While the bulk of the public and media attention to the results of
Tuesday’s primary elections has focused on the shift to the left among
voters in New York City, the Democratic Party as an organization has
further cemented its ties to the military-intelligence apparatus,
selecting a former Navy admiral and four veterans of wars in the Middle
East as congressional candidates.
The primary results reflect a political radicalization within the
working class and among youth and professional layers who are being
hammered by the accelerating economic, social and political crisis of
American capitalism. The leftward shift of large sections of the
population that resulted in the election of Mamdani last year is
continuing and deepening. It is fueled by hatred for Trump and disgust
with the Democratic Party’s failure to seriously oppose—indeed, its
complicity in—Trump’s fascistic attacks on immigrants and democratic
rights, wars of aggression, cuts in social programs, and the plundering
of the economy for the benefit of his fellow billionaire oligarchs.
This
radicalization in the center of capitalist finance—the city with the
largest number of billionaires in the world—has national and
international significance. It is accompanied by an upsurge in the
struggles of the working class and a growing rebellion against the
corporatist trade union bureaucracy. It poses the task of breaking with
the Democratic Party, a party of American imperialism and the corporate
oligarchy within which the DSA operates as a faction.
*****
These victories follow last week’s win by DSA member Janeese
Lewis George in the Washington D.C. Democratic mayoral primary,
virtually assuring her victory in the November general election. DSA
members will then hold the mayor’s office in the nation’s capital as
well as its most populous city.
It is highly significant that a
central theme of the DSA campaigns was opposition to the US-backed
Israeli genocide in Gaza, which garnered broad support in a city with
1.2 million Jews. This shatters the claim that opposition to Zionism and
genocide equals antisemitism.
Republican politicians and media
outlets responded with near hysteria to the primary results in New York.
Trump repeatedly called the DSA candidates “communists.” Republican
House Speaker Mike Johnson posted on X: “We are in a fight RIGHT NOW to
save the Republic, and EVERY AMERICAN needs to take this seriously.”
At
a press conference on Wednesday, Johnson warned that communism is now
“on our own shores” and added, “The Marxists have nominated some of the
most radical candidates to ever run for office, and they’re running for
Congress. The insurgent left is on the rise.”
Trump’s fascist aide
Stephen Miller declared that the Democratic Party is embracing a
“violent ideology that wants to tear America down and destroy everything
that we know and love, from top to bottom.”
The Murdoch-owned New York Post headlined its front-page report “The Hateful Slate.”
In
fact, the DSA is being brought forward and further integrated into both
the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy to promote the
fatal illusion that the Democrats can be pressured into serving the
interests of working people, and the union apparatus can be forced to
oppose the corporations and the government.
The DSA’s role is to
block an independent movement of the working class against capitalism.
It works to channel the growing social and political opposition into the
blind alley of electoral politics and the Democratic Party. It has
nothing to do with Marxism or genuine socialism. It represents the
interests not of the working class, but of privileged and better-off
layers of the middle class, which seek to improve their lot within the
framework of the existing system—and at the expense of the workers.
*****
The international working class has had critical experiences with
movements similar to the DSA that promise radical reforms within the
framework of capitalism, only to betray the workers and impose the
dictates of the ruling class—from Syriza in Greece, to Podemos in Spain,
to Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and the Left Party in Germany. These
lessons must be assimilated and applied to the current struggles. The
danger is that without an independent movement of the working class
against all sections and parties of the ruling class, the initiative
will pass to the far right and the fascists.
The task before
workers and youth is not the reform of the system, but its overthrow.
The capitalist oligarchy must be expropriated in the US as part of an
international struggle for socialism. The necessary revolutionary
leadership—the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee
of the Fourth International—must be built to lead that struggle.
Internationally,
the escalating fortunes of the super-rich represent a historic
redistribution of wealth upwards, based on the increasing exploitation
of the working class. In New Zealand, a country of 5 million people
which once postured as a model of egalitarianism, the richest 150
individuals and families now own as much wealth as the bottom half of
the population.
As
it prepares to roll out the red carpet for US President Donald Trump
and other imperialist war criminals, the Erdoğan regime is seeking to
suppress all opposition to war, genocide and militarism.
The
IYSSE was the only university group at Berlin's Humboldt University to
stand on a socialist program against the genocide in Gaza, the
development of war and the militarization of the universities.
Since their concert was posted on the YouTube channel of the American radio station KEXP, the math rock duo Angine de Poitrine has generated considerable excitement and quickly gained worldwide recognition.
The
concert, originally performed at a music festival in France in December
2025, garnered over 16 million views in just four months. In April, one
of the standout tracks from their latest album, “Fabienk,” topped
Spotify’s Viral 50: Global chart, which takes into account factors such
as how often a song is shared and the number of new listeners who have
discovered it.
The band, based in Quebec and whose name translates roughly as “Chest
Pain” in English, has embarked on a tour of cities across Europe and
North America and most of these concerts are already sold out.
The
musicians, anonymous individuals that have adopted pseudonyms as
brothers, guitarist Khn de Poitrine and drummer Klek de Poitrine. The
math rock genre is a progressive, experimental subgenre of alternative
rock that uses complex rhythms, unconventional time signatures, angular
guitar riffs and an “electro-infused rock” sound.
*****
To these math rock features, Angine de Poitrine also includes
microtonality. Departing from the whole-tone and half-tone octave
intervals commonly associated with Western music and found in most rock
and pop music, the band makes effective use of quarter- and eighth-tone
intervals.
As is evident in the YouTube video, the Angine de
Poitrine duo plays freely with the audience’s musical expectations as
the structure of their songs remains rooted in dance. They make
remarkable use of microtonality and odd time signatures and keep their
music very accessible. They do not shy away from repetition or
simplicity. They skillfully use loop pedals to create a “build-up,”
while also deviating from standard song structures.
The comical
costumes worn by the two conceal the identities of two very accomplished
musicians who are masters of their instruments and equipment. The
performance demonstrates remarkable skill and groove. We see Khn,
barefoot, managing a range of loopers with his toes while playing a
microtonal double-neck guitar/bass hybrid, while Klek, unwavering,
produces a rhythmic body and coherence with the subtlety of a jazz
musician and the energy of a metalhead.
*****
Guitarist Khn has also revealed that he is a fan of Indian music,
Japanese music, and other Asian musical traditions where microtonality
is common. The band’s success is likely due less to its
originality—though real—and more to the social and historical context in
which it emerged. One internet user poses the provocative question: “Is
it Angine de Poitrine that’s good, or is everything else just mundane
and boring?”
*****
To their credit, they don’t reduce their music to an exercise in
self-expression. Being half-serious, they explain that their music
serves to “stimulate the neurons, sweat in the pure present moment, and
hear the geometry.”
And what about their costumes? Some have
claimed that it was a “publicity stunt to attract attention,” but the
origin of their costumes is more modest. Unable to play two consecutive
weeks at the same venue in a small town in their home region, Saguenay
Lac-St-Jean—a remote industrial region of Quebec known for its aluminum
smelters—they decided to dress up “just for fun.”
