behind, giving voice to the concerns about “a new Castillo in the presidency”—referring to the left nationalist President Pedro Castillo ousted in a parliamentary coup in December 2022.

The dominant sections of the bourgeoisie and their corrupt politicians feared any expression of left opposition to the dominant far-right parties, even in a tame fashion like the Sánchez candidacy. They are unwilling to accept even the smallest obstacle to their anti-worker policies and profiteering through the state.

The elections come after twelve months of a growing wave of class struggle. There were more than a dozen 24-hour public transportation strikes in Lima and Callao, supported by the entire citizenry and betrayed by union leaders who collaborated with the police. In addition, 60,000 EsSalud workers held a militant two-week strike in July 2025. University students, Gen Z youth, and other sectors have begun taking to the streets of Lima and other cities, clashing with the police, most recently to protest hikes in transit fares. 

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The explosive levels of opposition to the entire political establishment were mainly expressed in abstention and spoiled ballots. Of the 27.3 million Peruvians eligible to vote, 8.4 million or 30.8 percent cast null votes, blank votes, or did not vote. That is three out of every 10 voters, more than the top two candidates combined, either cast a protest ballot or stayed home out of opposition to the entire bankrupt bourgeois democratic system in Peru and its disregard for widespread poverty, informal employment, corruption, citizen insecurity, extortions, and other widely felt issues. 

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As the most prominent representative for the dominant sections of the national bourgeoisie and foreign capital, Keiko Fujimori is the heir to her father's 1993 Constitution, which was aimed against the interests of the working class, small farmers and small businesses.

Her entire family is neck-deep in corruption, but all the top candidates are as well. The most well-known case against her is “The Cocktail Parties.” She allegedly invited businesspeople, bankers, and other millionaires who paid US$500 to attend fundraising meetings to finance her 2011 and 2016 campaigns.

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Roberto Sánchez Palomino is the presidential candidate for Together for Peru—a nominally center-left, bourgeois party—with a background that includes positions in various branches of government. He served as Minister of Foreign Trade and Tourism between 2021 and 2022 during Pedro Castillo’s administration. 

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His political platform has a populist slant disguised as progressive: promoting education, health, science, and micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises. Sánchez's proposals would place his administration in a head-on clash with the Fujimori-era Constitution, based on unfettered dominance of free markets and foreign investment. 

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Sánchez has a murky political past. As a member of the Humanist Party, he supported its integration into the government of Alan García. During García's second term, the June 2009 “Baguazo Massacre” took place. At that time, Humanist Party leader Yehude Simon was serving as President of the Council of Ministers with Roberto Sánchez as part of his government.

The National Police's attempt to evict Amazonian indigenous communities resulted in the deaths of 33 people (police officers and civilians). Sánchez helped cover up this massive crime, with García combining the deployment of special forces with racist insults against the protesters, who sought to block oil companies from exploiting the Amazon region.

Under the party label Together for Peru, Sánchez would then join several coalitions with Stalinist and pseudo-left forces, including with Veronika Mendoza’s New Peru for the 2021 elections, before joining the Castillo administration as a minister. Prosecutors have launched several investigations over corruption under his term, including over the misappropriation of funds for personal use and for influence peddling.

Independently of who assumes the presidency on July 28, the ruling class will continue its offensive against the social and democratic rights of workers.

Not only will the newly created bicameral Congress retain the power to remove presidents and name key officials, the campaign and debates saw all the top candidates maintain a “tough on crime” focus, synonymous with building up the state repressive apparatus.

Their proposals included:

(1) the reinstatement of the death penalty

(2) death for extortionists

(3) death for corrupt members of Congress,

(4) the construction of several prisons at altitudes above 4,000 meters above sea level, an extreme climate,

(5) the reorganization of the police force with increased funding, modern weaponry, and intelligence equipment,

(6) a reduction in the number of ministries, which would mean mass layoffs.

The opposition of Sánchez to Fujimorismo is not based on a defense of workers’ rights and social programs. Instead, his populist rhetoric serves as a cover for the sorting out of the conflicting interests of different sections of the ruling class, which compete over the distribution of profits and ties to foreign capital as the Trump administration goes on an aggressive offensive against the influence of China, Peru’s main trading partner.

7. Meta and Microsoft announce mass layoffs, as AI jobs massacre continues

The business press has normalized the cuts as a critical “efficiency” move. The Wall Street Journal headlined Meta’s layoffs as part of a “relentless shift toward AI,” reducing the question to a management strategy rather than social devastation. Bloomberg’s coverage, as summarized in companion reporting, described the layoffs as a response to “heavy AI spending” and a need to “trim workforces,” language that conceals the class content of the decision behind balance-sheet jargon. 

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The terminations themselves are being organized in a way meant to maximize fear and discipline. Reuters reported that Meta’s layoffs were initially leaked, then confirmed, with more cuts planned later in 2026, producing an atmosphere in which workers are left waiting for notices while management continues business as usual.

CNBC reported that Microsoft’s buyouts are structured as a first in the company’s 51-year history, with workers being pushed out under the guise of “voluntary” separation. 

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Wall Street’s response has been predictable. Meta’s stock fell on Thursday on the layoff news, only to rebound and exceed previous levels. Microsoft shares went through a similar downward cycle on Thursday and then bounced back by Monday.

The Wall Street sentiment is bound up with the significant capital expenditures required for AI development. Reporting cited in CNBC and elsewhere notes that Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are expected to spend some $650 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, much of it connected to AI infrastructure.

Wall Street is effectively cheering a model in which workers are discarded so that speculative bets on AI can be funded and corporate valuations preserved and increased. The market celebrates “productivity” because the financial benefit from gutting employees translates into increased shareholder value.

The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has already explained the class logic of the new wave of job cuts. In March, we wrote that executives were openly justifying mass layoffs as the product of artificial intelligence and “new ways of working.” In a year-end review, the WSWS warned that “AI and automation were used to implement thousands of layoffs” while corporations continued funneling money into buybacks and executive compensation. That analysis is now being acknowledged by corporate statements and business news reporting.

The latest surge of layoffs at Meta and Microsoft must be understood as part of a deliberate corporate offensive against the working class. The financial oligarchy is using it to reorganize work, intensify exploitation and shift the costs of technological change onto the remaining workforce. While the corporate press describes these cuts as strategic and prudent, the socio-economic purpose is unmistakable: The jobs of tens of thousands of workers are being sacrificed by the multi-trillion dollar tech giants with the expectation of another surge in their market value.

8. NYC home care workers end hunger strike on disputed promise of vote on 24-hour shifts

A weeklong hunger strike by New York City home care workers fighting to ban 24-hour shifts ended Thursday after City Council Speaker Julie Menin’s office told organizers the “No More 24” Act would be brought to a vote by May 14—a commitment her office immediately denied making. The strike, the second in two years, followed repeated broken commitments and months of inaction after multiple protests at City Hall. It ended without a concrete gain, leaving the workers’ struggle once again suspended pending a future vote.

This action demonstrates that workers cannot rely on the City Council or any existing political channels to advance their demands. Appeals to City Council Democrats, including Menin and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who voiced support for the bill while taking no action, have led to a dead end. The determination shown by the strikers must now find a new form. To win their demands, home care workers must organize independently and mobilize broader layers of New York City workers confronting the same conditions of overwork, low pay and inadequate healthcare.

The bill is not being judged based on workers’ conditions, but on its financial impact. Ending 24-hour shifts would require increased Medicaid spending. At every stage, officials have cited funding as the decisive issue while postponing a vote and extending “ongoing discussions.” That cost question places the decision in Albany, where Medicaid funding is controlled. Reports that the office of Kathy Hochul has pressed City Council leadership to delay a vote, along with repeated insistence that any change must be “paid for,” underscore that the demand to abolish 24-hour shifts has been subordinated to budget priorities.

Responsibility is passed between city and state authorities, each citing the same financial constraints, while no action is taken. The legislative process thus operates as a mechanism for delaying and containing the workers’ demands.

The hunger strike was carried out in isolation, without any mobilization by 1199SEIU, which represents roughly 200,000 healthcare workers in New York City. Despite the serious health risks faced by workers on hunger strike and the well-documented physical and psychological toll of 24-hour shifts—including chronic pain, injury and sleep deprivation—the union has taken no action to organize broader opposition, call strikes or mobilize its membership.

Instead, the struggle has been confined to a small group of workers appealing to City Council officials. This isolation has allowed the political establishment to delay action without facing pressure from the wider workforce. The union leadership’s silence, even as the strike ended on a disputed promise, underscores its refusal to mobilize the power of the workers it claims to represent.

In this way, the absence of any organized intervention by the union apparatus has been decisive. By keeping the struggle limited and disconnected from broader layers of workers, it has ensured that the workers’ demands remain subject to the same political processes that have already failed to deliver results. 

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Within the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), rank-and-file members voted to support abolishing 24-hour shifts, only to have that position overridden by the organization’s leadership, which moved to block official backing for the bill. This reflects the same alignment seen at the city level. The leadership of the DSA acted in line with the union apparatus and Democratic Party officials, refusing to support the workers’ demands as the bill was delayed. Figures such as Mayor Mamdani have voiced support while remaining within a political framework that has produced no action. 

