Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Crushing Prairieland sentences mark new stage in US ruling class’ war on political opposition
The extraordinary prison sentences handed down this week in the Prairieland Detention Center case mark a new stage in the war being waged by the US ruling class against political opposition to its criminal rule.
Eight defendants convicted in connection with the July 4, 2025 protest outside the Prairieland facility in Alvarado, Texas received a combined 450 years in prison. Benjamin Hanil Song, convicted of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer, was sentenced to 100 years. Maricela Rueda received 70 years. Cameron Arnold (also known as Autumn Hill), Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Bradford Morris and Elizabeth Soto were each sentenced to 50 years, while Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada, who prosecutors acknowledged was not present at the protest itself, received 30 years.
Sanchez-Estrada was not accused of participating in the shooting, planning an attack or providing material support to any alleged act of violence. Instead, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison after being convicted of concealing documents for moving a box containing artwork, journals, poetry, magazines and antifascist zines after his wife, defendant Maricela Rueda, had been arrested. Prosecutors argued that these materials constituted evidence of the alleged conspiracy. In effect, Sanchez-Estrada received a sentence longer than any imposed on a January 6, 2021 coup defendant for handling literature protected by the First Amendment.
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The administration is attempting to establish a sweeping new precedent: that political beliefs and associations can serve as the basis for terrorism prosecutions carrying decades-long prison sentences. The government’s theory rests on the proposition that left-wing political activity itself—including participation in organizations, possession of literature and communication with other activists—can constitute “material support” for terrorism.
The government’s claims collapse under the weight of the factual record. Prosecutors portrayed the protest as a coordinated terrorist assault on law enforcement, yet produced no evidence of a plan to carry out a mass casualty attack. There were no deaths. There was no organized attack. There was no “Antifa terror cell.”
The only exchange of gunfire involved former Marine Benjamin Hanil Song and Alvarado police officer Thomas Gross. Song maintains that he fired after seeing Gross raise his weapon toward a fleeing protester. Whatever the legal issues surrounding that exchange, it does not justify the transformation of everyone present, and even those not present, into members of a terrorist conspiracy facing decades or life in prison.
The conspiracy charges encompassed individuals accused of traveling together to the protest, communicating through encrypted messaging applications, possessing anti-ICE and anarchist literature, and participating in political organizations, including the Emma Goldman Book Club.
Protected political speech, books, zines, online messages and political associations figured prominently in the government’s presentation of the case. The prosecution argued that such materials constituted “material support” for terrorism when combined with other evidence.
The Prairieland prosecution is one component of a broader legal and political offensive by the US ruling class to establish a police state and shred the Bill of Rights. Since returning to office, Trump has issued an executive order targeting alleged “Antifa” activity and signed National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) ordering a nationwide crackdown against “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” thought. Then Attorney General Pam Bondi followed with a memorandum directing federal prosecutors to aggressively pursue conspiracy and terrorism charges against political opponents.
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Federal prosecutors have since brought similar conspiracy charges against protesters in Minnesota and Michigan. In Minnesota, 15 individuals face conspiracy-related charges arising from protests against federal immigration kidnapping operations. In Michigan, federal prosecutors have brought conspiracy charges against anti-genocide demonstrators after an investigation that, according to the FBI, involved assistance from Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office. Nessel, a Democrat, had previously pursued state charges against a separate group of anti-genocide protesters before later dismissing them.
The timing of this campaign is significant. As the federal government expands the use of domestic terrorism statutes against political protesters, influential sections of the corporate media are simultaneously portraying socialism as a growing internal threat.
One day after the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, in which three candidates backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani won, Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers launched a coordinated campaign warning that socialism was “on the march” in America. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post portrayed the victory of candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as an existential political threat, publishing editorials and opinion columns invoking Cold War imagery and suggesting the election represented a fundamental danger to the American political order.
Trump himself followed with open anti-communist denunciations on social media, declaring, “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!” and, in a separate post, warned of “many Communists running in badly failing Blue States.”
The ruling class is not terrified of the DSA, which functions as a faction of the Democratic Party and works to contain growing opposition to capitalism within the framework of electoral politics. It is terrified of the broader social process reflected in the vote: the growing hatred among workers and youth for inequality, dictatorship, war and the attack on immigrants. The corporate media’s hysterical invocation of “socialism” is not an analysis of the DSA, but a warning from the ruling elite that any movement which threatens to escape its control will be met with repression.
The response of the Democratic Party to the Prairieland sentences has been virtual silence. As of this writing, the only elected Democrat who appears to have publicly commented is Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib, who called the sentences “a travesty and totally unjustified.” Even this statement did not call for the convictions to be overturned, for the sentences to be vacated or for the defendants to be freed.
The World Socialist Web Site requested comment from several Democratic elected officials, including Texas state Representative James Talarico, who is currently running for the Senate. The only response received from Talarico’s office as of this writing was an automated email acknowledging receipt of the inquiry and providing links to donate to his campaign. Similar requests sent to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders had not received replies by the time of writing.The silence is not accidental. While Democrats posture as opponents of Trump, they have nothing to say when anti-ICE protesters are sentenced to decades in prison for alleged political association and opposition to Trump’s mass deportation regime.
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The Democrats are far more terrified of a mass socialist movement of the working class than they are of Trump’s use of NSPM-7 to prosecute political opponents and destroy the First Amendment. The Prairieland sentences underscore that the defense of democratic rights cannot be entrusted to the Democratic Party, its DSA operatives or the courts. The struggle against dictatorship requires the independent political mobilization of the working class on a socialist and internationalist program directed against the capitalist system itself.
2. The California billionaire tax: A faction fight within the ruling class
The “One-Time Wealth Tax for State-Funded Health Care Programs Initiative” for California’s November ballot has been greeted by its proponents as a landmark blow against inequality. Engineered by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), the measure would levy a one-time five percent tax on the net worth of the state’s roughly 200 billionaires, raising an estimated $100 billion for Medi-Cal and public education.