*****
The reasons behind the cultural stagnation in recent decades have been analyzed in detail on the World Socialist Web Site.
The working class has faced a widespread assault by the ruling class on
social conditions, including attacks on funding for and access to the
arts. Capitalism subordinates all of society to the pursuit of profit in
every sphere.
Add to this the influence of postmodernism and the
turn by artists toward subjectivity and their “inner self” rather than
toward social reality and the damage done to art by identity politics,
which accuses artists of “cultural appropriation.” It is refreshing and
encouraging that Angine de Poitrine has “appropriated” elements of
Eastern and Asian music to create something new.
The immense
artistic void that has emerged is just waiting to be filled. It is into
this void that the duo of Khn and Klek de Poitrine has stepped and they
are pointing in a direction as the audience responds with enthusiasm.
Time will tell how the band will evolve musically. But the explosive
social and political context suggest that more captivating musical
surprises are on the horizon.
Educators
who participated in the Committee for Public Education’s recent online
public meeting speak about the issues raised at the meeting and the No
vote that followed.
Steven
Linell Smith, a black maintenance mechanic at the USPS St. Paul
Processing and Distribution Center in Eagan, Minnesota, endured five
years of racial harassment, including death threats and slurs, before
being fired.
Budgets
in New South Wales and Queensland show the leading role of Labor
governments in slashing social spending amid the ongoing fallout from
the Iran war.
The
national party conference of the Left Party (Die Linke), which took
place in Potsdam from 19 to 21 June, centered primarily on one question:
Will the party succeed in curbing the radicalization of the youth?
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.
Rabinowitch’s tetralogy consisted of 1) Prelude to Revolution, published in 1968, which concentrated on the political crisis that erupted in Petrograd in the summer of 1917; 2) The Bolsheviks Come to Power, published in 1976, which dealt with the events that culminated in the October 1917 socialist revolution; 3) The Bolsheviks in Power, published in 2007, which provided a detailed narrative of the first year of Bolshevik rule; and 4) The Bolsheviks Survive: Petrograd 1919, published in 2026, which focused on the almost miraculous victory of the Bolshevik Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky.
The
substantial span of time between volumes reflected the meticulous
character of Rabinowitch’s research, which was based on intense work in
critical archives. The major achievement of his work was its
substantiation of the mass working class base of the Bolshevik Party. It
came to power not through a coup, but as the result of a massive
revolutionary offensive. The Bolsheviks became a mass party because its
program coincided with and clearly articulated the interests of the
working class.
More than once, Rabinowitch’s honesty and
principled approach to history put him at odds with the dominant moods
and tendencies in his profession and personal milieu, setting his life
on a course that he himself never anticipated. The works he produced as a
result of this unyielding commitment to historical truth were
pathbreaking and constitute an important contribution to the historical
record of 1917 and the first two years of the civil war.
*****
Rabinowitch attended high school and college during the McCarthy era and
Korean War. He later recalled about his years as an undergraduate, “As
an ROTC cadet, I was trained to think and prepared to train others to
think of the Soviet Union as the incarnation of evil and the ‘free
world’s arch-enemy’.”
But his own research contradicted these conceptions. Having initially
set out to write his dissertation about the Menshevik leader Irakli
Tsereteli, a trip to Soviet Russia in 1963-64 prompted Rabinowitch to
shift his attention to the July Days of 1917. His dissertation, which he
defended in 1965 at Indiana University, became Prelude to Revolution: The July Days in Petrograd.
A pathbreaking work, it established that, contrary to the prevailing
view in the West, the July insurrection was not an early botched attempt
by Lenin at a coup d’etat.
Rather, it was an uprising,
originating from below, which the Bolsheviks first sought to counteract,
recognizing that it was too early to succeed, and only supported as it
became clear that it enjoyed overwhelming support among the most
militant sections of workers and soldiers.
Rabinowitch’s book documented the Bolsheviks’ transformation into a
mass organization within the few months following the overthrow of the
Tsar in the February 1917 Revolution. As he explained in his 2011
lecture, “This party was deeply rooted in the masses, the factories, the
residential districts and the garrisons, and exhibited great
sensitivity to the prevailing political opinions and tendencies, as well
as to the highly developed culture of democratic discussion in its own
organization.”
Having arrived at this conclusion through the
research for his first book, all of his future research would serve to
substantiate and deepen it. Rabinowitch would later credit his teachers,
historians Leopold Haimson and John M. Thompson, for awakening his
interest in the revolution as a seminal political and social event and
emphasizing that historical research must be as “objective as humanly
possible.”
*****
Rabinowitch’s great strengths as a committed researcher were at full display in his second and perhaps most important book, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The 1917 Revolution in Petrograd,
first published in 1976. It is difficult to overstate the significance
of this work in countering both anti-Communist and Stalinist
falsifications of history.
Given that access to Soviet archives
was out of the question, he had to base himself on a meticulous analysis
of published sources, especially newspapers and meeting minutes.
Rabinowitch was able to trace the political conflicts within the
Bolshevik Party, the relationship of the Bolsheviks to factory workers
and the changing moods within the working class itself. He showed how,
upon his return to Russia in April, Lenin had to wage a fierce struggle
within the leadership of his own party to orient the party toward the
socialist seizure of power.
Rabinowitch’s account illustrated and confirmed, in all essential
elements, the analysis of the inner-party struggle provided by Leon
Trotsky’s Lessons of October. His book also highlighted the
decisive role of Trotsky as the head of the Military Revolutionary
Organization in the planning and organization of the October 1917
insurrection. Rabinowitch’s account was also the first to establish the
immense historical rule of later leaders of the Left Opposition such as Ivar Smilga
in the events of 1917. Their role had been wiped from the historical
records as they themselves were murdered by Stalin during the Great
Terror.
Stalinist historians in the Soviet Union denounced his first two books
and labeled Rabinowitch a “bourgeois falsifier.” In the West, his work
dealt a devastating blow to anti-communist denunciations of 1917 as a
“coup.” Despite many an effort to revive this discredited
narrative—especially after 1991—Rabinowitch’s account has never been
refuted. In 1989, in the final years of the Soviet Union, it became
first major work of a Western historian on 1917 to be translated into
Russian. More than half a century upon its first publication, his book
remains an unsurpassed study of the Bolshevik Party on the eve of the
seizure of power.
*****
With his determination to continue and deepen his important
historical research, Rabinowitch demonstrated an admirable degree of
intellectual and moral integrity. Like the best historians of his
generation, he was motivated by the conviction that history is a science
and that the historian’s principal task is the establishment of
historical truth for the sake of the development of society. Underlying
this work was a deeply felt concern with the fate of humanity and social
progress.
He would not have been able to conduct this work
without the immense support of his wife of over 64 years, Janet
Rabinowitch. An accomplished and renowned academic editor who had also
been trained in Russian studies, Janet Rabinowitch assisted and
encouraged his work at every step, both on a personal and a professional
level.