The result is that even where support develops from below, it is blocked and redirected. Workers are encouraged to appeal to elected officials and established organizations, only to be brought back to the same processes of delay and inaction. In this way, the political environment functions to contain the struggle and prevent it from developing into a broader movement capable of forcing change.

*****

To win their demands, home care workers must organize independently of the union apparatus and the Democratic Party, building rank-and-file committees under workers’ direct control and uniting with broader layers of New York City workers confronting the same conditions of overwork, low pay and inadequate healthcare. Only through the independent mobilization of the working class can the power necessary to impose fundamental changes in working conditions be brought to bear.

9. Oppose the political persecution of Dr. Ranjeet Brar and all health workers!

The Socialist Equality Party (UK) opposes the arrest and persecution of Dr. Ranjeet Brar, general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). Maintaining its irreconcilable political differences with the Maoist CPGB-ML, the SEP denounces this anti-democratic act aimed at suppressing and intimidating anti-war speech and sentiment.

Brar, employed as a National Health Service (NHS) consultant vascular and endovascular surgeon at King’s College Hospital, was arrested on April 9 by Metropolitan Police officers at his home under Section 18 of the Public Order Act—on allegations of a racially aggravated offence. He was taken to a police station despite him being the only adult in the house caring for his children, the youngest of whom is six years old.

A statement by the CPGB-ML issued April 9, said, “Not only have the police arrested him, they arranged to have him suspended from his work as an NHS surgeon for at least two weeks—no doubt with a view to further suspension and ultimately with the aim of depriving him of work.”

Brar was released later that evening. He has now been arrested five times over the past few years, targeted in connection with the Labour government’s clampdown on protests against the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza—backed by Washington and London. 

*****

Last month, Dr. Rahmeh Aladwan, a trainee NHS surgeon—with an impeccable record over seven years—was arrested under the Terrorism Act (2000) and the Public Order Act (1986) in connection with statements opposing the genocide in Gaza. 

This was her fifth arrest—part of a campaign of intimidation and harassment led by Zionist lobby groups, police agencies and the Starmer Labour government.

*****

Following the latest mass arrest earlier this month of 523 peaceful protesters in London—who carried a sign reading: “I support Palestine Action”—the total number arrested for indicating support for the group stands at 3,302. These arrests were carried out despite the UK’s High Court having ruled the PA proscription unlawful on February 13.

On Tuesday and Wednesday this week, the Court of Appeal will hear Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s appeal of that decision.

These unprecedented attacks on democratic rights and freedoms must be opposed. The SEP demands that the charges against Brar and Aladwan are dropped and that they are allowed to resume their jobs, free from intimidation and attacks on the right to free speech, assembly and association.

10. United Kingdom:  Your Party’s purge of socialists: the rotten end of the Corbyn project

With its majority vote to proscribe nominally socialist organizations from Your Party and purge “dual members” belonging to them, Jeremy Corbyn’s factional allies on the Central Executive Committee (CEC) stand exposed as witch-hunters against the left who have effectively self-destructed their organization.

More than a year after 800,000 people expressed support for a new mass socialist party to fight Labour’s pro-war, pro-austerity and genocide-enabling government, Corbyn’s “The Many” faction has confirmed its central remit in building a Labour Party Mark II, one bitterly hostile to the socialist aspirations of workers and youth.

Corbyn’s clique, with a comfortable majority on the CEC, tabled their plans for a purge of socialists at a meeting of the CEC on Sunday, April 12. It was the main item of business, based on proposals set out in a 7-page document titled “Dual Party Membership Eligibility”.

A list of parties that “don’t meet the criteria for dual membership” was presented to the CEC, set out in bullet points: “Socialist Workers Party,  Alliance for Workers’ Liberty,  Socialist Party, Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee), Scottish Socialist Party, Socialist Equality Party, Revolutionary Communist Party.”

This list, the CEC explained, was “not exhaustive”. In support of its mission of building “a broad left party”, the CEC voted to ban all “small self-described revolutionary parties that operate according to principles of democratic centralism”. All of these had “strategic objectives” that were “incompatible with the values and constitutional framework of Your Party.”

*****

Corbyn’s party seeks to divert anti-capitalist sentiment into parliamentary channels to prevent a developing break by the working class with Labour from acquiring a mass socialist and revolutionary character. His guiding star remains The British Road to Socialism, the postwar program of the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which insisted on socialism’s achievement through parliament via the election of a left-wing Labour government.

While bureaucrats like Murphy have spent months decrying the “Marxist sects” and their supposedly clandestine activities within YP, Corbyn’s CEC has presided over an internal regime even more anti-democratic than Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC).

Neither the identity nor the number of YP CEC members who voted for the dual membership ban is known—not even by CEC members! A secret ballot was introduced for this purpose, justified as a means of preventing leaks. Forbes simply declared each motion carried. Once the ban on socialist groups had passed, Pontius Corbyn arrived on cue, having left the dirty work of purges and proscriptions to others.

11. Australia: Labor’s aged home care cuts continue

In an anxious move in response to a popular outcry, the Albanese government last week announced that older people in its new Support at Home program will no longer have to pay for showering, dressing and continence care.

Despite the reversal of the most cruel and humiliating aspects of the scheme—such as paying up to $50 for a full-fee shower—hundreds of thousands of retired workers, mostly depending on poverty-line aged pensions, are still facing prohibitive costs under the program, which the Labor government launched last November.

While the government will now pay for immediate clinical expenses, such as nursing and allied services, participants will still have to pay up to 50 percent—depending on their pension status and means testing—of the charges for transport and mobility support, and up to 80 percent of the charges for everyday living services such as cleaning, home maintenance, gardening, meals and social support.

Plus, home modifications are still capped at $15,000 for someone’s entire lifetime, with an additional $15,000 available for assistive technology like wheelchairs.

As many of those affected and advocate groups have protested, many aged people, especially those with infirmities, illnesses or disabilities, will be unable to afford essential services as the cost-of-living soars for all working-class households.

*****

Those most in need of support will face higher costs, effectively punishing them for their failing physical and mental health and their frailty. The burden will also fall on relatives and friends as a result.

Moreover, the underlying thrust of the scheme will intensify over coming years as more profit-making service providers move in to take advantage of the privatised aged home care market that Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s previous Labor government initiated in 2013.

This attack on retired workers goes hand-in-glove with Labor’s plan to force off or deny access for 300,000 people to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) over the next four years. Health Minister Mark Butler outlined the twin assault at the National Press Club last Wednesday. 

*****

Support at Home continues the CDC model, but with extensive co-payments. Full pensioners now contribute 17.5 percent toward everyday living services, whereas many previously paid very little or nothing beyond a basic daily fee.

This is a levy on the poorest retired working people. Around 75 percent of participants will be full aged pensioners. Only 4 percent of recipients are expected to be self-funded retirees.

***** 

In announcing the backdown on personal care charges last week, Health Minister Butler made similar claims, saying the government “has listened to older Australians, their families, advocates and providers—and in the 2026 Budget will invest $3 billion to deliver more beds, more packages and better care for older Australians.”

Butler said the May 12 budget would deliver an additional 5,000 residential beds a year. But that will nowhere near overcome the crisis resulting from the fact that more than 200,000 people are also on a Support at Home waiting list, hoping to avoid having to go into a residential facility. About 120,000 people are waiting to be assessed for aged care at home. Another 87,000 have approval but no package yet.

Last year, in introducing the Support at Home legislation, Aged Care and Seniors Minister Sam Rae claimed that only 90,000 people were waiting and that the proposed release of 83,000 new packages by mid-2026 would effectively solve the problem. Given Labor’s record, this is another fraud.

In fact, the figure of 200,000 waiting is a massive underestimate because it does not include people waiting for long established services such as Meals on Wheels, community transport, home nursing and other services funded via the Commonwealth Home Support Program, which the government intends to shut down by 2027.

***** 

Across the board, from the NDIS to aged care, Labor governments have led the way in transforming care services into a for-profit market. Under the slogan of “rights-based aged care,” they have created markets in which vulnerable people do not have a right to necessary services and, even if approved for services, may not be able to afford to pay for them.

In the leadup to the May 12 budget, the Albanese Labor government is going further to meet the demands of the corporate elite for cuts to social programs, while pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into military spending in preparation to join further criminal US-led wars, from the Middle East to China.

To answer this offensive, a political struggle is essential against the trade union-backed Labor government and all its apologists, for a socialist program based on social needs, not the profits of the billionaires.

12. UNDP report exposes vulnerability of South Asia’s economies to US war against Iran

The US-led imperialist war against Iran is intensifying the economic crisis across the world, with South Asian countries among the worst hit as confirmed by a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report.

Washington’s indiscriminate bombing of multiple sites inside Iran triggered retaliatory strikes across the region. This led to the US blocking commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the global energy supply normally passes. The blockade has significantly affected South Asian countries, where oil storage facilities are minimal.

*****

The UNDP report entitled Military Escalation in the Middle East: Human Development Impacts Across Asia and the Pacific (April 2026) warns that higher fuel, freight, and input costs are “diminishing household purchasing power, raising food insecurity, straining public budgets, and weakening livelihoods” in underdeveloped Asian countries.