The measure has attracted widespread attention because it raises an issue that finds broad support among workers: the redistribution of society’s wealth from a tiny layer of billionaires to meet urgent social needs.
But the so-called billionaire tax act is not a vehicle for such a redistribution. It is a proposal crafted within the confines of capitalist politics that leaves the wealth and power of the financial aristocracy fundamentally intact.
The initiative has triggered frictions in California politics, with tensions between SEIU-UHW and Governor Gavin Newsom, fractures among other unions, and a $118 million counter-mobilization by Silicon Valley’s oligarchs. Every party to this conflict has presented itself as the defender of working people. In reality, the billionaire tax act is a faction fight within the ruling class and its political servants over the management of the fiscal crisis of American capitalism. Not one of the contending forces represents a way forward for the working class.
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The SEIU bureaucracy has long functioned as a labor contractor that manages the sale of labor power on behalf of corporations and the state. Time and again, it has shut down strike movements, blocked the unification of workers across industries, and imposed concessionary agreements that fail to meet workers’ demands.
In Los Angeles, SEIU officials helped prevent a united walkout of school workers and teachers, while in healthcare the union apparatus has repeatedly collaborated with management to end strikes before workers secured their key demands.
The union’s simultaneous endorsement of Xavier Becerra for governor exposes the raw cynicism of this entire campaign. As Biden’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Becerra presided over the disastrous “Medicaid Unwinding,” a bureaucratic purge that stripped healthcare from over 20 million low-income Americans, including millions of Californians. Now, he openly opposes the very wealth tax SEIU-UHW claims is vital to rescue the state’s safety net. The union is endorsing him anyway.
These are not contradictions born of confusion. They are the logical expression of a trade union bureaucracy that subordinates the interests of healthcare workers and patients to its institutional positioning within the Democratic Party.
The California Teachers Association’s opposition to the billionaire tax lays bare the character of the trade union apparatus in education. The CTA objects to the fact that the revenues would bypass Proposition 98, the 1988 constitutional amendment that guarantees the CTA bureaucracy’s institutional claim on roughly 40 percent of state General Fund revenues.
The CTA publicly argues that a “one-time revenue source” is “not the right policy” for sustainable funding. Simultaneously, it is spending millions to campaign for its own permanent high-income surtax extension under Proposition 55. The distinction is purely bureaucratic: the CTA’s tax feeds its funding stream; the SEIU’s tax feeds healthcare. It is a turf war between two sections of the trade union apparatus.
The CTA’s record in the actual class struggle makes this unmistakably clear. The CTA’s “We Can’t Wait” campaign was a fraud from the start, a bureaucratic operation that blocked a statewide strike that would have brought 80,000 educators into direct confrontation with both the Trump administration and the Democratic Party.
The CTA sent teachers back into classrooms under expired contracts, substituting social media campaigns and “informational pickets” for the strike action the situation demanded. The same apparatus that refuses to lead a fight for educators’ wages and working conditions now poses as the guardian of school funding against a tax on billionaires.
Newsom’s opposition to the wealth tax is less about state budgeting and more about class solidarity. Though his net worth is a rounding error compared to Silicon Valley’s titans, his loyalties remain clear. He protects the oligarchy because he is a creature of the elite network that funds it, ensuring that his interests strictly align with the ultra-rich.
His administration’s claim that the wealth tax would “harm working Californians” is a lie. The initiative’s statutory text explicitly directs 90 percent of revenues to healthcare and 10 percent to education and food assistance. SEIU-UHW Chief of Staff Suzanne Jimenez was correct to call this “Trump-like misinformation,” but her own union is simultaneously trying to negotiate a private deal with the man spreading it.
Newsom’s strategy of building an opposition coalition of Planned Parenthood, the CTA, and the California Medical Association as “progressive shielding” uses these organizations to administer policies the working class opposes. Newsom’s chief of staff stated the logic plainly: “This is not going to be ‘Billionaires killed this wealth tax’ if it appears on the November ballot. It’s going to be Planned Parenthood, doctors, teachers, and labor killed it.”
In addition to Teamsters and UNITE HERE, the California Democratic Socialists of America, Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna all support the wealth tax. This is presented as evidence of progressive momentum. It is, in fact, evidence of the political function of the pseudo-left: to channel working class anger into the dead end of the Democratic Party.
Speaking of billionaires, the California DSA urged workers to vote for Tom Steyer for governor, a man whose wealth was earned through the exploitation of the working class and was invested in private prisons and coal mining, on the grounds that he might prove to be a “class traitor.”
The DSA admits Steyer refuses to call Israel’s genocide in Gaza a genocide. It still insists workers should not “cast a protest vote.” This is the essence of the pseudo-left’s function: it supports a largely token billionaire tax with one hand and endorses a billionaire candidate with the other. Both positions keep workers tethered to the Democratic Party and block the development of independent class consciousness.
Bernie Sanders spent a decade rallying his supporters behind Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden after he shut down his own campaigns, and then campaigned for Kamala Harris. His endorsement of the wealth tax is of a piece with this record: progressive-sounding rhetoric that ultimately reinforces the Democratic Party framework.
The response of Silicon Valley is instructive. Sergey Brin, who historically funded “progressive, liberal causes,” contributed $82 million to kill the tax and relocated to Nevada, declaring, “I fled socialism.”
Leaked transcripts from a private Signal chat group—including Brin, Marc Andreessen, Patrick Collison, Brian Armstrong, and Garry Tan—revealed oligarchs discussing plans to buy out the union’s signature-gathering firms and holding secret “Shark Tank in the dark” fundraisers.
California’s billionaires saw their collective wealth grow by 144 percent between 2023 and 2025, to over $2 trillion, while paying an average of 0.26 percent annually in state income taxes. A one-time five percent tax would barely dent this accumulation. Still, they have mobilized over a hundred million dollars to kill it.