Rabinowitch’s death is a genuine loss to the historical
profession and all those committed to historical truth. It speaks to the
climate of reaction that prevailed after 1991 that no comparable figure
emerged from later generations of historians.
*****
The remarkable body of historical research he produced remains an
indispensable foundation for any serious study of the Russian Revolution
and the civil war. As new generations of workers, principled
intellectuals and young people are radicalized by the cascading crises
of capitalism and an emerging global war, the intellectual appeal and
political significance of his work will only grow.
A
United Nations independent commission has issued a damning indictment
of Israel’s campaign of mass killing in Gaza, concluding that Israel has
committed and continues to commit genocide, crimes against humanity and
war crimes against the Palestinian people, especially against
Palestinian children.
The 94-page report,
published on June 18, 2026, by the Independent International Commission
of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East
Jerusalem and Israel, has the title: “The essence of childhood has
been destroyed”: Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children
in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 7 October 2023.
The
report covers the period from October 7, 2023, through March 31, 2026,
and is a comprehensive legal and factual record of atrocities that
dwarf, in duration and systematic character, virtually any comparable
episode of state-directed violence against a civilian population in the
modern era.
While the Commission’s findings are not new, they are devastating in their scope and accumulation. The World Socialist Web Site has
tracked and reported on this genocide since its inception, documenting
each massacre, each hospital destroyed, each famine deliberately
induced, and each act of political cowardice by governments that claimed
to oppose genocide in principle while enabling it in practice. From the
earliest weeks of Israel’s assault, the WSWS called the campaign by its
correct name: genocide. The UN Commission has now officially, after two
and a half years, arrived at precisely the same conclusion.
*****
The Commission’s genocide findings, which build on a previous
dedicated report, are rooted in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’s definition. The Convention
requires proof of specific acts committed withintent
to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious
group as such. The Commission provides proof that four categories of
genocidal acts have been committed against Palestinians in Gaza and
three of these categories relate directly to children.
First, killing members of the group:
the Commission concludes that the direct, intentional killing of
Palestinian children—through precision weapons, wide-area munitions,
sieges and denial of medical care—constitutes killing of members of the
protected group with genocidal intent. The Commission notes that
Israel’s continued use of massive explosive munitions in densely
populated areas, despite mounting child casualties and despite binding
orders from the International Court of Justice, demonstrates that these
deaths were “intentional” and not collateral.
*****
Second, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group:
tens of thousands of Palestinian children have sustained catastrophic
injuries requiring multiple surgeries and lifelong
rehabilitation—services that barely exist in the destroyed Gaza
healthcare system. Children who survived bombings endure amputations,
burns, polytrauma and permanent disabilities. The Commission finds this
harm was foreseeable, systematic and deliberately inflicted.
Third, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction:
the total siege imposed on Gaza, blocking food, medicine, clean water
and humanitarian aid, has produced acute malnutrition, the reemergence
of diseases including polio, the collapse of the neonatal healthcare
system and a measurable decline in the Palestinian birth rate.
The
Commission identifies four specific indicators of genocidal intent in
relation to the siege: the nature and duration of the siege itself;
Israel’s awareness that it would destroy Palestinians as a group; the
continuation of the siege in defiance of ICJ orders; and the “entrapment
of Palestinians in Gaza, ensuring they cannot escape the violence and
intended destruction of the group.”
Significantly, the Commission
writes: “Having assessed as a whole, taking into account the nature and
duration of these acts, their foreseeable consequences and the prolonged
denial of remedial measures, the Commission reiterates its finding that
Israeli authorities and security forces deliberately inflicted on the
Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction, in whole or in part, with specific intent to
destroy the group, as such.”
*****
The Israeli government did not cooperate with the Commission. The
report notes that since October 7, 2023, the Commission sent 13 requests
for information and/or access to the government of Israel. No responses were received. Israeli
officials have repeatedly dismissed the Commission as biased, the Human
Rights Council as antisemitic, and the International Court of Justice
proceedings as illegitimate.
The Israeli government’s standard
denial takes several forms. It claims that Gaza civilian casualties,
including children, result from Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure
as cover, placing responsibility for deaths on Hamas. It invokes the
right of self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. It asserts
that its military conducts operations in compliance with international
humanitarian law and conducts internal investigations of alleged
violations. It portrays the genocide designation as a political weapon
wielded by enemies of Israel rather than a legal determination based on
evidence.
Each of these denials collapses under scrutiny. The
Commission examined the claim that Palestinian boys killed or arrested
were “terrorists” or “fighters” and found it to be a systematic pattern
of false labeling used to justify the murder and detention of children.
*****
The corporate media’s response to the Commission’s findings has been,
predictably, to minimize and bury its meaning and significance.
Mainstream outlets led their coverage with Israeli denials, gave
prominent space to accusations of UN bias, and framed the genocide
finding as a “controversy” rather than a legal determination. The BBC
and the New York Times and comparable outlets, treated the
Commission’s conclusions as one perspective in a debate, while reserving
unqualified authority for Israeli military spokespeople.
The
Trump administration’s response went further. Having already withdrawn
US support for UN bodies critical of Israel, cut funding to UNRWA and
provided unqualified military and diplomatic backing to the Netanyahu
government, the administration dismissed the Commission’s report. Trump
officials have called ICC arrest warrants for Israeli officials—issued
for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav
Gallant—an outrage and threatened sanctions against ICC personnel. The
US has demonstrated that it is not a bystander but an active accomplice
in the ongoing genocide.
Governments in Europe, Canada and
Australia have adopted the language of “concern” while continuing arms
transfers and diplomatic protection for Israel at the United Nations
Security Council. The British Labour government of Keir Starmer, despite
some rhetorical distancing, maintained arms sales and blocked
meaningful accountability measures.
The German government,
cynically invoking its post-Holocaust commitment to “never again,”
provided Israel weapons used in the commission of acts that the UN now
officially characterizes as genocide. This is a historical irony of
grotesque proportions, but it is not inexplicable given the resurgence
of fascist political organizations such as the AfD and the return of
German imperialist militarism.
Political parties that have
persistently argued against the genocide characterization—including
representatives of both the US Republican and Democratic parties, the
British Conservative and Labour parties and their counterparts across
Europe—bear direct political responsibility for enabling the conditions
described in this report. Their arguments—that the evidence is
insufficient, that Hamas bears primary responsibility, that the conflict
is too “complex” for legal determination—have been definitively refuted
by 32 months of documented evidence now codified in UN commission
findings.
As the World Socialist Web Site has
consistently referenced, the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945-46 established
principles that remain the foundation of international criminal law.
Chief among them was the recognition that crimes against humanity and
war crimes do not arise in a vacuum—they are rooted in what the Tribunal
designated the “supreme international crime”: the crime against peace,
the planning and execution of aggressive war.
*****
The policies documented in the UN commission’s report, from the
systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure to the deliberate
starvation of a population, from the mass arrest and torture of children
to the bombing of hospitals, are not aberrations from an otherwise
lawful military operation—they are the operation. They
are the expression of an ethnic cleansing project, supported by the
Israeli political and military establishment, to destroy the Palestinian
people as a national and cultural group.