“Rising living costs are squeezing poor and near-poor households, while food and fertilizer prices increase, hitting ahead of key planting cycles, threaten to deepen food insecurity… Employment losses are concentrated in informal and micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME)-intensive sectors. Women, migrants, and low-income households face the greatest risks,” the report notes.

South Asia accounts for the largest share of people being pushed into poverty by the Iran war—the UNDP estimates an additional 8.8 million—with the region particularly exposed to rising food and energy costs and falling remittances. 

*****

The report states that labor market effects in South Asia will be “regressive,” with low-skilled workers hit hardest. A one percentage point decline in GDP growth is associated with a 2-percentage-point increase in unemployment among lower-skilled workers. Women workers, migrants, and informal laborers are singled out as the most vulnerable.

The US war against Iran is inseparable from the broader descent into global war. South Asia’s ruling elites, whether aligned with Washington, Beijing, or balancing between them, will only deepen their attacks on the working class and the masses through increased austerity and social repression.

The only progressive answer is the independent mobilization of the working class across South Asia, the Middle East, and internationally against war, IMF austerity, and capitalism itself. This means fighting for workers’ governments and socialist policies that place society’s resources under the democratic control of the working class to meet human need, not profit and geopolitical plunder. 

13. Workers Struggles: The Americas

Argentina:

National protest strike by government workers

Bolivia:

Peasant protests merge with worker and student mobilizations against right-wing Paz administration

Canada:

Nova Scotia long term care workers’ strike continues to expand
Toronto Transit workers move closer to work stoppage 

Chile:

Cafeteria workers strike major chain

United States:

California state workers rally as contract talks for 100,000 workers begin
Chicago school’s lunchroom workers protest stalled contract talks
 
New Orleans nurses to walk out May 1 over staffing ratios

Venezuela:

Public university employees hold 24-hour protest strike

14. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!

Bogdan Syrotiuk in 2015

"Peace for the world! Down with war!"

Apr 27, 2026

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

 1. This week in history: April 27-May 3

  • 25 years ago:
Capitalist governments repress May Day rallies 
  • 50 years ago:

Italian parliament dissolved after bribery scandal

  • 75 years ago:

    Iran nationalizes oil industry, as Mohammed Mossadegh becomes prime minister

  • 100 years ago:

British Trade Union Congress calls general strike 

2. Resolution for UAW Convention: “Against the US–Israeli Imperialist War on Iran — For the Independent Mobilization of the Working Class”

Autoworker, socialist, and working class hero Will Lehman

On Saturday, April 25, UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman introduced this resolution at a meeting of UAW Local 677 in Macungie, Pennsylvania. Local 677 includes the Mack Trucks plant at which Lehman works. The meeting was attended by members of the local apparatus. In order for resolutions to be presented at the upcoming Constitutional Convention, they must first be approved by local unions. 

When the vote was taken, the resolution was voted down 7–1, with Will Lehman casting the only vote in favor.

This outcome stands in sharp contradiction to the sentiments of rank-and-file workers. There is enormous opposition among autoworkers and workers throughout the UAW to the war, to the attacks on democratic rights at home, and to the diversion of trillions into militarism while living standards are slashed. But the UAW apparatus has aligned itself with the war drive of the government and the corporations, enforcing nationalism while workers are told to “sacrifice” for policies that benefit only the financial oligarchy.

We urge workers to read, print, and distribute this resolution widely in your workplaces, present it at your local, and use it to organize discussion and action independent of the bureaucracy. The fight against war cannot be waged through the officials who support it—it requires the conscious mobilization of rank-and-file workers in every plant, every workplace and every local.

3. Rank-and-file candidate for United Auto Workers president, Will Lehman, introduces resolution against Iran war

Will Lehman—a rank-and-file Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for UAW president—introduced a resolution opposing the war against Iran at a meeting of UAW Local 677 on Saturday. Lehman proposed that the resolution—“Against the US-Israeli Imperialist War on Iran; For the Independent Mobilization of the Working Class”—be taken up at the 39th UAW Constitutional Convention, scheduled for June 15–18 in Detroit. 

The resolution was put to a vote at UAW Local 677 and was defeated 7 to 1. Lehman cast the only vote in favor. The seven who voted it down were not rank-and-file workers but local officers and their associates—a tiny bureaucratic clique convened without the 2,400 Mack Trucks workers. Their vote is entirely typical of the pro-war UAW apparatus that has, from the national leadership on down, either actively promoted the war drive or maintained a cowardly silence in the face of it.

The resolution proposed by Lehman is a powerful statement outlining a strategy for the working class to stop the war. It denounces the war as criminal, drawing on the Nuremberg precedents established after World War II, and documents its staggering human costs and implications.

The resolution also directly connects the war to the attacks on the democratic and social rights of the working class at home. The same government that bombs Iranian cities is deploying militarized federal agents against immigrant workers, killed Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, and is building what the resolution characterizes as “the largest immigration prison system in American history.” 

*****

The resolution lays out a program of action rooted in the independent initiative of the rank and file. It declares that the war “can be ended only by the independent mobilization of the working class,” not by appeals to Congress, lobbying the Democrats, or reliance on “capitalist politicians of any stripe.” It therefore calls on UAW members to “actualize” the resolution through the formation of rank-and-file committees in every local—independent of and not subordinate to the union bureaucracy, elected in open meetings, accountable solely to the membership, and subject to immediate recall.

The resolution specifies what these committees would be charged with: taking the resolution into every workplace and convening the membership to discuss and act on it; organizing the defense of immigrant coworkers against ICE raids and deportations; opposing the conversion of auto and auto parts production to military output; and preparing to oppose conscription and defend any worker or young person who refuses to fight in an imperialist war. It further calls for establishing direct lines of communication and coordination with rank-and-file committees in other UAW locals, other unions, and with workers internationally, including in Iran.  

Finally, it links these organizational measures to concrete industrial and political action. The committees are instructed to convene assemblies, prepare the membership for “industrial and political action up to and including work stoppages and strike action,” and report back “regularly and openly” on progress. The resolution underscores that implementation cannot be left to “officials, staff, or apparatus,” but depends on “the conscious, organized, and independent action of the rank and file.”

The vote against Lehman’s resolution by the Local 677 apparatus is politically significant not for its tally—7 to 1 in a meeting designed to exclude the membership—but for what it reveals. A handful of officials, acting as a closed bureaucratic clique, moved to suppress any expression of opposition to an illegal war and prevent even a discussion among the 2,400 Mack workers they nominally “represent.” In this sense, the vote is a concentrated expression of the role of the UAW apparatus as a whole.

UAW President Shawn Fain has positioned the apparatus as a reliable prop of the war drive. He has issued no statement opposing the Iran war, while reviving the poisonous mythology of the World War II “Arsenal of Democracy”—the corporatist arrangement under which auto production was converted to armaments, workers were stripped of the right to strike, and the union bureaucracy was rewarded with state sanction and institutional privileges in exchange for enforcing “labor discipline.” 

Fain’s embrace of Trump’s economic nationalism and tariff war flows from the same logic: divide workers along national lines, subordinate their struggles to the “national interest” of American capitalism, and prepare the union to police the workforce as war and austerity escalate.

The World Socialist Web Site calls on autoworkers and all UAW members to take Lehman’s resolution into every plant and every local, circulate it on the shop floor, and implement the strategy that it lays out. As the resolution states, the working class possesses, through its position in production, transportation and the universities, the social power to halt the war machine. The issue is organization and leadership: whether workers’ collective strength is consciously mobilized, or strangled by officials whose privileges depend on keeping workers politically disarmed and isolated.

4. Harvard Academic Workers-UAW leaders sabotage strike of non-tenure-track faculty

As the strike by members of the Harvard Graduate Student Union–United Auto Workers (HGSU–UAW) begins to enter its second week, their class brothers and sisters in the Harvard Academic Workers-UAW (HAW-UAW) union have reached a critical turning point in their struggle. The fight by 4,000 non-tenure-track faculty and researchers for a first contract with the Ivy League university is a focal point in the struggle of academic workers across the country.

The primary obstacle to victory is not merely the recalcitrance of the Harvard administration, but the sabotage of the UAW bureaucracy. UAW International and Region 9A officials have moved to strangle the strike before it could become a united counter-offensive by academic workers and graduate student workers.

In a flagrant violation of democratic principles, the HAW-UAW bargaining committee has unilaterally called off plans for a spring strike, overriding a clear mandate from the membership. As reported in the Harvard Crimson, during a general membership meeting, 53 percent of attendees voted to close the strike authorization vote and begin striking immediately. Rather than implementing this decision, the committee engaged in “bureaucratic gaslighting,” citing “procedural confusions” and “notification windows” to justify an abrupt about-face that rules out any strike action for the remainder of the semester. This maneuver is a deliberate attempt to protect the university’s “reading period” and commencement operations at the expense of the workers’ primary leverage.

This betrayal is a gift to the Harvard administration. By preventing a unified front with Harvard Graduate Student Union (HGSU-UAW) members who are already on strike for living wages, the HAW-UAW leadership has effectively enforced the “divide-and-conquer” strategy of management. While graduate workers face $3,500 median rents in Cambridge on a pittance wage as little as $18 per hour, the HAW-UAW bureaucracy is ensuring that the non-tenure-track faculty remains isolated, stripped of their power to shut down the university.