On the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the World Socialist Web Site convened a significant global webinar, “The American Revolution and Its Place in History: From the War Against Monarchy to ‘No Kings.’” The event was co-moderated by David North, chairman of the WSWS International Editorial Board, and Eric Lee, a federal civil litigator who has played a major role in the fight to defend democratic rights.
The webinar brought together leading historians of the American Revolution and Civil War. James Oakes and Sean Wilentz are among the foremost scholars of slavery, emancipation and American democracy—Oakes, a two-time Lincoln Prize winner and author of Freedom National, and Wilentz, the Bancroft Prize-winning author of The Rise of American Democracy. Richard Carwardine, former president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, is a biographer of Lincoln and himself a two-time Lincoln Prize winner. Adam Hochschild, the renowned author of King Leopold’s Ghost and American Midnight, and labor historian Thomas Mackaman of King’s College, who conducted the WSWS’s 2019 interviews with historians on the 1619 Project, also took part.
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The Revolution must be studied critically as, in North’s words, “an opportunity to ask what was revolutionary in the Revolution, what was limited, what was betrayed, what was carried forward and what remains unresolved.”
The webinar took up that task. It addressed an enormous breadth of political, intellectual and historical issues that ranged across two-and-a-half centuries.
The panel examined the society from which the Revolution sprang, and it traced the Revolution’s global reach. Wilentz declared, “you can’t understand any of the other revolutions without understanding the American Revolution,” while Hochschild traced the abolitionist networks that carried the famous British diagram of a slave ship to Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia and to Lafayette in Paris. The international thread ran on into the Civil War: Carwardine recalled the grief in British cities at Lincoln’s assassination, and Mackaman noted that Marx, writing for the International Working Men’s Association, helped turn the British working class against the Confederacy.
The webinar followed the enduring strength of the Declaration’s principles down through American history. Oakes observed that the labor radicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “repeatedly invoked the Declaration of Independence,” as had the movements for abolition and women’s suffrage before them. And the panelists examined the relentless assault upon those principles as the class struggle sharpened and American imperialism emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on his book American Midnight, Hochschild reconstructed the repression during and after the First World War, and Wilentz drew the line to the present, noting that the one Alien and Sedition Act still on the books is the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the statute “upon which Donald Trump has seized in order to do his mass deportations.”
But the question to which the discussion repeatedly returned, and the one that gave the webinar its central purpose, was the revolutionary character of the Revolution itself. Oakes spoke to the universalism of the Declaration, whose assertion of universal human equality “establishes an entirely new revolutionary standard by which every social movement from that point on is evaluated.” Carwardine described it as the formal end of “a world of ascribed status,” in which a person’s place was fixed by birth and rank.
Wilentz drew out the two revolutions, one against monarchy and aristocracy, the other against slavery that would culminate in the Civil War, and the radicalism of an upheaval that overturned a social order founded on inherited rank. Mackaman stressed the importance of the Declaration’s proclamation of the right of revolution and the principle of equality, “the most powerful idea” not only in American but “in world history.”
This was a direct answer to the campaign to deny that 1776 was a revolution at all. Mackaman confronted the claim, advanced by Gerald Horne’s The Counter-Revolution of 1776 and, above all, by the New York Times’ 1619 Project, that the rebellion was no revolution, or even a counter-revolution to protect slavery. “In its time,” he noted, “nobody, including its enemies, thought it was anything but a revolution.” This denigration of 1776, he argued, is a systematic campaign waged from the milieu of the Democratic Party, employing a racialist falsification of history to recast the Revolution as a reactionary defense of slavery.
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Throughout, the panel insisted on the Declaration’s living relevance. Hochschild read its indictment of George III—the military rendered “superior to the civil power,” people “transported beyond seas” for “pretended offenses,” domestic insurrection incited—and observed that the charges read as if they “were written this morning” in answer to the Trump administration. Lee pointed to the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision handed down the same day stripping rights from immigrants and to the fact that the organizers of the January 6 coup walk free, while protesters at ICE detention camps face prison sentences of 30, 40 and even 50 years.
In his closing remarks, North returned to the critical theoretical questions involved in an analysis of the American Revolution. History matters, he argued, because “it adds complexity to our understanding of the present” and lets us place the moment within a far broader trajectory. He quoted Lincoln, “our occasion is piled high with difficulty,” and observed that things look most impossible “at the point in which the greatest change is in the offing.”
From this came a revolutionary optimism in the face of the rampaging reaction of the oligarchy. “To be an optimist is to see not only the difficulties but contained within those difficulties the possibility of renewal.” North ventured a prediction, that “the America and the world of 2036 will look vastly different from the world of today,” pointing to the revolutionary potential within the international working class, a globalized society, and growing social opposition. The greatest challenge of the present, he concluded, “is the fight for a historical consciousness.”
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The issues raised in this webinar are not matters of mere academic interest. They bear directly on the political struggles now unfolding. The WSWS urges its readers to study this discussion closely, to watch it in full, and to circulate it as widely as you can among co-workers, academics, students and youth.
4. US violates ceasefire, launches strikes against Iranian sites in the Strait of Hormuz
Iran has once again rejected the American claim to maritime authority in the Strait of Hormuz. Reuters reported that Tehran insisted it had the right to control shipping there and warned Gulf states not to side with Washington after the cargo ship incident.
The Iranian line is that the strait lies within a contested security zone and that the US and its allies are using “freedom of navigation” language to mask coercive control over a vital strategic waterway. The dispute over the strait is a key issue over whether the MOU means anything in practice.
The reported drone attack itself centered on a commercial vessel, identified in some reporting as the Ever Lovely, which was struck in the Strait of Hormuz near Oman. Trump said three other drones were intercepted, and the ship, while damaged, remained able to continue. AP and Reuters reported that the event led maritime authorities to pause efforts to move ships out of the area, indicating the immediate consequences for commercial traffic.