Political leaders who
authorized, ordered or covered up these crimes—including members of the
Israeli war cabinet, senior military commanders and ministers who
publicly called for the destruction of Gaza—bear criminal
responsibility. And accountability must extend beyond Israel’s borders,
to those who enabled the genocide: political leaders who blocked UN
Security Council action through vetoes, arms suppliers who provided
weapons used in documented atrocities and officials who publicly denied
genocide while the evidence mounted.
These principles must be
applied with full force to the conduct of the Israeli state. The
occupation of Palestinian territory, now in its sixth decade,
constitutes a sustained violation of international law, including the
prohibition on acquiring territory by force. The measures necessary to
put an end to the Gaza genocide—as well as the ongoing US-Israeli war
crimes against Iran and Lebanon—cannot be carried out by the UN, which
is an instrument of the imperialist world order that is the source of
21st century barbarism.
While the UN Commission’s report provides a detailed factual and legal
record upon which war crimes prosecutions should be built and calls for
UN member states to “arrest any Israeli officials against whom arrest
warrants have been issued by the ICC and extradite them into the custody
of the ICC,” it remains incapable of enforcing them. The UN Commission
does not, for example, reference the Nuremberg precedent nor does it
discuss what, if convictions are obtained against the Israeli war
criminals and their enablers, the potential sentences should be.
On June 21, just 37 days after the epidemic was declared, the
Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) surpassed the grim milestone of
1,000 confirmed Ebola cases. Official figures now record 1,003 confirmed
infections and 256 deaths across the DRC and neighboring Uganda, making
this the worst first month of an Ebola outbreak in recorded history.
Health
Policy Watch reports that the current epidemic is three times larger
than any previous outbreak at the four-week mark. By comparison, the
horrific 2014 to 2016 West Africa epidemic registered only 242 cases at
four weeks, and the 2000 Uganda outbreak just 281.
The
catastrophic acceleration of this disease is not a natural disaster. It
is a social crime. The material and scientific means to contain this
epidemic exist in abundance, yet they are deliberately withheld by the
major imperialist powers. The mass death now unfolding in central Africa
is a clear demonstration of capitalist social murder, a conscious class policy that prioritizes private wealth and imperialist war above human life.
*****
The present epidemic is the 17th in the DRC alone, the second in less
than a year. A 2025 study in Scientific Reports surveyed 3,752 health
workers and researchers across 151 countries, who warned of a “creeping
catastrophe” of escalating infectious disease driven above all by
climate change, socioeconomic inequality and the emergence of pathogens
resistant to antibiotics. More than 60 percent of emerging infectious
diseases are zoonotic, and the rapid urbanization of Africa, mass
displacement and deforestation are tearing down the barriers between
human populations and animal reservoirs.
This creates a brutal
paradox. Humanity knows more about the biology and transmission of these
pathogens than ever before in history, yet the capitalist ruling class
deliberately does less to stop them. The homicidal COVID-19 doctrine of
“let it rip,” “let the bodies pile high,” and “the cure cannot be worse
than the disease” has been generalized from a single pandemic to the
whole of global public health. What is unfolding in central Africa is
its application.
Global leaders portray a coordinated international effort, but the
financial reality exposes a deliberate deception. More than $910 million
was pledged to combat the outbreak, yet under $90 million, less than 10
percent, has been delivered.
The African Union’s pledge to disburse funds within four weeks
remains unmet, leaving the $518 million joint continental response plan
effectively unfunded. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and
Prevention (Africa CDC) urgently needs 540 personnel on the ground but
has deployed only 84. Africa CDC Director General Jean Kaseya recently
revealed that donor pledges were “corrected” downward as the death toll
rose, with commitments quietly withdrawn by the major powers.
A major factor in this collapse is the Trump administration’s dismantling of the US Agency for International Development
(USAID) in July 2025. A June 2026 interim staff analysis by the House
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, “People Are Already Dying,
and More Will Die,” states that Trump’s first-day executive order
dismantling the agency “has already resulted in hundreds of thousands of
deaths and will lead to the deaths of millions more globally.” It cites
a study in The Lancet by Daniella Medeiros Cavalcanti and colleagues
estimating that the sudden termination of USAID has already caused more
than 600,000 preventable deaths.
*****
There is a staggering contradiction between the pitiful sums made
available for fighting Ebola and the vast accumulation of private wealth
by the capitalist oligarchy. Elon Musk became the world’s first
trillionaire from the SpaceX public offering, which added more than $500
billion to his fortune in days. That windfall is seven times the entire
annual economic output of the DRC, a nation of roughly 106 million
people, and 25,000 times the $23 million US emergency Ebola response.
The average Congolese citizen lives on roughly $700 a year, less than $2
a day, atop one of the most mineral-rich territories on earth, the
source of the cobalt and coltan in every modern phone and battery, even
as global military spending hit a record $2.887 trillion in 2025.
*****
There is no vaccine for the Bundibugyo strain because, like every
disease of the poor, it offers no profit to develop one. This is
precisely why the pharmaceutical industry must be taken out of private
hands and operated as a public utility, so that therapeutics and
vaccines are produced on the basis of human need. And because pathogens
recognize no borders, this requires a genuine international
collaboration of scientists and workers, pooling knowledge and resources
across the very national and commercial lines that the profit system
enforces.
Precisely because these necessities are international in
scope, scientific in character, and require the planned allocation of
vast resources against the profit motive, only a socialist solution is
viable and practical. The only social force capable of carrying it out
is the international working class. The Congolese miner, the displaced
family in Ituri and the public health worker fired in the United States
confront the same system.
The life-saving resources required to
halt this epidemic exist in abundance, but they are concentrated at the
top and spent on war. This social murder is a conscious class policy,
and it will only be ended through the political mobilization of the
international working class fighting for the socialist reorganization of
the global economy.
Ontario’s hard-right Tory premier, Doug Ford, is seeking to place the
province at the center of Canada's military-industrial buildup,
unveiling a 10-year strategy aimed at rapidly transforming the country's
most populous and industrialized province into a critical hub within
North American and European military-supply chains.
The plan was
announced in late May at the CANSEC defense trade show in Ottawa.
Ontario’s new defence Industrial Strategy (ODIS) boasts of what
government officials describe as a “once-in-a-generation” increase in
military spending by Canada and other NATO states. In a press release,
Ford stated, “Our provincial defense strategy will position Ontario to
take advantage of these record investments, contributing to global
security, supporting Ontario companies and bringing tens of thousands of
good-paying defense jobs to our province.”
The ODIS places these
initiatives within the context of the “illegal” Russian invasion of
Ukraine, China’s “growing use of economic coercion,” ongoing conflicts
in the Middle East, and shifting transatlantic security dynamics. The
lies about Russian aggression in Ukraine, a conflict provoked by over
three decades of US and NATO expansion following the dissolution of the
Soviet Union, and the portrayal of China, rather than the US and
European imperialist powers, as the driving force towards war, express
the predatory interests of Canadian imperialism. Ottawa requires a war
machine to enable the bourgeoisie, as Prime Minister Mark Carney put it
in his Davos speech, to be at “the table” rather than “on the menu” in the imperialist redivision of the world.