The UAW International apparatus functions as a policing mechanism for the financial oligarchy. Under the leadership of Shawn Fain, the bureaucracy has perfected the use of corporatist “red tape” to stifle the initiative of workers. The HAW-UAW bargaining committee’s claim that a strike was “logistically unfeasible” is a political fiction designed to obscure their role as management’s enforcers. 

*****

As [the World Socialist Web Site has] previously reported, the most important figures on the Board include:

  • Penny Pritzker: Billionaire; Former Commerce Secretary (Obama); Boards of Microsoft & Icertis.
  • Timothy Barakett: Founder, TRB Advisors; Appointed to KKR Board (March 2025).
  • Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Former NSC Senior Director (Obama); President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a major thinktank for the military- intelligence apparatus.
  • Michael Chae: Vice Chair and CFO of Blackstone (World’s largest commercial landlord).
  • Sylvia Mathews Burwell: Former Health and Human Services secretary; Chief of Staff to Robert Rubin (Architect of deregulation).

The administration has weaponized a narrative of “financial distress,” citing a projected $365 million deficit to justify wage suppression. This is a strategic accounting lie. Harvard sits on a $53.2 billion endowment and recently raised $629 million in current-use gifts. The “crisis” is a political choice made under the pressure of the Trump administration’s scorched-earth campaign against academic freedom and student anti-genocide protests.

With Education Secretary Linda McMahon placing Harvard under “heightened cash monitoring” and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth freezing $2.2 billion in grants, the Harvard Corporation is offloading the costs of its political conflict with the far right onto the backs of the workers. 

*****

The only viable path forward for Harvard workers is the strategy proposed by Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for UAW president. Lehman has explained that the Harvard strike is part of a global movement against exploitation and war, which pits workers against the pro-war labor apparatus. “The bureaucracy can’t be reformed. It must be abolished,” Lehman has stated, emphasizing that academic and industrial workers face the same bureaucratic enemy.

Lehman’s call for a “unified counter-offensive” is the only response to the Harvard Corporation’s retrenchment and the Trump administration’s drive toward fascist dictatorship.

The victory of Harvard workers depends on their ability to break the grip of the UAW bureaucracy and the two-party system it serves. The leadership’s decision to override a strike vote is a warning: the apparatus will always prioritize its relationship with the university and the state over the needs of the workers.

To prevail, Harvard workers must:

  • Reject the sabotage of the HAW-UAW leadership and demand an immediate return to democratic control over the strike timeline.
  • Form independent rank-and-file committees to coordinate action across bargaining units, independent of the highly paid officials of the UAW International.
  • Link the struggle to the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to unite with the international working class in a common fight against capitalism and war.

The fight at Harvard is a central battleground in the global class struggle. Workers can only win by recognizing that their true allies are not the “labor lieutenants of capital” in the union offices, but the international working class mobilized in a revolutionary struggle against the financial oligarchy.

5. Book banning in the US: The right-wing effort to inoculate the population against critical thought

The ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) tracked 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025, the second highest ever documented by ALA. The highest ever documented was 4,240 in 2023. As one of the essays included in the State of America’s Libraries points out, “These numbers stand far from the baseline of 273, which was the average annual number between 2001 and 2020.”

This is not the result of some sudden upsurge in public morality or even prudishness. This is a concerted, organized campaign driven by ultra-right elements dedicated to forcing their anti-democratic and unpopular views on a largely unsuspecting public. It is part of the preemptive assault on popular consciousness, driven by fear of the growing radicalization materialized in the “No Kings” demonstrations of millions and other indications of public hostility to the entire political establishment.

Along these lines, one of the “key findings” of the ALA in regard to the “censorship landscape” bears on the identity of the “intellectual freedom challengers.”

The State of America’s Libraries observes:

Contrary to common narratives suggesting that book challenges originate primarily from concerned parents, our data shows otherwise. Approximately 91.7% of titles challenged in 2025 were targeted by pressure groups (20.8%) and government decision makers (70.9%). By comparison, only 2.7% of challenges came from parents, and 1.4% came from individual library users. This represents a dramatic shift from previous years. In the past, pressure groups and government officials accounted for roughly 12.9% of book challenges, averaging about 46 titles per year. [Emphasis added.]

*****

 The claim by the censorship zealots that they are “protecting children” is hypocritical, cynical drivel. The right-wing forces so worried about the young are the same ones in favor of slashing budgets, social programs and benefits, resulting in the impoverishment of millions of children and families.

The most targeted books in 2025 included Sold, by Patricia McCormick, a 2006 novel about a girl from Nepal sold into sexual slavery in India. The book was adapted as a film in 2014, with Emma Thompson as one of the executive producers. The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999) by Stephen Chbosky is also highly targeted. That novel too was made into a film, in 2012.

Two fantasy novels by Sarah J. Maas (Empire of Storms [2016] and A Court of Thorns and Roses [2015]), and another by Jennifer L. Armentrout (Storm and Fury, 2019) are on the list, as is Anthony Burgess’ dystopian 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange!

Also on the 2025 list, John Green’s 2005 young adult novel, Looking for Alaska, was the fourth-most challenged book in the US between 2010 and 2019, with profanity and a sexually explicit scene identified as objectionable. When the Marion County (Kentucky) High School considered removing the book from the library and senior English curriculum, it created a genuine controversy, with considerable public support for the book. The teacher who wanted to use Green’s novel received more than 500 encouraging emails, half of them written by teenagers who had read it.

Tricks (2009) by Ellen Hopkins was another title under attack in 2025, in this case for its treatment of drugs and adolescent sexuality, as was her Identical (2013). Gender Queer: A Memoir (2019) by Maia Kobabe and Last Night at the Telegraph Club (2021) by Malinda Lo were singled out for attack because of their gay sexual themes.

Beyond the list of the most targeted, the ALA reports that of the titles targeted in 2025, 1,671 deal with LGBTQ and black or indigenous themes. The fascistic book banners consider these subjects “low-hanging fruit,” appealing to the most backward elements in the population. And anti-gay bigotry and racism are real driving forces in these quarters.

*****

This is along the lines of the Nazi-like effort to “synchronize” institutions and culture behind American chauvinism, militarism and social reaction. Donald Trump’s January 29, 2025 executive order, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” for example, asserted that parents expected US schools “to instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation and the values for which we stand.” This was to be coordinated with the Department of Defense.

6. Australia’s militarist Anzac Day held amid global eruption of war

This year’s militarist Anzac Day celebration coincided with an eruption of imperialist war that Australia, under the Labor government, is centrally involved in.

Anzac Day marks the disastrous 1915 landing of Australian, New Zealand and British troops at Gallipoli, Turkey, amid World War I. Notwithstanding the government’s glorification of the landing at Gallipoli, it was a catastrophe from start to finish, the result of the reckless decisions of British and Australian military leadership. Up to 50,000 Allied troops and more than 85,000 Turkish soldiers lost their lives in a battle that was supposed to be a surprise attack but dragged on for more than eight months.

Now 111 years later, Australia is participating in a new criminal war in that region of the world, the US-led assault on Iran, which threatens to ignite a global conflagration.

Widely reviled amid the mass hostility to the Vietnam War, Anzac Day has been heavily promoted by governments since the 1980s and 90s, a period coinciding with unending US-led wars that are now metastasizing into a direct confrontation of American imperialism with nuclear-armed states, Russia and China.

The lead-up to Anzac Day was more muted than in previous years. In his statements on Saturday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese trotted out the usual lines about the military having “embodied all that is greatest in our national character.” But he said nothing about the role of the military in conflicts that are underway today.

The reason for the vagueness is that there is widespread anti-war sentiment. A Newspoll last month found that 72 percent of the population opposed the US attack on Iran. Over more than two years, there have been mass protests opposing the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the Labor government’s support for it.

Even among the crowds that gathered, which were many times smaller than the largest of those demonstrations, there were glimmers of popular anti-war sentiment. Roy Pearson, a 99-year-old veteran of World War II told the Sydney Morning Herald, “War never solves anything. We need to wake up to ourselves.” 

*****

While government leaders avoid speaking about the implications of what they are preparing, the reality of plans for a major war were spelt out bluntly by former secretary of the Home Affairs department, Mike Pezzullo. 

In a comment published by the Murdoch-owned Australian and the hawkish Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Pezzullo bemoaned the fact that “Australians tend to frame war in moral terms and as something that is in our past.” The former senior official warned that the “solemnity” of Anzac Day, and an emphasis on the horrors of war undermined “The idea of the utility and necessity of war.”

Speaking about his willingness to sacrifice the new generations of young people he continued:

“Will we have the fortitude to calculate the odds of war and to prepare accordingly, even as we abhor war? Will we have the moral clarity to calculate the cost of war and the price of peace? Will we be prepared to make the same sacrifices that we rightly honor on Saturday, for the sake of future generations?

“Odds are, we may be tested soon enough.”

He denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin. But the main target of the diatribe was China. Pezzullo repeated all of the US talking points, falsely depicting Beijing as an aggressor and declared, “For Australia’s part, we are not doing nearly enough to prepare for the possibility of a war in the Pacific in the near term.”