The MOU, signed only a week earlier, has now shown itself to be a piece of paper with little meaning in a war that has not ended. The language of the deal, including the phrase that Iran would “make arrangements using its best efforts” to ensure safe passage, was ambiguous from the start and left room for interpretation, and it has now become a mechanism for the collapse of the entire MOU.
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Reports over the last week have shown that, far from receding, the conflict is broadening with Israeli attacks continuing in Lebanon, and Gaza remains under near-constant assault despite talk about a ceasefire and peace agreements. Just as it has in Gaza, the ceasefire framework contained in the MOU is emerging as a formal cover for the continuation of the imperialist war by other means.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz said Israel will not withdraw its forces from occupied security zones until Hezbollah is disarmed. Hezbollah leadership rejected prior US-brokered deals and maintained that Israel must fully withdraw unconditionally.
Taken together, Friday’s actions show that the ceasefire is highly fragile, if existing at all, and that Israel continued to use military force to pressure villages near the border. The result was continued civilian deaths, displacement and an ongoing clash between formal diplomacy and battlefield realities.
The situation in Gaza, which has been moved off the front page of the news since the war with Iran began on February 28, is even more catastrophic. Palestinian and UN-linked reports say Israel has killed roughly 1,000 Palestinians since the ceasefire was announced, while Gaza’s Government Media Office says Israel has carried out 3,269 violations, killed 992 Palestinians and wounded 3,144 others.
Aid delivery has remained far below what was promised, with only 52,740 trucks entering Gaza out of the 147,000 required, according to the same reporting. These numbers show that the “agreement” has disguised the sustained Israeli campaign of attrition against Palestinians.
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The contradictions at the core of the Middle East conflict remain unresolved. The US and Israel are pursuing a strategy aimed at subjugating the region through siege, bombing and occupation. The events on Friday confirm that the military conflict is moving into another stage, not away from it.
Only the independent mobilization of the working class across the Middle East and within the imperialist centers in a unified struggle against war and for socialism can break the cycles that are leading to a Third World War.
5. US sends troops under cover of Venezuelan earthquake, as death toll surges
Forty-eight hours after the most powerful earthquakes to strike Venezuela in 125 years, the United States has seized upon the humanitarian catastrophe to accelerate its military consolidation of control over a country it invaded just six months ago. Under the cover of disaster relief, Washington has dispatched warships, warplanes and a commanding general of the Marine Corps to Venezuela—a deployment whose scale and character have no purpose in a genuine humanitarian operation.
By Friday afternoon, the official toll stood at 920 dead, 3,360 injured, and 383 buildings totally or substantially destroyed. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has received unconfirmed reports that the number of missing could reach 50,000.
Meanwhile, the International Organization for Migration estimates that up to 6.76 million people may have been affected by the earthquakes, but the true scope of the disaster remains unknown.
In La Guaira, declared a disaster zone following the twin earthquakes of June 24, residents have been left to dig through rubble with machetes, hammers, crowbars, hydraulic car jacks and their bare hands. Many sectors still had no heavy machinery, no water, no rescue specialists and no rope. The smell of decomposing bodies, families report, has become unbearable. Rescuers describe the agony of hearing children crying beneath the debris until the sounds stop.
Children are arriving at hospitals alone, identified only by a strip of adhesive tape on their arm with a name written on it. “Most arrive without relatives,” one doctor told AFP, speaking anonymously because she was not authorized to speak to the press. “The paramedics pull them from the rubble, put them in an ambulance, and bring them here because the hospitals in La Guaira are completely overwhelmed.” A hospital orderly confirmed to AFP that the morgue is full.
There is growing unrest, with people taking matters in their own hands to carry out rescue efforts and secure their mere survival.
In the Catia La Mar district, residents surrounded a civilian pickup truck distributing bread and water. People had converted a pharmacy parking lot into an improvised shelter. Initial reports from La Guaira describe people taking staple foods and other basic necessities from destroyed warehouses and shops. People have forced trucks to stop at their neighborhoods to help remove rubble.
These are not scenes of a society receiving the necessary aid.
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Into this vacuum of state capacity, the United States has sent not a relief agency, having already dismantled USAID, but a military command. Two US warships—the USS Fort Lauderdale and the littoral combat ship USS Billings—have been dispatched to Venezuelan waters. C-17 Globemaster and C-130 Hercules transport aircraft, along with fixed and rotary wing aircraft, are en route under US Southern Command authority.
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On the Venezuelan side, Acting President Delcy Rodríguez has appointed Maj. Gen. Juan Ernesto Sulbarán Quintero, commander of the Bolivarian National Guard, as the Sole Authority for the Emergency. The state of La Guaira has been placed under military administration.
The configuration is stark: only six months after a US special forces operation abducted the Venezuela’s sitting president Nicolás Maduro, the commanding general of the US Marine Corps and the commander of the Venezuelan National Guard are now in control. It is a military occupation wearing the mask of disaster relief.
Reuters has observed that Rodríguez is using the crisis to “stamp her authority on a fractured government” with a national unity message. The political analyst Ricardo Rios of the Caracas-based consultancy Poder & Estrategia was direct about what that unity actually means: “It’s a situation that is going to be very well exploited to increase the presence of the United States and its control over Venezuela. And also, for Rodriguez to lean on the United States as her primary ally.”
The historical precedents are unambiguous. The 1972 earthquake in Nicaragua and the 1985 earthquake in Mexico each contributed to the eventual unraveling of the Somoza dictatorship and the PRI’s political monopoly respectively, as the regimes’ failure to protect the population exposed the rottenness of the social order. The lesson Washington drew from those experiences—and applied with devastating clarity after the 2010 Haiti earthquake—was that military occupation in the immediate aftermath of disaster is the most effective mechanism for consolidating imperial control and preempting social revolt.
rump has announced $150 million in relief funds and the lifting of certain sanctions. The search-and-rescue teams and military medics being deployed possess real skills, and their efforts will no doubt save lives on the ground. But this must be placed in its full context. It was Trump who, in 2017, escalated the sanctions that Obama had put in place after declaring Venezuela a “national security threat.” It was the Trump and Biden administrations that maintained and deepened an economic and naval blockade that caused Venezuela’s economy to contract by roughly 80 percent in a decade, driving more than 8 million people to flee the country. Excess death estimates from that decade of economic strangulation run into the tens of thousands. Where was the aid then?