*****
Ontario’s 2026 austerity budget, the latest in a decades-long
all-party assault on public services, dovetails with the Ford
government’s determination to make a major contribution to the
construction of Canadian imperialism’s war machine. It promises a boon
for the province’s private developers and defense contractors, and
deprivation for the working class. The projected deficit of $13.8
billion—significantly higher than previous forecasts—will be used to
justify further austerity for public services and public sector workers.
Critical social services, like healthcare, education, and housing, are
already chronically underfunded due to cost-cutting budgets enforced by
Ford’s Tories since taking power in 2018. Prior to that, governments led
by the Liberals, Tories, and NDP imposed strict fiscal discipline for
public spending since the 1990s, while slashing taxes for big business
and the rich, producing an explosion in poverty and the growth of a
super-rich elite.
K-12 education funding drops 3.6 per cent this
year, continuing a trend that has seen per-student funding decline by
roughly $1,500 in real dollars since Ford took office. The government
has seized direct control of eight school boards, installing
Tory-connected supervisors to force through school closures and cuts to
special education. Funding for Ontario colleges and universities will
decline in real terms by almost 2 percent this year. These institutions
already receive among the lowest levels of per-student public funding in
Canada.
Much of the Ford government’s much-ballyhooed “historic
investment” in post-secondary education will be financed through
regressive changes to the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP)
whose impact will fall disproportionately on working-class students. The
government has slashed the grant portion of student aid from 85 to 25
per cent, thereby dramatically increasing students’ reliance on loans.
The student aid cuts have triggered protests across the province, as
students confront rising debt-loads and the soaring cost of higher
education.
Having cut government funding for
colleges and
universities to the bone, the government proposes in the ODIS closer
integration between post-secondary institutions and the defense sector
through workforce planning mechanisms embedded in the education system.
It calls for a “robust pipeline of new talent” and proposes convening
the Ontario Military Defense Representative (OMDR)—a Canadian Armed
Forces liaison officer stationed within the provincial
government—alongside administrators and industry executives to “identify
defense-related training gaps.” In other words, to secure funding,
institutions of higher learning will be compelled to subordinate their
activities to the needs of arms suppliers and the Canadian military.
*****
The federal government’s sweeping military buildup takes place amid a
historic breakdown in US-Canada relations, which finds expression in the
trade war initiated by the fascist Trump and fuelled by the Canadian
ruling class’ nationalist reaction, and the US president’s threat to
annex Canada. Working in line with the Carney government, Ford recently
traveled to Washington to champion “Fortress North America” and push for
the retention of the US, Mexico, Canada Agreement (USMCA, the successor
to NAFTA), which is due to expire in July. Canadian imperialism hopes
to remain part of a US-led protectionist trade bloc directed against
Washington's global economic rivals—above all China.
*****
Workers cannot oppose the militarization of society through the trade
unions, which have emerged ever more openly as champions of exploding
military budgets and wars of aggression. Unifor President Lana Payne has
hailed the Bombardier Global 6500 military aircraft as a “Canadian
success story” and now sits on Carney's Canada-US advisory council
alongside CEOs and retired Tory politicians. Her union has discussed
with General Motors converting the idled CAMI auto plant in Ingersoll,
Ontario, to military vehicle production and has long campaigned for
Canada to adopt national aerospace and defense strategies based on
government-directed contracts for arms producers and military
contractors.
At the provincial level, Ontario Federation of
Labour president Laura Walton—who rose to her top position in the
bureaucracy by helping sell out the 2022 strike of 55,000 education
workers against poverty wages and a government-imposed strike
ban—proposed a “Labour-Business-Community Anti-Tariff Task Force” with
Ford’s government to promote a Canadian nationalist response to Trump’s
trade war in January 2025. When Ford ignored her, she groveled publicly,
declaring, “His office has my cell number, and we're ready to roll up
our sleeves and get to work.”
The political alignment of the union
bureaucracy and its “partners” in the Carney Liberal government with
Doug Ford’s provincial government is highly revealing. Ford swept to
power in 2018 as an unabashed Trump imitator—rolling back the minimum
wage, imposing a public sector hiring freeze, slashing $6 billion from
welfare and healthcare, and illegally capping public sector wages for
over a million workers at one percent per year for three years. He
invoked the “notwithstanding clause” to trample on democratic rights,
prematurely ended all COVID-19 public health measures at the cost of
thousands of lives, and initially allied himself with the far-right
“Freedom Convoy” that occupied downtown Ottawa in early 2022. He has
played a major role in backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, banning the keffiyeh from the Ontario legislature and pressing for police action against anti-genocide, Palestine solidarity protesters.
If
Ford no longer publicly touts his admiration for Trump, this is only
because Canadian and American imperialism have seen their decades-long
military-strategic partnership break down over the intervening years.
But Ford, like the Canadian ruling class as a whole, is fully on board
with large swathes of Trump’s far-right agenda, because the gutting of
public spending, banning of strikes, rearmament and war, and attacks on
democratic rights serve the interests of the financial oligarchy.
*****
Ford’s Tories and the Carney Liberal government are committed to
waging global war in the interests of Canadian imperialism and making
workers pay for it. The unions, the New Democrats, and their pseudo-left
appendages dress up these political forces as partners in “Team
Canada.” But there is no “Team”: the bosses’ wars—commercial and
military—are being waged at the expense of workers' jobs, wages, and
public services.
The fight for decent jobs and social services is a
fight against war and the capitalist system that gives rise to it. What
is required is the independent industrial and political mobilization of
the working class on the basis of a socialist and internationalist
program to fight for a workers’ government that will reorganize the
economy to place social needs before profit, and abolish Canada’s war
machine.
The
Erdoğan government is responding to the imperialist war on Türkiye’s
borders and to the deepening class struggle at home by consolidating its
construction of a presidential dictatorship.
On
8 June, Berlin's Education Senator (state minister) Günther-Wünsch
(Christian Democratic Union, CDU) signed an agreement with the
Bundeswehr granting youth officers exclusive access to our classrooms.
Eight people convicted in connection with the July 4, 2025 protest at
the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas were sentenced on
Tuesday to a combined 450 years in prison in one of the most draconian
political prosecutions in modern American history.
The sentences expose the class character of the judicial system and
the advanced stage of the assault on democratic rights under the Trump
administration. The punishments handed down by federal judges in Texas
far exceed those imposed on all of the fascist militants who
participated in the January 6, 2021 coup attempt. While President Donald
Trump pardoned more than 1,600 participants in the attack on Congress,
including members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys convicted of
violently assaulting police officers, anti-ICE protesters, the vast
majority of whom did nothing but light fireworks and vandalize
government property, have now been condemned to decades behind bars.
Benjamin
Hanil Song received a sentence of 100 years in prison. Maricela Rueda
was sentenced to 70 years. Cameron Arnold, Savanna Batten, Zachary
Evetts, Bradford Morris, Elizabeth Soto and Daniel Rolando
Sanchez-Estrada received sentences ranging from 30 to 50 years.