An editorial in the Australian Financial Review (AFR) was more restrained, but made the same basic point. 

*****

In what could become a defining element of this year’s Anzac Day, was the decision of Victoria Cross recipient, Ben Roberts-Smith, to attend an Anzac Day event on Queensland’s Gold Coast. He appears to have been given a warm welcome by most in the small crowd, while media outlets, including the publicly funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation, published respectful articles citing Roberts-Smith’s comments about his passion for Anzac Day.

It’s less than three weeks since Roberts-Smith was criminally charged with five war crimes, for his alleged involvement in the murder of multiple Afghans. That includes accusations that Roberts-Smith machine gunned a disabled Afghan prisoner to death and kicked a civilian off a cliff.

War crimes committed by Australian forces in Afghanistan flowed inexorably from the neo-colonial and criminal character of the occupation itself. The official claims that governments and the military command were unaware of the atrocities that were carried out are not credible.

Even in that context though, the ability of Roberts-Smith to make public appearances and to be treated politely by the press, as an accused serial murderer, is disturbing and a marker of a shift to the right by the entire political and media establishment.

7. Trump seeks to profit politically from attack in Washington hotel

On Saturday night, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen of Torrance, California, was tackled and subdued by Secret Service agents after he broke through the outer security perimeter at the White House Correspondents Association dinner at the Washington Hilton.

There was a flurry of gunshots, some by the gunman, who was armed with a shotgun and a handgun, some by Secret Service agents or other security officers. Only two people required medical attention: Allen himself, and an unnamed Secret Service agent, who was wearing a bulletproof vest and only lightly injured, according to accounts given by federal officials.

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While the statement issued by Allen indicates that he was deeply opposed to the actions of the Trump regime, the course he took serves no progressive purpose. Long historical experience has demonstrated that individual attacks on one or another leader play into the hands of political reaction. In this case, it provides an opportunity for Trump to escalate attacks on democratic rights.  

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Trump sought to use the incident both to glorify his own significance, and to press ahead with the construction of the gigantic ballroom that would replace the now-demolished East Wing of the White House. This included an obscene comparison of himself to Abraham Lincoln. Trump declared, “the people that do the most, the people that make the biggest impact, they’re the ones that they go after.” 

The response from the political establishment and the corporate media is, as always, reactionary, cowardly and hypocritical. In the various statements from these layers, centered on the theme of “there is no place for political violence in America,” none made the basic point that Trump is himself responsible for escalating brutal violence abroad and within the United States.

It is not even two months since US and Israeli forces carried out the extermination of much of Iran’s political leadership, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and many of his family members, advisers and other government officials in a targeted air strike on the first day of the US war with Iran.

The leaders of the European imperialist powers, who have balked at some of Trump’s actions in the Persian Gulf, were at pains to condemn the attack on the WHCA dinner and any suggestion that violence in America was a case of the chickens coming home to roost.

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tweeted that she was “relieved” Trump and attendees were safe, adding: “Violence has no place in politics, ever.” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas struck a similar tone, warning that “political violence has no place in a democracy.” 

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was “shocked by the scenes” Saturday night in Washington, while German Chancellor Friedrich Merz tweeted, “Violence has no place in a democracy.” French President Emmanuel Macron was more direct, declaring, “I extend my full support to Donald Trump.” 

The hypocrisy is sickening. Trump is himself the greatest threat to American democracy, as these ladies and gentlemen well know. His thugs attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021 in an effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election, and his war against immigrants has left American citizens dead on the streets and immigrants dead in detention camps. To say nothing of the thousands slaughtered in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza by US bombs and missiles.

8. Unite’s secret talks with Reform UK: Isolating Birmingham bin strike and embracing the far-right

Unite union officials have held secret talks with representatives of Reform UK over ending the 15-month Birmingham bin strike. The meeting is the filthy product of Unite’s isolation of a struggle that has pitted a small but determined group of 400 refuse workers against the Labour Party, locally and nationally, and its brutal austerity agenda.

Strike action became all out from March last year against the Labour-run council’s abolition of the safety-critical Waste Recycling and Collection Officer (WRCO) role, affecting 150 bin loaders, crippling pay cuts of up to £8,000, and a reduction in crew sizes by a quarter, with a similar downgrading exercise impacting bin lorry drivers.

Unite’s attempt to portray Reform UK—a far-right, anti-immigrant, pro-business party—as a potential ally is politically criminal, with implications far beyond the Birmingham dispute.

The Times reported Unite officials met senior advisors to Reform UK leader Nigel Farage on April 14 at a Holiday Inn on the outskirts of Birmingham to discuss a potential settlement of the protracted dispute with the Labour authority led by John Cotton. Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham was not present, with talks conducted by trusted emissaries.

The meeting was held in secret to avoid backlash against getting into bed with the far-right party.

It took place amid a deep crisis for Keir Starmer’s Labour government, which faces a meltdown in local elections on May 7 covering thousands of council seats across England, Scotland and Wales. This reflects widespread anger over its austerity program, such as the devastating £300 million cuts imposed in Birmingham, the UK’s second-largest city, across the council workforce

Unite’s engagement with Reform UK lends credence to its efforts to pose as a worker-friendly alternative to Labour that will in fact be used to push a further shift to the right in the interests of the corporate and financial elite. 

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Farage provided an exclusive with the Daily Mail on Friday which laid out what Reform UK would do in power if it replaced the Starmer government.

The ex-banker demanded brutal cuts to welfare provision, targeting those on disability benefits, threatening that “there’ll be riots, and there’ll be strikes and there’ll be protests, and we know all of that, but that’s what we’re going to have to do – it has to be done. We just can’t afford it now.”

This is the party Unite officials are promoting as intermediaries in Birmingham, while normalizing its toxic nationalism and xenophobia. Conservative shadow justice minister Robert Jenrick made infamous hate filled remarks against immigrants and the working class of Birmingham in March 2025 after visiting the Handsworth area of the city, complaining he had not seen “another white face” and “it was as close I’ve come to a slum in this country.” 

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The embrace of Reform UK is in line with Unite’s own promotion of nationalism and militarism. Graham’s most heated rows with the government have centered on her complaints that Labour is not moving fast enough on military spending, including threatening that Chancellor Rachel Reeves should be sacked if this was not speeded up. If Reeves could not “grasp the concept” of backing British industry “and doesn’t care where things are made then she should go.” She described a massive rearmament program as “vision for Britain.”

Unite’s agenda of militarism and economic protectionism, so far pursued in collaboration with the Starmer government, is fundamentally incompatible with the defense of workers’ jobs, pay and conditions, or public services, all of which are being sacrificed on the altar of increased military expenditure, trade war and further tax concessions to big business. But it is entirely compatible with support for a Reform UK government by bureaucracy that functions not as a vehicle for workers’ resistance, but as an instrument for its suppression.

The Holiday Inn meeting between Unite and Reform UK is a damning exposure of the role of the pseudo-left, including the Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party, which have backed Graham, promoted the union’s bogus “mega-pickets” while the strike was systematically isolated, and glorified Graham’s spats with Starmer as representing a shift to the left by the union bureaucracy. 

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The Socialist Equality Party has insisted throughout the Birmingham dispute that the fight against the Starmer government, against anti-migrant attacks, the rise of the far-right, austerity and war mean ending the strangulation of the class struggle by the union bureaucracy. It requires the building of independent rank-and-file committees to transfer decision-making to workers themselves and unify struggles across workplaces and sectors and forging a new leadership for the working class, the SEP.

9. Tanzania whitewashes post-election massacre of thousands of protesters

President Samia Suluhu Hassan and her Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) government has released a report into the October 2025 post-Tanzanian election mass killing of protesters—one of the bloodiest episodes in post-independence African history.

The October 29 election, in which Hassan claimed a one-candidate “victory” with the absurd official result of 97 percent, was a transparent fraud. The main opposition leader Tundu Lissu was detained and accused of treason ahead of the elections. His pro-business Chadema party was barred from contesting.

The response was explosive. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of workers and youth flooded the streets in the largest protests since independence, shattering the myth of Tanzania as a stable “land of peace” promoted by the corporate media and foreign investors. The regime responded with naked terror. Under cover of a five-day internet blackout, security forces unleashed a killing spree, gunning down protesters nationwide.

The report is a whitewash. The commission was chaired by former chief justice Mohamed Chande Othman, like all senior judicial posts appointed from the CCM regime responsible for the massacre.

The report admits that at least 518 people died from “unnatural causes”, 197 by gunfire, and that victims were shot in their homes as well as in the streets, with over 2,000 injured and 833 struck by live rounds. Of the 518, 21 were children. But it dismisses well documented reports of mass graves and large-scale disappearances as unsubstantiated, even as it acknowledges that 245 people are still missing and that 39 families reported seeing the bodies of relatives in morgues before they later disappeared.

The true scale is far greater. A November report by 40 African human rights organizations in Nairobi estimated the death toll at up to 3,000 protestors. 

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Without presenting a shred of evidence, the report attributed the violence to “trained individuals” and “coordinated actors.” It claims that “there were people roaming around in various places… inciting and recruiting others to participate in violence during and after the election”.