The European powers and regional governments that either collaborated with Washington’s campaign of economic strangulation or stood silently by as it unfolded—cannot pose as disinterested humanitarians.
Rosa Luxemburg, writing in 1902 about the eruption of Mount Pelée that destroyed the city of Saint-Pierre in Martinique and killed 40,000 people, captured the character of such moments with a precision that has not aged a day.
The same imperial powers that had drenched Madagascar, the Philippines, Cuba, and South Africa in blood rushed to offer aid to Martinique’s survivors. Luxemburg called them what they were: “weeping carnivores” and “beasts in Samaritan’s clothing.” The same governments that inflicted far more death through deliberate policy than any volcano or earthquake now arrived to perform the role of rescuers.
Luxemburg’s essay concluded with a vision of a different reckoning—a “volcano” of social revolution that would “sweep the whole sanctimonious, blood-splattered culture from the face of the earth,” after which, on its ruins, humanity would at last confront its only true enemy: “blind, dead nature.”
The distinction she draws is decisive. Nature is not malevolent. It is indifferent. The earthquake does not choose its victims. It is the social order—which concentrates wealth at the apex while leaving the majority in substandard housing and infrastructure, without functioning hospitals or emergency services—that turns a natural event into a class crime.
The earthquake that has devastated La Guaira is inseparable from the social earthquake produced by a century of imperialism, decades of Chavista bourgeois nationalism and the open colonial plunder now underway. The fight for the victims of the earthquake is the fight against the capitalist system that produced this catastrophe.
6. The Great American State Fair and the war on arts and culture in the US
Remarkably, US president and former five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower argued in 1953 that military spending materially damaged human progress. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” He went on: “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. … This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” These comments had an obvious propaganda purpose in the midst of the Cold War, but nonetheless no representative of the US ruling elite today would be caught dead speaking like this even on holidays or other special occasions.
The “cold, hard facts,” the “base truths,” as Lenin termed them, are clear enough. For fiscal year 2026, US government funding for the arts represented roughly 0.02 percent of what was spent on the military.
7. U.S. Supreme Court strips refugees of protected status, blocks immigrants from applying for asylum
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday issued two virulently anti-immigrant decisions authored by arch-reactionary Justice Samuel Alito on behalf of the six-justice right-wing bloc. The three moderate justices dissented.
The rulings will have immediate—and, in some cases, deadly—consequences for hundreds of thousands of immigrants seeking refuge in the United States from political oppression, violence and starvation in their countries of origin.
The first, Mullin v. Doe, reverses multiple lower court rulings that former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem failed to follow appropriate procedures when she revoked the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for refugees from Haiti and Syria. The TPS program was established in 1990 under the George H.W. Bush administration.
Alito wrote that revocation of a TPS designation “allows no judicial review” whatsoever of “either an individual decision or the chain of events leading up to a decision.” In other words, all of the approximately 1.3 million immigrants who before Thursday were legally living and working in the US under TPS designations—many for a decade or more, and some with children who are US citizens by birthright—are instantly converted to undocumented aliens subject to immediate deportation to their countries of origin without any recourse to a court of law.
Haiti was designated under TPS in 2010, shortly after the devastating earthquake that killed more than 300,000 in the impoverished former French colony, the location of history’s only successful slave revolt.
Presently, an estimated 350,000 Haitians live and work in the United States, the majority of whom fled following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, which left Haiti without a functioning parliament or executive branch. The country is essentially under the control of violent gangs sponsored by rival warlords in the Haitian ruling class. The police that remain are just as brutal as the gangs. A recent UN report documented 106 extrajudicial killings by law enforcement in just three months of 2024, including children as young as 10.
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In the second anti-immigrant ruling, Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the same lineup of Supreme Court justices reversed the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, reinstating the practice of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers of turning away immigrants before they can cross into a port of entry, thus blocking their asylum applications under a law that grants people who “arrive in” the United States the right to apply for asylum.
Prior to Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, Democratic President Barack Obama implemented this so-called “metering” in response to a surge of Haitian refugees along the Mexican border. The result was a mushrooming of squalid, crime-ridden refugee camps in Northern Mexico and a sharp increase in illegal crossings.
Ignoring both the political context and human consequences of metering, Alito called the question “straightforward” because “no one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place—for example, a house, a city, or a country—before the person enters that place.” After surveying dictionaries, Alito rejected the contention that a person “arrives” at a place where someone is blocking entry.
Alito’s opinion was little more than a cut-and-paste of the Trump administration brief, incorporating the same puerile metaphors. In American football, a “running back does not arrive in the end zone when he reaches the 1-yard line,” Alito wrote, nor does a letter “arrive in the mailbox when a dog assaults the carrier a step away.”
Alito concluded, “A person arrives in a destination only when he enters it, and that conclusion does not change because someone or something blocks entry.”
Brushing off the Refugee Act of 1980, which prohibits the return of refugees who face persecution, Alito wrote that the law “imposes a duty on nations not to send refugees that are within their borders to certain places,” not “that refugees have a right to enter a nation at the time they prefer.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor read an expanded summary of her dissent from the bench, displaying unusual emotion for a justice. She stated, “The consequences of today’s decision are predictable. More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not.”
Referring to the M. S. St. Louis—the ship with more than 900 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany that was turned away from US shores and forced to return to Europe, where most wound up exterminated in concentration camps—Sotomayor wrote, “the majority’s interpretation would allow immigration officers to refuse even to consider their asylum applications by physically blocking them from stepping foot onto US soil.”