The
sentence imposed on Sanchez-Estrada is particularly revealing. Although
he was not present at the protest itself, he was sentenced to 30 years
in prison for “corruptly concealing a document” after his wife Rueda,
from jail, requested he remove some anarchist magazines the couple had
in their home. His punishment alone exceeds the sentences received by
numerous January 6 foot soldiers who were captured on video violently
assaulting police officers while participating in an effort to overturn a
presidential election. Fascists seeking to establish a dictatorship are
rewarded, while opponents of mass deportations and state repression are
branded “terrorists” and sentenced accordingly.
Celebrating the
outcome, the Department of Homeland Security declared on social media,
“We have been clear: anyone who attacks law enforcement will be
prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This is a win for law and
order.”
In a Department of Justice statement, Acting Attorney
General Todd Blanche said the sentences “make clear that Antifa
terrorists who attack law enforcement and federal facilities will face
swift and uncompromising justice,” and that their “violent extremism has
no place in our country.”
The extraordinary punishments imposed in the Prairieland case stand
in sharp contrast to the impunity enjoyed by agents of the state. More
than six months after ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renée Good and
Border Patrol agents Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez gunned down Alex
Pretti in Minneapolis, no federal officer has been criminally charged.
Instead, the Trump administration has blocked investigations, withheld
evidence from state authorities and sought to shield the perpetrators
from accountability. Nor have the Democratic state and local authorities
brought charges against the killers.
The sentences handed down
this week rest on a narrative that was never substantiated at trial.
From the outset, federal prosecutors and the Trump administration
portrayed the July 2025 protest as a coordinated terrorist attack aimed
at carrying out a mass killing of law enforcement personnel. Yet no
evidence presented during the proceedings established the existence of
any such plan.
All parties agree that only two individuals fired weapons during the
confrontation: Benjamin Hanil Song and Alvarado police officer Thomas
Gross. No police officers, ICE agents, detention center employees or
protesters were killed. The government’s own case established that Song
and Gross exchanged gunfire amid a chaotic confrontation outside the
detention center.
Song, a former Marine, has consistently
maintained that he fired only after observing Gross raise his weapon
toward a fleeing protester. According to Song, he believed the officer
was about to shoot someone in the back who was running away and fired
what he described as defensive shots in response. Regardless of whether
one accepts Song’s account, it bears no resemblance to the government’s
portrayal of a premeditated terrorist assault.
The prosecution’s
“antifa terror cell” narrative rested not on evidence of a conspiracy to
commit mass murder, but on guilt by association and political ideology.
Defendants were prosecuted collectively for their alleged political
sympathies, social relationships and participation in opposition to ICE
and the government’s mass deportation apparatus. The extraordinary
sentences imposed this week are aimed not merely at those convicted in
the case. They are intended to intimidate all those who oppose the Trump
administration’s anti-immigrant policies and attacks on democratic
rights.
The political character of the prosecution was reflected
in the conduct and backgrounds of the judges who oversaw the
proceedings.
*****
The Prairieland prosecution is part of a broader campaign launched by
the administration to expand the use of “domestic terrorism”
authorities against political opposition. Last year, Trump issued his
so-called “antifa” executive order, directing federal agencies to
intensify investigations and prosecutions targeting alleged anti-fascist
activists. This was followed by National Security Presidential
Memorandum-7 and then-Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December memorandum,
which vastly expanded the powers of federal law enforcement agencies
while encouraging the treatment of left-wing political opposition as a
national security threat.
The significance of these measures lies
not only in their repressive content, but in the political fiction on
which they are based. “Antifa” is not an organization. It has no
membership rolls, leadership structure or national apparatus. The term
denotes opposition to fascism. Yet federal prosecutors and law
enforcement agencies increasingly invoke the label as though it were a
coherent criminal enterprise, allowing them to transform political views
and associations into evidence of conspiracy.
The Prairieland case is already being used as a model. Similar
“antifa conspiracy” indictments have been brought against opponents of
the federal occupation of Minneapolis and against anti-genocide
protesters in Michigan. In each case, prosecutors seek to blur the
distinction between protected political activity and criminal conduct,
advancing the principle that opposition to government policy can itself
be treated as evidence of terrorist intent.
The assault on
democratic rights cannot be explained simply as the work of Trump and
the Republican Party. Democratic Party officials have played an
essential role in legitimizing and advancing the same framework.
*****
... The Prairieland sentences establish a dangerous precedent. The Trump
administration is systematically seeking to transform opposition to mass
deportations, war, inequality and fascism into a form of criminal
conspiracy. The target today is those accused of participating in a
protest against an immigration detention center. Tomorrow it will be
striking workers, students, anti-war protesters and anyone who
challenges the interests of the financial oligarchy.
Farmers’
fundamental problems can be resolved only through their independent mobilization against big business and finance capital, united with the
rural poor and under the leadership of the working class.
On Tuesday, in advance of the summer recess that will start before the
July 4 holiday, the U.S. Supreme Court decided five cases, four by
identical 6-3 votes along the now familiar ideological lines and one
unanimously. Collectively, the rulings slash protections for individuals
and allow US multinational corporations to sue Cuba for billions to
recoup expropriations following the revolution 66 years ago.
Another tranche of Supreme Court opinions will be released Thursday,
with all argued cases likely decided by the end of next week. The 11
cases still pending include whether Trump can summarily remove without
cause appointees to the Federal Trade Commission or Federal Reserve Board,
the protection of transgender athletes from discrimination, the timing
of mail-in ballots, and First Amendment protection for political
contributions to the Republican National Committee.
All eyes are on Trump v. Barbara,
however, which should decide the validity of Trump’s outrageous
executive order that purportedly revokes the Fourteenth Amendment’s
guarantee of birthright citizenship.
Indicating at least some measure of skepticism, the Supreme Court put
the executive order on hold while the merits were briefed and argued.
Trump is clamoring for a ruling in his favor on the factually incorrect
basis that the Fourteenth Amendment was meant only for “babies of
slaves.”
Barbara may well be the last case decided before
the summer recess, and there are signs it will be authored by Chief
Justice John Roberts, whose behind-the-scenes maneuvering delivered
Trump the immunity decision that let him off the hook for the January 6,
2021 coup attempt.
In a campaign-style event at the Mack Trucks plant in Macungie,
Pennsylvania on Tuesday, President Trump sought to posture as a defender
of American workers in a fascistic speech that promoted his tariffs and
trade war policy in front of a carefully vetted audience. A large
banner in back of the stage read “American Workers First,” but few if
any Mack workers were present.
In reality, Trump’s speech was
aimed not at workers but directed at the trade union bureaucracy and the
United Auto Workers apparatus, in particular, which has provided
critical backing for the administration based on the shared program of
nationalism, militarism and trade war.