This is a well-worn pattern employed by regimes across the region, including that of William Ruto in Kenya following the massacres of anti-austerity protests in 2024 and 2025, and Yoweri Museveni during recent elections in Uganda.

These stooges of imperialism, presiding over capitalist regimes carved out on the colonial boundaries, routinely invoke shadowy external forces to justify their repression, rather than acknowledge the real driving forces: soaring living costs, austerity measures, and police state violence, pushing workers and youth into struggle.

Speaking after receiving the report, Hassan declared that the events were a “tragedy” that “shook our nation”. This gave way to an open defense of repression. She insisted that the security forces had acted to prevent the country from descending into “anarchy,” and claimed that “all the violence was planned, coordinated, financed and executed by people who were trained and given equipment for committing crimes.” The aim of the protests was “to create a leadership vacuum” and render the country “ungovernable.” 

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The report’s release has been met with deafening silence from Washington and Brussels, whose sole concern is Tanzania’s growing importance within the global scramble for resources. The country possesses vast deposits of nickel, graphite, rare earths, and other critical minerals essential for electric vehicle batteries, advanced electronics, and military technologies. US-backed ventures, including major nickel and liquefied natural gas projects, are moving forward, while the European Union has intensified cooperation under its Critical Raw Materials strategy to secure alternative supply chains.

These investments are central to the economic and military interests of the imperialist powers. Maintaining access to these resources and countering the expanding influence of China, which has become Tanzania’s largest trading partner and a major investor in infrastructure and mining, is their overriding aim.

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For the Tanzanian masses, the central issues remain unemployment, poverty, and repression. The October protests expressed a deep social crisis. The essential lesson is that the struggle for democratic rights is inseparable from the fight against capitalism and imperialism, and cannot be entrusted to the state, the bourgeois opposition, or the imperialist power now waging war on Iran.

What is required is the united independent political mobilization workers, youth, and the rural masses in a struggle that must extend beyond the colonial boundaries imposed by imperialism. This must be based on a program linking immediate democratic demands, including accountability for the killings, the release of political prisoners, and the restoration of democratic rights, to the broader objective of socialist transformation: the expropriation of the ruling elite, democratic control over the region’s vast resources, and their utilization for human need rather than profit, as part of the fight for the United Socialist States of Africa.

Such a perspective requires the construction of a revolutionary socialist leadership in Tanzania, rooted in the working class and armed with the internationalist program of Trotskyism, forged in struggle against Stalinism, social democracy, and all forms of petty bourgeois nationalism, including Julius Nyerere’s “African Socialism.” These historical lessons of the International Committee of the Fourth International are documented in “The December 9 protest in Tanzania, Nyerere’s ‘African Socialism’ and the struggle for Permanent Revolution” and “Maoism offered as a bogus alternative to ‘African Socialism’ and Pan-Africanism”.

10. Police in India arrest hundreds in bid to suppress mounting worker unrest

The ongoing industrial uprising of tens of thousands of workers in the manufacturing belt that surrounds Delhi, India’s capital and largest urban area, is being met with mounting state repression. Acting at the behest of the BJP–the Hindu supremacist party that holds power nationally, in Delhi, and in the neighbouring states of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana–police have arrested hundreds of workers protesting poverty wages and brutal working conditions, as well as scores of activists who have supported them.

Over 400 workers have been arrested in the National Capital Region (NCR), since the worker rebellion began on April 10. Police are now casting a wider net to capture and arrest young labor and political activists who have shown solidarity with the worker protests by publicizing their plight and resistance via social media and by giving speeches at various strike locations. The police have falsely claimed that these activists are the principal cause of the worker unrest, labeling them instigators. In a transparent smear, the authorities have also suggested some of them may be in cahoots with India’s arch-rival Pakistan.

The police started systematically targeting the activists after the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh (UP), the Hindu fascist Yogi Adityanath, called the workers’ protests an “organized conspiracy” to “disrupt peace and progress at a time when the state is moving steadily towards development and stability.”

On April 18, Aditya Anand, a young labor activist was arrested at a railway station in the city of Tiruchirappalli in the southern state of Tamil Nadu by teams of UP police who had traveled about 2,500 km (1,500 miles) to capture him. They had placed a reward of Rs. 100,000 for his arrest. Despite holding a bachelor’s degree in engineering, Aditya is unemployed.

The UP police are fanning out across the country to arrest political activists simply for being present at the workers’ demonstrations. So far, they have reportedly arrested at least 63 people across the country, not including the hundreds of workers who have been thrown in jail.

The police have described Aditya Anand as the “mastermind” behind the violence that occurred on Monday, April 13, in the Noida township, about 25 km from New Delhi, the site of India’s parliament buildings. What the police and the Indian corporate media have termed “violence” took place after the police mounted a frontal assault on the workers, mercilessly beating them with batons and dragging detained workers through the streets. After this assault, the workers defended themselves by throwing stones and firecrackers at the police and by overturning police vehicles. Some other vehicles were set on fire by unknown persons.

Anand has been charged with various criminal offences, including inciting violence and damaging public property. The police have also served him with a non‑bailable arrest warrant endorsed by a local court. Prior to Anand’s arrest two persons police have labelled his accomplices—Manisha Chauhan and Rupresh Rai—were also arrested. The day after Anand’s arrest, police arrested two more individuals: Himanshu Thakur in New Delhi and Satyam Verma in the UP city of Lucknow. What is common to all of them is that they are activists in a labour advocacy group named Mazdoor Bigul (Workers’ Bugle). Their only “sin” has been to document and publicize the misery of these oppressed workers through social media and to appear at their demonstrations.

After Anand’s arrest, Noida Police Commissioner Laxmi Singh sensationally told the press that “the violence that occurred in Noida was a mala fide, internationally organized activity.” The Police Commissioner provided no evidence to support this claim. She simply repeated an allegation first propagated by Chief Minister Adityanath that there may be a “Pak connection,” referring to Pakistan, behind the workers’ uprising. 

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In contrast to these sensationalist and highly prejudicial claims, Aditya’s aghast brother, Akash Anand, told the Indian Express: “He was simply demanding a fair wage for laborers, is that so wrong?” He continued: “He always had a humanistic approach to everyone. We even have video evidence of Aditya pleading with workers to protest in a peaceful manner, but no one is ready to listen to us.”

Aditya Anand has now reportedly “confessed to his role in the crime.” This suggests that the police have used beatings and/or torture to extract a confession from him. India’s police are notorious for abusing detainees and using forced confessions to railroad poor people and government opponents to lengthy prison terms.  

Lawyers for some of those arrested have called the detentions completely illegal, arguing that the police have violated the most basic procedures of law. Defense lawyer Kabir Gupta, who represents Aditya Anand, told the Times of India: “The arrests are illegal because they were carried out without following due procedure under law. Unless the grounds of arrest are disclosed and our client is served with an arrest memo, the arrests cannot be called legal.” 

*****

The Indian ruling class has a long history of criminalizing workers’ struggles. One of the most notorious cases was the frame-up and victimisation of the entire leadership of the Maruti Suzuki Workers Union (MSW), a newly formed independent union that led a series of militant job actions in 2011-12. Following a company-provoked altercation and mysterious July 2012 fire at Maruti Suzuki’s Manesar, Haryana, plant, thirteen MSWU leaders were framed up on murder charges. After five years in prison and a bogus trial in which the judge deliberately mangled the law, the thirteen were sentenced to life in prison. Although the 11 surviving MSWU leaders are currently out on bail pending the court’s ruling on their appeal, they remain under threat of re-imprisonment and continue to suffer from their terrible ordeal.

The draconian measures being utilized by the authorities to suppress worker opposition flow from their determination to reassure domestic and foreign capital that India will guarantee them ever expanding profits under conditions of growing global economic turbulence, further compounded by Trump’s tariffs and now the criminal US-Israeli war on Iran. While the attack on the Noida workers has been led by the BJP, opposition-led state governments have similarly unleashed the police on protesting workers and routinely invoke essential services laws to break strikes. Many are also now implementing the “Labour Codes” introduced by Prime Minster Narendra Modi and his BJP government to gut even minimal statutory protections for the already highly exploited Indian working class.

The World Socialist Web Site condemns the arrests, imprisonment and ongoing prosecution of the Noida workers and labor activists. These actions are aimed at suppressing worker resistance and silencing left-wing opposition, above all that which seeks to support working class struggles. Workers, youth and socialist-minded professionals in India and around the world must strongly denounce and publicize this outrage and demand the immediate release of these class war prisoners. 

11. Lake City ammunition strike in Missouri enters fourth week: Why the fight against Olin Winchester requires a struggle against imperialist war

A strike by approximately 1,300 workers at the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Independence, Missouri is entering its fourth week without resolution. The workers, members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Local 778, walked out on April 5 after courageously rejecting a pro-company contract that enforced severe cuts to real wages amid historic inflation and maintained a punishing regime of forced, excessive overtime.

While the immediate demands of the workers are economic—centered on defending their living standards and winning back a semblance of work-life balance—the objective logic of their struggle brings them into a direct political collision with the US government and the machinery of military production.