Sotomayor’s courtroom summary was so powerful that Alito protested he was blindsided and had to respond. Nothing similar has previously happened in the Supreme Court.
In yet a third 6-3 decision authored by Alito, Wolford v. Lopez, the Supreme Court overturned Hawaii’s law that barred concealed firearms from private property open to the public, such as stores and restaurants, without the consent of the owners, claiming the law violated the Second Amendment right to bear arms, one of the few constitutional rights the current majority has expanded.
Finally, defending big business from victims of malfeasance, a different alignment of Supreme Court justices ruled 7-2, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting, that Bayer subsidiary Monsanto Company, the manufacturer of the pesticide Roundup, cannot be sued for negligently failing to warn of its cancer risks under state product liability laws so long as its disclosures conform to those required by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
Although Bayer and its insurance carriers have already paid billions in Roundup verdicts and settlements, the ruling jeopardizes an estimated 60,000 pending claims. Bayer stock rose 17 percent in trading after the decision was issued.
Eight cases, including the rights of transgender athletes, Trump’s authority to terminate members of the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Reserve Board, mail-in ballots, First Amendment protection for political contributions and birthright citizenship, remain to be decided before the end of the current Supreme Court term next week. More opinions will be released on Monday.
8. Australia’s ASIO surveillance chief declares “unprecedented” security threats
Mike Burgess, the director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the country’s domestic political spy agency, this week gave his seventh annual threat assessment address, again ratcheting up headline-grabbing claims of unparalleled multiple “national security” dangers.
Before Burgess’s inaugural such address in 2020, ASIO directors-general rarely spoke beyond closed-door briefings. Now, with the Albanese Labor government’s blessing, the ASIO boss has increasingly become a prominent political figure.
In a speech typically full of unsubstantiated assertions, Burgess declared: “[W]e face an unprecedented number of threats, with an unprecedented cumulative level of harm.”
Notably, Burgess specified “far-left activists” as a key part of the security threat. He deliberately bracketed them with neo-Nazis and other far-right elements as dangers to “social cohesion” under conditions of global fracturing, the breakdown of strategic alliances, economic instability and social and political “grievances.”
The presentation was clearly designed to create an atmosphere to justify further crackdowns on dissent, free speech and basic democratic rights, as well the Labor government’s boosting of ASIO’s powers, funding and resources.
Without the slightest shred of evidence, for example, Burgess claimed that ASIO, working with its police and intelligence partners, had “foiled 31 major terrorism plots” since 2014, including a seemingly staggering 14 since last December’s apparently Islamic State-inspired killings of 15 people at Sydney’s Bondi Beach.
That would amount to two or three major terrorist plots shut down every month since December, all apparently without the public’s knowledge. Burgess provided no details.
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ASIO has a long history, dating back to its establishment by the Chifley Labor government in 1949, of bugging, infiltrating and orchestrating witch-hunts and frame-ups, often directed against socialists and left-wing groups. In the “war on terrorism” its many victims included a Gold Coast doctor, Mohamed Haneef, whose prosecution was only dropped in 2007 after it was proven that the police and ASIO had made false allegations against him about planning mass terrorism acts.
ASIO is a key instrument of political repression, intimately involved in the preparations for wider US-led wars, including against China. Along with all the other Australian intelligence agencies, it works closely with their US counterparts, including through the global US-led “Five Eyes” surveillance and data-swapping system, together with the UK, Canada and New Zealand.
Burgess’s speech is another warning of the moves, currently led by the Labor government, to suppress opposition as capitalism plunges into war, intensifying the attacks on social spending, working-class conditions and fundamental democratic rights.
9. The “Ulm 5”: How Germany is criminalizing opposition to the Gaza genocide
A trial has been underway since April 27, 2026 that is setting a dangerous precedent in Germany’s post-war history. Five young people – from Ireland, Britain, Spain and Germany, aged between 20 and 30 – are standing trial before the Staatsschutzkammer in Stuttgart-Stammheim, a specialized panel of judges within the German regional court system that handles cases relating to national security, and are being treated like terrorists because they destroyed property belonging to an Israeli arms corporation. Throughout the proceedings, their fundamental democratic rights are being stripped away and the harshest prison conditions imposed in order to intimidate anyone who protests against the genocide in Gaza.
In the early morning of September 8, 2025, eleven activists broke into an office building belonging to the Israeli company Elbit Systems in the Böfingen district of Ulm. They destroyed furniture and technical equipment, damaged devices in a technology laboratory and daubed the outside of the building with red paint. The action was filmed by the group itself and a video posted on the internet. The participants then allowed themselves to be arrested by the police without resistance. Five of them – the so-called “Ulm 5” – were detained and have been held in custody ever since.
Elbit Systems is one of Israel's largest arms producers and, by its own account, supplies the Israeli military – and to no small extent. Elbit Systems is said to supply over 80 percent of the drones used in the Gaza genocide. Elbit Systems Deutschland is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the parent corporation. Against this background, German-Israeli cooperation with Elbit is being expanded ever further: in February 2026, it became known that ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems and Elbit Systems had jointly opened a factory for submarine parts in Israel.
As early as November 2025, the defense lawyers for the “Ulm 5” had called on the Stuttgart Public Prosecutor’s Office to investigate the possible involvement of Elbit Systems Deutschland in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Gaza. The defendants' motivation for the actions against the arms company, they argued, had been to prevent a greater wrong. The Stuttgart Public Prosecutor’s Office has so far completely ignored this request.
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The decisive legal instrument in the proceedings is the charge of membership in a criminal organization under Section 129 of the Criminal Code. This provision provides for a prison sentence of up to five years and permits far-reaching methods of investigation. Section 129 punishes the founding, membership in, support for or recruitment for an organization whose purpose or activity is directed towards criminal offenses that carry a maximum sentence of at least two years' imprisonment. The law thus criminalizes not only individual acts, but the very participation in a permanent, organized structure.