*****
Trump’s speech lasted almost an hour and a half and was laden with
its usual ballast of lies and fascistic demagogy. While presented as
part of a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of
Independence, Trump made no reference to the ideals of the American
Revolution at the event. His only reference to the anniversary was to
celebrate the deranged Ultimate Fighting Championship bloodfest staged
on the White House lawn on June 14. Trump even invited UFC fighters Bo
Nickal and Anthony Cassar to the stage.
Trump began his remarks by
praising Mack Trucks as a great company and denouncing “illegal
immigrants” and “globalist politicians that let other countries rip you
off and close your factories, rob your jobs, take them away to foreign
lands.” He boasted, “I stood up to the trade cheaters, their cheaters,
and abusers, and violators of the world.”
In fact, workers in the
US are linked with workers in other countries in a system of global
production that makes it virtually impossible to determine the
“nationality” of any particular vehicle. This is apparent at Mack
Trucks, an “American company” owned by transnational Volvo Group, which
itself is partially owned by the Chinese automotive conglomerate
Zhejiang Geely Holding Group.
The president falsely claimed that
his tariffs have led to a surge in manufacturing jobs in the US, a
decline in the unemployment rate and the slashing of the trade deficit.
In fact, unemployment is rising, and 2025 saw a net decline in
manufacturing jobs and no change in the trade deficit. Earlier this
year, Mack Trucks parent Volvo Group announced it planned to cut 800
jobs across North America, citing uncertainty due to Trump’s tariffs.
Most
significant was Trump’s praise for the trade union apparatus. At one
point, Trump declared, “I just spent time with the heads of your unions,
and they are terrific. They work with us.” Trump cited by name Tim
Hertzog, shop chairman of UAW Local 677 at the Mack Trucks plant in
McCungie. The UAW and the leadership of Local 677 have been promoting
stridently nationalist, anti-Mexican agitation over Mack Truck’s plan to
open a heavy-duty truck plant in Monterrey, Mexico later this year.
They are even distributing T-shirts with the logo “not made in Mexico”
to Mack workers.
*****
In his Macungie speech, Trump spoke repeatedly of “radical leftist
communists” being elected, in reference to various figures being
promoted by the Democratic Socialists of America, such as D.C. mayoral
candidate Janeese Lewis George. Trump’s real concern is not the fake
socialists from the DSA but the radicalization of the working class,
including the nomination of a socialist autoworker running for UAW president. The UAW apparatus shares this fear.
*****
In a statement posted on his X social media account after Trump’s visit to Mack Trucks, [the socialist autoworker running for UAW president Will] Lehman said:
As
candidate for UAW president, I denounce the visit of Donald Trump to my
home plant, Mack Trucks in Macungie, Pennsylvania. Trump came to stoke
nationalist divisions and try to line workers up behind the interests of
American corporations in competition with their rivals abroad. Workers
need to understand that nationalist ideology is a poison that must be
actively fought. That is shown every day in the ICE raids where our
friends and neighbors are being dragged away, and in the escalating war,
where working people are paying the price in lives, livelihoods and
social services.
Trump told workers here that he is delivering
for them. But the stock market and the wealth of the oligarchy is one
thing, and your paycheck is another. Reality is the judge of this
presidency, and the verdict is already in.
Trump, in his remarks,
singled out UAW officials for praise—an expression of the ongoing
collaboration between the union apparatus, the corporations and the
state. Under Shawn Fain, the UAW has itself embraced Trump’s economic
nationalism that pits us against our class brothers and sisters in
Mexico, Canada and around the world. What is required is the
international unity of the working class against both corporate
management and the union bureaucracy that is an arm of management.
On June 17 and 18, leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN) gathered in Kazan, Russia, for a commemorative summit with
President Vladimir Putin marking 35 years of ASEAN-Russia relations.
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., as current ASEAN chair,
co-chaired the proceedings alongside Putin. The summit took place as the
G7 met simultaneously in Évian, France. The two gatherings—one pledging
to tighten the sanctions strangling Russia, the other deepening
cooperation with Moscow—capture in a single week the accelerating
fracture of the postwar capitalist order.
Southeast Asia produces approximately 2 million barrels of oil per
day and consumes 5 million, importing the difference primarily from the
Persian Gulf. When Washington’s war on Iran shuttered the Strait of
Hormuz, it severed the region’s energy lifeline. Physical Brent crude
hit $141 a barrel. The International Energy Agency’s director called the
disruption “more serious than the ones in 1973, 1979 and 2022
together.” The net shortfall reached approximately 13 million barrels
per day—roughly 13 percent of world energy supply.
The Philippines
declared a national energy emergency. Indonesia faced fuel shortages
threatening an already fragile economy. Workers and the poor across the
region were forced to absorb the price shocks through inflation, rising
transport costs and cuts to social programs. This crisis was not a
natural disaster. It was the direct consequence of a war Washington
launched.
For six years, ASEAN-Russia relations were suspended in
near-dormancy. The global COVID-19 pandemic severed contact; the 2022
invasion of Ukraine and the Western sanctions regime that followed made
engagement with Moscow politically costly. The last in-person leaders’
summit was Singapore in 2018. It is the energy shock—not any shift in
political allegiance—that has reversed this separation. The pressure of
the crisis drove ASEAN governments back to the table.
Against this
backdrop, the Kazan summit produced four formal documents: the Kazan
Declaration 2026, a Joint Statement on Energy Cooperation, a Joint
Statement on Cultural Cooperation, and a Comprehensive Plan of Action
for Russia-ASEAN 2026–2030. The Declaration committed ASEAN and Russia
to a “just, democratic and multipolar world order” and pledged to
“strengthen cooperation to enhance energy security.”
These are frameworks, not contracts. No specific volumes of oil were
committed, no purchase orders signed, no delivery schedules established.
The summit produced the handshakes of intended partnership, not bills
of sale.
The concrete numbers tell a different story. The
Philippines’ Petron Corporation—the country’s only refiner—purchased
2.48 million barrels of Russian crude, the first in five years. Two
tankers docked at Limay port for the Bataan refinery. Vietnam activated a
long-standing Rosneft-PV Oil supply framework and signed a new
cooperation agreement with Zarubezhneft for crude, gas, and storage
infrastructure. Thailand and Malaysia secured spot cargoes and bunkering
flows.
Indonesia announced the most dramatic figure: 150 million
barrels, agreed after President Prabowo Subianto held a three-hour
meeting with Putin in Moscow on April 13. One cargo arrived. Roughly
700,000 barrels of Arctic Novy grade crude were delivered to the Cilacap
refinery in late April. The gap between the headline and the reality is
a measure of the difficulty every ASEAN government faces in translating
political will into energy security.
*****
On April 23, the day Jakarta announced the 150-million-barrel
commitment, the EU issued its 20th Russia sanctions package, which
included Indonesia’s Karimun terminal—the first non-Russian oil terminal
sanctioned by Brussels since 2022. Karimun had functioned as a hub for
Russian shadow-fleet ship-to-ship transfers. Sanctioning it was a direct
warning to Jakarta.