The Lake City plant is a central artery of the US military-industrial complex, producing the vast majority of small-caliber ammunition for the United States Armed Forces. The context of this strike is of the highest strategic consequence. It is unfolding in the midst of a massive, blood-soaked war launched by the Trump administration against Iran. While a recently declared “indefinite ceasefire” has nominally paused direct military strikes, workers must be warned: this is a fraud. Accompanied by a continuing and illegal US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the ceasefire is not an end to the war or a step toward peace, but a tactical, armed truce.

As the World Socialist Web Site has continuously warned, the assault on Iran is not an isolated conflict, but a major theater in the initial stages of a rapidly developing Third World War. The drive by American imperialism to subjugate Iran is inextricably linked to the US-NATO proxy war against Russia and advanced preparations for a massive military confrontation with China. 

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Because the military is demanding this massive stockpiling effort, the demands placed on defense manufacturing workers have reached intolerable levels. The mass production of ammunition is dangerous, exhausting work. Workers operate amid massive industrial presses and high-decibel metal stamping, facing constant exposure to toxic heavy metals such as lead, alongside volatile explosive compounds. To meet the Pentagon’s quotas, workers have been subjected to an exhausting regime of endless, forced overtime. This brutal setup deprives workers of time to rest, recover or see their families, destroying their health to guarantee an uninterrupted supply of bullets.

In stark contrast to the sacrifices demanded of the workers, Olin Winchester, the multi-billion-dollar defense contractor that operates the government-owned facility, is gorging itself on the profits of war. As the international death toll has climbed, Olin has raked in massive revenues, funneling this blood money directly into the pockets of its corporate executives and Wall Street investors. As its own corporate financial filings confirm, Olin routinely diverts hundreds of millions of dollars toward aggressive stock buyback programs and uninterrupted quarterly dividend payouts. The company expects the rank-and-file to accept effectively lowered wages—eaten away by years of inflation—while management liquidates the profits of global slaughter to enrich the major shareholders. 

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To win this battle, Lake City workers need a new strategy based on a clear understanding of the political forces arrayed against them. They are fighting not just Olin Winchester, but the bipartisan war machine, the capitalist state, and an IAM apparatus that is functioning as an agency of the government.

If this strike remains in the hands of the IAM, it will be isolated and suppressed. That is what the IAM bureaucracy did to end the four-month strike by 3,200 Boeing defense workers in the St. Louis area in 2025 and the seven-week strike by 33,000 Boeing aviation workers in the Pacific Northwest in 2024.

Workers at Lake City must urgently take the conduct of the strike into their own hands by forming a rank-and-file strike committee. This committee must outline non-negotiable demands—including a substantial wage increase that fully offsets inflation, the institution of automatic cost-of-living adjustments (COLA), and the total abolition of forced overtime.

But such a committee must recognize the political nature of this fight. It must break the isolation imposed by the IAM by sending delegations to other defense plants, manufacturing facilities, and logistics centers, appealing for broader working-class action. By organizing through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), workers can unite their struggle with the growing movement of the working class globally against austerity and capitalist exploitation.

The fight for decent living standards, for the right to a life free from exhausting exploitation, is inherently bound up with the fight against imperialist war. The working class must not be forced to sacrifice its health, its wages, and its democratic rights to build the arsenals for World War III. Instead, workers expropriate the war profiteers and convert the military machine into a socially useful industry.

12. Pacific Island economies hit hard by war on Iran

The US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran is having a devastating impact on the global economy, threatening to plunge billions of people into deep poverty and hunger. Among the worst-affected regions is the Pacific, where impoverished and isolated island states are highly vulnerable to the fuel shortage caused by the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz.

On April 17, the leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), which includes 18 countries and territories, declared a region-wide emergency and invoked the Biketawa Declaration—which provides a framework for the regional coordination of relief efforts. 

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The imperialist powers, which are responsible for the extreme poverty and underdevelopment in the Pacific, are utterly indifferent to the fact that millions of people’s livelihoods are being crushed. The US and its allies, Australia and NZ, will exploit the crisis to further militarize the strategically vital region in preparation for war against China—the main target of US imperialism. 

The US maintains thousands of troops in Guam and is developing bases in Palau and the Northern Mariana Islands. The US and Australia are upgrading and making use of the Lombrum Naval Base in Papua New Guinea.

Australia has signed neo-colonial military agreements with PNG and Tuvalu, and is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a Pacific Policing Initiative, aimed at deploying militarized police anywhere in the region to suppress popular unrest.

New Zealand last year cut all aid to the Cook Islands in order to coerce its government into signing an agreement that will compel it to consult NZ before making any commercial or diplomatic agreements with China. Under the deal, reached earlier this month, the NZ military has unimpeded access to the Cook Islands’ vast territorial waters.

Despite the tremendous hardship imposed on their populations by the war, none of the Pacific governments has opposed the genocidal bombing of Iran and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Papua New Guinea’s foreign minister Justin Tkatchenko spoke for the capitalist elites throughout the region when he told Radio NZ (RNZ) on March 3: “We have supported the United States and Israel from day one.”

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On April 10, Kimberlyn King-Hinds, a US Republican representative for the Northern Marianas, told the ABC that the territory was on the brink of economic collapse, fuel prices had doubled and people were “having to choose between having medication or not having medication… this is a life and death situation.” But she refused to criticise the war and the billions of dollars being squandered on the military, saying “that’s for the president [Trump] to decide.” 

Major struggles will inevitably erupt in the Pacific as the imperialist powers and the local ruling classes seek to impose the full burden of the economic crisis on working people. Workers, farmers and young people must prepare by taking up a conscious political struggle for socialism. We call on readers across the Pacific to participate in the upcoming International Online May Day Rally, which will present a socialist strategy to stop the developing third world war, and to join the fight to build the Trotskyist movement in every country.

13. Mamdani’s pension deferral plan advances Wall Street austerity agenda

Last week, media outlets reported that Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) mayor of New York City, is considering a plan to defer required contributions to several pension funds for city workers—an austerity measure that amounts to a pension cut in slow motion—aimed at reducing the city’s $5.4 billion budget gap.

Such a move is a major attack on workers who will retire over the next two decades, weakening the funds’ position and paving the way for future benefit cuts and “reforms” imposed in the name of fiscal necessity. Mamdani has taken up this plan from the City Council’s counterproposal for the Fiscal Year 2027 budget, which begins in July.

Mamdani’s stated aim is to save $1.2 billion a year in payments to the city’s five pension funds by extending the legal deadline for full funding. In 2013, the City Council passed a law requiring the funds to reach 100 percent funding by 2032. Mamdani’s proposal would push that deadline back to 2042 or later.

This is aimed at satisfying Wall Street while exposing workers to far greater danger in the long term. If a major stock market crash were to occur in 2033, for example—and the financial system is already in an extremely fragile state—the city would be in a far weaker position to absorb the shock because it would not yet have the supposed “100 percent funded” cushion.

There is also the more immediate danger of provoking credit rating agencies to reduce the city’s rating, making borrowing more expensive. In March, Moody’s and Fitch issued negative outlooks for the city—the same warnings that preceded credit downgrades in 2020.

There is desperation in this proposal—but also political calculation. The DSA administration is working to prove to finance capital that it can govern “responsibly,” which in practice means administering austerity and preparing major cuts to schools and social programs. 

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Last week, amid much fanfare, [conservative New York Governor Kathy] Hochul and Mamdani announced that she would implement a “pied-à-terre tax” on second homes in New York City valued at $5 million or more and owned by people who do not live in the city.

The aim is political theater: a headline-grabbing “tax the rich” gesture used to provide cover for austerity measures aimed at workers—beginning with pensions. On April 15, the day income taxes were due, Mamdani released a widely circulated video in which he stood outside hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin’s $238 million penthouse on Billionaires’ Row in Midtown Manhattan and declared that he was honoring his campaign pledge: “Well, today we’re taxing the rich!”

Mamdani and Hochul have, in fact, formed a close political alliance and, as with his alliance with the would-be Führer Donald Trump, he has carefully avoided criticizing her in public. Hochul is using Mamdani to provide a pseudo-left cover for a right-wing budget framework, while Mamdani uses Hochul to market austerity as pragmatism. 

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Mamdani’s public “affordability” branding has now been explicitly folded into the Democratic Party’s attempt to refurbish itself through a photo-op with Barack Obama—an architect of Wall Street rule and imperialist war. In their first public appearance together, Mamdani and Obama staged a preschool event earlier this month. Mamdani’s cultivation of Obama—like his cultivation of Hochul and even Trump—signals a deeper integration into the capitalist establishment.

There is little doubt that Mamdani will be unable to balance the budget without massive cuts to education and social programs. The Trump administration is cutting aid to New York City at the very moment that the New York City Housing Authority, which houses 500,000 low-income residents and is kept afloat by federal funds, is collapsing. An estimated $80 billion is needed simply to address the enormous backlog of repairs.

While the full impact of federal cuts has not yet become clear, the expiration of certain programs is already making working class life measurably worse. The Emergency Housing Voucher program—part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the third and final pandemic measure passed by Congress—has run out of funds. The program subsidizes rent for 5,200 New Yorkers, who will now have to find new subsidies or face homelessness.