Should the “Ulm 5” be convicted based on this provision, it would set a dangerous precedent. Any strike by workers, any protest action against the government’s war drive could thereby be suppressed. A legal framework is being created to declare political activists to be terrorists.
The parallels to the British Labour government's actions against Palestine Action are obvious. In June 2025, Keir Starmer's government declared Palestine Action a terrorist organization. Since then, over 3,400 people have been arrested, many of them for merely carrying signs reading “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”. In June 2026, the British Court of Appeal upheld the ban on the organization.
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The case of the “Ulm 5” marks a qualitative escalation of the attempt to criminalize any opposition and resistance to the pro-war policies of the ruling class.
That the proceedings are being conducted so vehemently by the public prosecutor's office and the court is directly connected to the escalation of the government’s militarist agenda. After the US, Germany remains Israel's second-largest arms supplier and has also supported the war against Iran, which violates international law. In the NATO war against Russia, Germany is playing the leading role and, with the stationing of an armored brigade in Lithuania, is actively preparing to wage an open war against Russia once again, 80 years after the Second World War.
The trial of the “Ulm 5” is an attack on the democratic rights of the entire working class. The public prosecutor's office and the Stuttgart Regional Court are not acting as neutral judicial bodies, but as enforcers of a ruling class that is returning to its darkest traditions under the Nazis.
History shows that democratic rights cannot be defended by appeals to the reason of the rulers, but only through the organized struggle of the working class. The defense of the “Ulm 5” must be part of an international movement against imperialism, war and fascism that places the working class at its center.
10. The June 24 national transport strike in the Netherlands: the political questions
In the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday, June 24, the rail, bus, tram and metro networks of the Netherlands fell silent. From 4 a.m. to 8 a.m., public transport workers called out by three branches of the trade union federation FNV halted the national rail operator NS and stopped almost all urban and regional transport across the country. By 6 a.m. Amsterdam Centraal stood all but deserted, platforms empty, the strike announced on the departure boards and over the station loudspeakers. Only a handful of services, the IJ ferries and the Schiphol airport train among them, kept running.
Unlike the conventional strikes over better pay and working conditions of recent years, the Dutch transport workers’ strike marked a new stage in its political character—forced up from the rank and file and openly confronting the political direction of the state: it was a strike directed against the war cabinet of the minority government of prime minister Rob Jetten (D66) and its drive to cut social security provisions won by the working class through the struggles of the post-war era.
At issue are the gutting of unemployment (WW) and disability (WIA) benefits and a broader assault on state pensions. A survey of FNV members found 98 percent opposed to the cuts and more than 85 percent ready for a protracted strike. Dock and port workers, strike-ready since March, are poised to follow.
The stoppage was the Dutch expression of a class confrontation now opening across the continent and internationally. It erupted in the immediate shadow of the mid-June European Union summit in Brussels, where the heads of government bound Europe to its largest rearmament since the Second World War: to make the bloc “war-ready” for direct conflict with nuclear-armed Russia by 2030, to pour fresh weaponry into the war in Ukraine and to build the “deep precision strike capabilities” needed to strike deep inside Russia itself; a program that directly extends to national austerity policies.
The date of the Dutch strike was itself a marker. One year earlier, on June 24-25, 2025, the NATO powers had met in The Hague and pledged to raise military spending toward 5 percent of GDP. The cuts now declared unavoidable are the domestic enforcement of that pledge. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who set the tone, had already named who must pay: working people in every country must “accept restrictions” to finance rearmament and war.
The Netherlands is one front in a strike wave now sweeping the continent, everywhere driven by the same socio-economic and political conditions: austerity at home to finance war abroad.
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The fear running through this apparatus is a fear of the working class’s own courageous historic traditions. Three times in a single decade, strategically placed Dutch transport workers struck first and set the entire class in motion.
In February 1941, when the Nazi occupiers and their collaborators began rounding up and transporting Amsterdam’s Jews to extermination, the city’s tram drivers walked out followed by dock workers, and within a day some 300,000 workers had joined them. It was the only mass strike against the persecution of Jews anywhere in occupied Europe—an act of internationalist class solidarity, that was brutally suppressed and later relabeled by the ruling establishment and its monarchy as “national resistance,” stripping the February General Strike of its class content.
The September 1944 Railway Strike, called to disrupt the movement of Wehrmacht troops and supplies through the occupied Netherlands, came not from below but from the government-in-exile, which had fled to London with the monarchy in May 1940, before the Dutch military had even surrendered. Subordinated to Allied military aims, it left the working class to bear the brutal consequences and pay a heavy price: 30,000 railway workers were forced into hiding from Nazi repression, while the retaliation blockade of food transports to the western provinces helped bring about the Hunger Winter, starving 20,000 to death.
The lesson was driven home again after the war, in the form the bureaucracy fears most: workers turning their power against their own ruling class. In September 1946, as the Dutch state prepared to drown the Indonesian Revolution in blood and reimpose colonial rule, transport workers once again occupied the front rank of the struggle. After military police shot a worker at an anti-war demonstration in Amsterdam on September 21, a 24-hour wildcat strike broke out three days later against the troop transports bound for Indonesia. From Amsterdam to the Zaan region, Velsen, Delft, Enschede and Groningen, workers moved into action. The strike revealed the immense social force concentrated in the transport sector, only to be contained and betrayed by the Stalinist-led trade union apparatus.
Today the successors of those courageous workers, who defied fascism and a brutal colonial regime occupy positions no less strategic. Transport, dock, warehouse and industrial workers sit astride the choke points through which everything moves—food and energy, but also components, munitions and the machinery of war. As Europe’s governments pour billions into rearmament, these are the workers on whom both commerce and militarization depend. An independently mobilized stoppage could halt not only production and trade but the material infrastructure of war itself at its most sensitive points. The mood among workers is outgrowing the union ritual of symbolic action. What holds it back is not unwillingness to fight but a bureaucracy determined to keep the workers struggles fragmented, controlled and safely within the national framework.