The obstacles are not only legal and political. Russia’s own export
capacity is severely constrained. Ukrainian drone strikes have halted at
least 40 percent of Russia’s oil export infrastructure—roughly 2
million barrels per day. By May, Russian seaborne oil exports hit a
seasonal low, with diesel exports cut by 26 percent due to refinery
outages. The Far East route most relevant to Southeast Asia flows
through the ESPO Blend pipeline to the Kozmino terminal, which operates
near its capacity ceiling of approximately 1 million barrels per day.
This route is dominated by China, which absorbs roughly 58 percent of
Russia’s shadow-fleet crude. The shadow fleet itself is shrinking:
Sanctions and seizures eliminated 22 vessels in early 2026 alone.
Russian demand from ASEAN buyers may, in the Kremlin’s own words, exceed
what Moscow can supply.
The window is also closing. The US
sanctions waiver that briefly allowed Russian oil purchases expired on
May 16; Asian governments including the Philippines lobbied for its
extension and were refused. Any transaction now structured in dollars
exposes buyers to secondary sanctions risk. Washington launched the war
that closed the Strait of Hormuz, opened the valve when it suited its
interests, then shut it again. The EU, which decoupled from Russian
fossil fuels after 2022 and faces no comparable energy emergency, sent
its foreign policy chief to Brunei to tell Southeast Asian governments
not to buy Russian oil—and sanctioned Indonesia’s Karimun terminal to
impede the flows. The costs of the war in Ukraine—now financed and
prosecuted overwhelmingly by European imperialism—are being enforced on
Asian workers.
The G7 summit at Évian produced a formal statement pledging to
“strengthen sanctions, including those on the oil and gas sectors.” The
unity was a surface achievement. European governments spent days pushing
Ukraine back onto Trump’s agenda; Washington came to Évian to announce
its Iran deal. The divergence is structural. The EU has committed over
$226 billion to Ukraine since 2022 and agreed on a further $104 billion
loan for 2026–2027, including nearly $70 billion for military
assistance. European military spending rose 14 percent in 2025. The war
in Ukraine is now financed and sustained predominantly by Europe, while
Washington’s strategic focus is China and the Middle East. As the World Socialist Web Site
has analyzed, European capitals increasingly pursue their imperialist
interests independently of—and if necessary against—Washington.
ASEAN
governments are maneuvering in the space this fracture opens. Their
turn toward Moscow is driven by the collapse of the order Washington
built and can no longer sustain.
The Kazan Declaration’s pledge to
a “just, democratic and multipolar world order” is the ideological
packaging of, not a genuine alternative to, imperialism. Russia is a
declining capitalist power whose export infrastructure is being
destroyed by Ukrainian drones and whose shadow fleet is being seized in
the North Sea. The ASEAN states are not building a new order. They are
scrambling for position in the ruins of the old one.
If
no tentative agreement is reached, according to NALC, “unresolved
issues would be addressed through an interest arbitration process,”
producing “a final and binding decision on the contents of a new
National Agreement.”
Will
Lehman, a rank-and-file Mack Trucks worker in Macungie, Pennsylvania
who was nominated at last week's UAW convention to run for union
president, condemned the UAW's in-plant vote at Nexteer as a fraud.
On
Wednesday, June 24, at 2:30 p.m., the following open letter from the
Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP) and the editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site in Germany will be delivered to Türkiye’s ambassador in Berlin, Gökhan Turan.
Dear Ambassador Gökhan Turan,
We are writing to you to protest
the arrest of Ali Ercan Akpolat, the mayor of the municipality of
Adalar, and to demand his immediate and unconditional release.
The
arrest of Akpolat and numerous other representatives and employees of
the municipality of Adalar is a serious attack on democratic rights. The
charges brought against him are baseless. They are clearly directed not
against actual crimes but against elected mayors and opposition
politicians. They are part of a broader campaign by the Erdoğan
government to intimidate and disempower opposition-led municipalities
through police operations, criminal prosecution and state intervention.
Akpolat
is an elected mayor and is known in Türkiye and internationally for his
commitment to preserving historical truth and cultural heritage. Of
particular significance is his work in connection with the “Trotsky
House” on Büyükada, the historic Prinkipo. There, Leon Trotsky, who
together with Vladimir Lenin led the October Revolution of 1917, lived
in exile from 1929 to 1933. On Büyükada he wrote some of his most
important works, including his autobiography My Life and The History of the Russian Revolution, and developed his perspective for the struggle against fascism, Stalinism and imperialist war.
At the commemoration on Büyükada in 2024, Akpolat declared:
We
are here today for an event of historical and contemporary political
importance. It has been 91 years since Leon Trotsky, the indomitable
defender of the working class who fought for an egalitarian world and
lost his life for this cause, left Büyükada.
It is also the 84th anniversary of his assassination in 1940. On this occasion, I remember him with respect.
Trotsky
settled in Büyükada in 1929 and spent four years here on our island. He
wrote the most important of his works based on a free and egalitarian
world in his house on the island. His life was intertwined with the ups
and downs of the class struggle. And today we will talk about the world
in chaos in the light of Trotsky’s dream, struggle and works.
We
have an internationally important historical and cultural heritage left
by Trotsky that has been neglected for many years. Our aim is to restore
the house where Trotsky lived on Büyükada and turn it into an
international library and museum house. Our research and work in this
direction is ongoing. Wouldn’t it be great if this house, which has been
abandoned to its fate for years, is transformed into a cultural center
that opens its doors to the whole world?
As I conclude my speech, I
respectfully salute Leon Trotsky and all revolutionaries who fought and
paid a price for a better world.
These words express
an understanding of the international historical and cultural
significance of Büyükada that deserves recognition far beyond Türkiye.
Akpolat’s arrest therefore threatens not only the democratic rights of
an elected mayor and the population of Adalar. It is also directed
against the defence of a historical heritage that is of significance to
workers, youth, scholars and defenders of democratic rights throughout
the world.
Indignation over these attacks is growing within the
Turkish working class and population. Earlier this week, large protests
took place on Prinkipo against the arrests. In Germany, too, the demand
for the release of Akpolat and the other detainees is receiving broad
support, as it becomes increasingly clear that the prosecution is
politically motivated and serves to intimidate all opposition.
We call on the Turkish government to:
Immediately
and unconditionally release Ali Ercan Akpolat and all those arrested as
part of the operation against the municipality of Adalar;
Drop the prosecution of Akpolat and all others affected;
End the campaign against elected mayors, municipal councillors and municipal employees of the opposition;
Release all political prisoners, including the more than 200 anti-NATO activists arrested in recent days;
Fully
respect the democratic rights of the population, including the right to
elect representatives to office and for them to exercise these offices
without intimidation and state arbitrariness;
No obstruction in
the work of preserving Leon Trotsky’s house on Büyükada and creating an
international cultural and educational center.
Mr. Ambassador, we ask you to forward this protest and these demands to your government without delay.
We
will follow this case closely, inform workers, youth, intellectuals,
artists and defenders of democratic rights internationally about these
developments, and organize further protests.
Yours sincerely,
Christoph Vandreier Chairman of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei
Johannes Stern Editor of the German-language edition of the World Socialist Web Site
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.