The city is teeming with poverty and homelessness, and layoffs are affecting broad layers of the working class. Inflation driven by the Iran war is pummeling incomes, and a simmering mood of dissent and anger is brewing in millions of households. 

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... perhaps nothing will better symbolize the tenor of Mamdani and the pseudo-left’s accommodation to American imperialism than the visit of the British monarch, Charles III, to New York City next week, in the year of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. Charles is the figurehead of British imperialism and the patriarch of the decayed and disgraced British royal family.

Mayor Mamdani, King Charles and Queen Camilla will lay a wreath on Wednesday at the monument to the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. After everything carried out in the name of that event—and amid the ongoing American assault on Iran—nothing could more clearly symbolize the surrender of Mamdani and the DSA to imperialism.

14. Near-miss at UPS’s Worldport, site of deadly crash last November, part of worsening aviation safety crisis

On April 14, a collision was narrowly avoided between a cargo jet and a smaller aircraft on approach to Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport in Louisville, Kentucky. The 767 cargo jet had to abort its landing when another aircraft moved onto the runway, forcing a go-around at one of the busiest freight hubs in the country.

The airport hosts UPS’s Worldport hub, the center of its air operations and one of the biggest logistics hubs in the country. The same facility was the site of the fatal crash of UPS Airlines Flight 2976 last November which killed 15 people, including three pilots. The plane crashed shortly after takeoff into a dense industrial corridor, which includes a Ford assembly plant, creating a debris field a mile long.

The National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) preliminary findings showed that the left engine and pylon separated during takeoff, with fatigue cracks and overstress failures in the attachment structure. Evidence so far indicates that maintenance of the 34-year-old MD-11F freighter was inconsistent at best. The plane had been in San Antonio from September 3 to October 18 for a heavy maintenance check, and investigators said they would examine every maintenance action performed before the crash.

UPS has since retired its entire MD-11 fleet. 

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The latest near-disaster at Worldport is the latest sign of a serious crisis in US aviation safety. On March 22 at LaGuardia Airport in New York City, an Air Canada Express CRJ-900 struck a fire truck on landing, killing the two pilots. Only two controllers were in the tower overnight, and the fire rescue truck on the runway lacked a transponder and could not be reliably tracked by the airport’s surface detection system.

On April 18, four days after the near miss in Louisville, two Southwest aircraft came perilously close at Nashville International Airport in Tennessee. One Southwest aircraft was executing a go-around while another was departing from a parallel runway, creating a near miss that investigators are still reviewing.

The ruling class’s relentless drive for profit has led to the dangerous neglect of maintenance and technology in the National Airspace System (NAS). More than 90 percent of US air traffic control facilities operate below recommended levels, forcing controllers into 10-hour shifts and six-day weeks.

While billions of dollars are being spent on domestic repression and imperialist wars, air traffic control systems are forced to rely on antiquated equipment and a technological patchwork. Conditions for controllers have worsened for decades since the Reagan administration smashed the PATCO strike in 1981 by firing over 11,000 air traffic controllers.

Significantly, the November UPS crash took place during a federal shutdown, in which controllers spent more than a month working without pay.

On March 6, Trump fired NTSB board member J. Todd Inman, undermining the independent investigatory powers of the agency. Inman had played a key role in the investigations of the November and the midair collision of a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines flight over Washington D.C. in January 2025, which killed all 67 people aboard both aircraft. Inman has said he was removed without explanation. White House cited misconduct allegations, which Inman has denied.

Inman is the second NTSB board member fired by Trump in less than a year. NTSB Vice Chair Alvin Brown was fired last May.

In his drive to establish a presidential dictatorship, Trump fired 17 independent inspectors general across departments like DHS, State and Defense during his first week in office. He has since dismissed dozens of independent agency leaders and either appointed loyalists or left seats vacant. 

15. One in Three Americans cannot afford healthcare without cutting essentials

The latest data from Gallup and Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) provide a devastating statistical portrait of social conditions in the United States. The figures expose a society in which tens of millions are forced to sacrifice basic necessities, forego treatment and incur crushing debt in order to survive.

The Gallup survey finds that 33 percent of Americans, or roughly 82 million people, have cut back on essentials such as food, utilities and transportation to pay for healthcare in 2025. Among the uninsured, the figure rises to 62 percent, but even among those with coverage nearly 3 in 10 report similar sacrifices.

Among the uninsured, 32 percent borrowed money to pay for care and 24 percent delayed or prolonged medication use. Nearly 1 in 10 Americans (about 9 percent) reported postponing retirement due to healthcare expenses, while twice as many delayed changing jobs.

The financial strain extends well beyond low-income groups. Around 25 percent of households earning $90,000–$120,000 and even 11 percent of those earning $240,000 or more reported cutting back to afford care. Healthcare has become a top economic concern, with over 60 percent of Americans expressing serious worry about costs and access. 

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One-third of adults report cost-related rationing of medications, including skipping doses or failing to fill prescriptions. A similar percentage say they skipped or postponed needed medical care due to cost in the past year. Meanwhile, 41 percent of the population carries medical or dental debt, with nearly a quarter unable to pay their bills at all.

Financial vulnerability is pervasive, with about half of adults unable to cover an unexpected $500 medical expense without going into debt. Healthcare costs now rank as a leading source of anxiety, with roughly two-thirds of Americans expressing serious concern about their ability to afford care, which only compounds mental healthcare conditions.

These statistics have profound political significance. Access to healthcare in the US, one of the most basic needs in human society, is determined not by medical need but by one’s income, employment status and insured status. And having health insurance is not a guarantee of access to medical care. The insured majority of patients increasingly face rising premiums, deductibles and out-of-pocket costs that render formal coverage largely meaningless. The result is a system of de facto rationing, enforced by the financial limits imposed on working class households. 

This situation is the product of decades of bipartisan policy, carried out by both Democrats and Republicans, aimed at dismantling the social gains won through generations of class struggle. Programs established in the aftermath of the Great Depression and expanded in the postwar period have been systematically eroded. The guiding principle has been the same: to subordinate healthcare and other social needs to the profit requirements of the financial and corporate elite.

The expansion of privatization and deregulation has been central to this process. Public programs have been hollowed out or transformed into vehicles for private profit, while regulatory constraints on insurers, pharmaceutical companies and hospital systems have been weakened.

The Affordable Care Act, designed and signed into law under the Obama administration, was not a progressive reform; rather, it entrenched the role of private insurance and, above all, was based on the private ownership of the health insurance companies, pharmaceuticals and giant healthcare chains. The result is the present crisis, in which nominal coverage coexists with widespread inability to access care.

Under Donald Trump, these long-standing tendencies have taken on an especially aggressive and reactionary form. The administration’s 2025–2026 policies represent a direct assault on the most vulnerable sections of the population, while increasing funds for war abroad and repression at home.

Central to this is the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which imposes mandatory Medicaid work requirements of 80 hours per month and introduces monthly eligibility checks, while cutting $900 billion from the fund. These measures are designed not to promote employment but to create bureaucratic barriers that strip millions of coverage through paperwork hurdles and administrative churn.

The impact is already evident. The expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies (introduced in 2021 through pandemic relief laws) has driven up insurance costs, placing coverage further out of reach for low-income families.

At the same time, new restrictions on Medicaid and CHIP eligibility for immigrants have excluded broad layers of legally present residents from care. Frequent income verification requirements have produced a system of “coverage churn,” in which eligible individuals lose insurance due to minor reporting discrepancies or delays.

The essential aim of these policies is to reduce federal expenditures by cutting people off from care. The human cost, measured in untreated illness, preventable deaths and deepening poverty, is treated as irrelevant. What matters is the reallocation of resources to serve the interests of finance capital, including tax cuts and increased military spending.

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Under the Clinton administration, the “Pivot to Managed Care” integrated market-driven efficiency into public safety nets. This era was defined by the expansion of private HMOs within Medicare and the 1996 welfare reforms, which disassociated Medicaid from cash assistance and introduced administrative hurdles that reduced enrollment.

The Obama administration furthered this trajectory with the “Private Market Mandate” of the Affordable Care Act. By rejecting a “public option” in favor of an individual mandate, the ACA required citizens to purchase private products, effectively using federal authority to guarantee a customer base for the insurance industry. Additionally, the growth of Medicare Advantage plans, which use federal funds to pay for privately run Medicare plans under both administrations represents a form of “stealth privatization.”

In states such as California, under Gavin Newsom, austerity budgets have targeted essential programs with approximately $5 billion in cuts, affecting particularly those serving immigrants and low-income communities.

The combined effect of these policies is a healthcare system that functions as a mechanism of social control and economic extraction. Workers are compelled to remain in jobs they might otherwise leave due to fear of losing insurance. Families are driven into debt or forced to choose between medical care and other necessities. The system operates not to promote health but to sustain profitability for insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms and corporate hospital networks. 

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No solution lies within the existing political framework, as both parties defend profit and corporate dominance. Growing social struggles point to the need for an independent working class movement to transform the system, establish universal public healthcare and abolish corporate control. As millions already sacrifice basic needs, conditions will worsen, posing a stark choice between continued inequality or a mass socialist movement to reorganize society. 

16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!

A video reminder describes Syrotiuk's ongoing plight 

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.