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In the Netherlands as everywhere, the fight against austerity is inseparable from the fight against war, and both pose the necessity of ending the capitalist system that produces them. The defense of every social gain of the past century now raises the conquest of power by the working class and the socialist reorganization of economic life—the United Socialist States of Europe. Dutch transport workers, and all those entering struggle, should draw the urgent conclusions: make contact with the IWA-RFC, read the World Socialist Web Site, and take up the building of a Dutch section of the ICFI—the leadership the working class needs to link the coming strikes that the transport workers have set into motion to the question of political power.
11. Enough is enough: Defend every job at Germany’s Volkswagen
The VW Group Executive Board, led by Oliver Blume, is determined to cut 100,000 jobs, twice as many as previously planned. It intends to close the VW plants in Hanover, Zwickau and Emden, as well as the Audi plant in Neckarsulm, which together employ 40,000 people, and to break up the Group in its present form. This was reported Friday by Manager Magazin, citing an “insider.”
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There has not been a comparable wave of job cuts since the Great Depression of the 1930s, which led directly to the Nazi dictatorship and the Second World War. This must not be allowed to happen under any circumstances.
Today, too, the destruction of jobs and the rise of war and dictatorship are two sides of the same coin, arising from the intractable crisis of the capitalist system. According to Manager Magazin, Blume’s concept was developed by the consultancy firm Boston Consulting Group, which, in collaboration with the Tony Blair Institute, also drew up plans for a “Trump Riviera” and an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone” in the Gaza Strip. Among other things, these plans envisage the “voluntary” resettlement of 500,000 Palestinians to Somalia, Egypt, Jordan and other countries.
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No resistance to the drastic cuts can be expected from IG Metall and its works councils. They are in cahoots with the major shareholders and the federal government in defending corporate profits.
IG Metall President Christiane Benner, General Works Council Chair Daniela Cavallo and IG Metall Regional Director Thorsten Gröger responded to the revelations in Manager Magazin with a terse, six-line statement.
“Attacks on the VW Act, co-determination and our sites are irresponsible threats,” the statement reads. Note the order: first come the VW Act and co-determination, which secure lucrative posts for trade union officials and works council members, and only then the sites. Jobs are not mentioned at all.
Finally, the statement calls on the Executive Board to “finally do its job and focus on its actual work: competitive products, technologies, group structures and synergies – and, consequently, job security.”
This is not what resistance looks like. The fact is that IG Metall and the works council were not taken by surprise by the Executive Board’s plans. They have been working with it for years to generate “competitive products” and “synergies” at the expense of the workforce, in other words, to boost profits.
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To build resistance against the cutback plans, workers must organize themselves within the VW Rank-and-File Committee, completely independently of IG Metall and its works councils. Its aim is to unite all workers ready to fight—manual workers, white-collar workers, permanent staff and agency workers. There is no place for trade union officials within it.
The Rank-and-File Committee is democratically organized, meaning that the members have the final say. It does not seek well-paid positions on co-determination bodies, which are bound by secrecy and the maintenance of industrial peace and which serve to enrich the bureaucrats. Nevertheless, the Rank-and-File Committee will use every opportunity—including works council elections—to champion its goals.
The Rank-and-File Committee defends, as a matter of principle, all jobs at all sites. It categorically rejects any concessions on wages, pensions or working conditions. It is not the group’s financial situation, but the struggle itself that determines whether wages and jobs will be preserved.
One of the Rank-and-File Committee’s most important tasks is to forge links with other sites both at home and abroad. It will not allow the Group’s various sites and brands to be played off against one another, nor will it allow the trade unions to drive a wedge between the work forces in Germany, China, Mexico, the USA, the Czech Republic or Spain.
The VW Action Committee is a member of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), which coordinates the growing resistance in workplaces across industries and worldwide.
We urge VW workers to follow the campaign of IWA-RFC member Will Lehman, who was recently nominated as a candidate for the presidency of the American United Auto Workers (UAW) union. Lehman works at Mack Trucks, a Volvo subsidiary, in Pennsylvania. His aim is not to replace the current UAW apparatus with another, but to abolish the apparatus and hand control over to the members. His campaign is resonating strongly with US autoworkers.
The oppression of Bolivia’s indigenous masses is real. It constitutes a profound democratic question rooted in centuries of colonial and capitalist plunder.
But the entire history of Bolivia confirms what Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution establishes: this democratic question cannot be resolved under capitalism nor by any form of bourgeois nationalism. Its solution depends on the working class taking power at the head of the oppressed masses, as part of the international socialist revolution.
The Morenoites’ “historic bloc of workers, peasants and indigenous people” liquidates this understanding, reducing the proletariat from the leading class to one component of a multi-class coalition in which non-proletarian and ultimately bourgeois forces hold the political reins.
This formula has the unmistakable stench of the Stalinist “bloc of four classes” imposed on the Chinese revolution of 1925–27, which chained the workers to the bourgeois Kuomintang and ended in their slaughter. It is a nationalist conception of the revolution, which is to say a conception of a bourgeois revolution. This assault on the Theory of Permanent Revolution is grounded on conscious revision at the foundation of the PRC’s politics, as the Brazilian Socialist Equality Group clearly established in its analysis of the Morenoites’ rebranding.
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In 1970-71, the Bolivian working class was directly confronted with the question of taking political power. But the betrayal of the workers’ revolutionary struggle led it to be drowned in blood by the fascistic military led by Col. Hugo Banzer.
The COB trade unionists, the Stalinists and—above all—the Pabloite Partido Obrero Revolucionário (Revolutionary Workers Party, POR) were responsible for this bitter defeat. Their promotion of the “Popular Assembly” was the chief mechanism that diverted the working class from establishing its political independence and disarmed it before the bourgeois state.
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The crisis of 1971 turned on a single question. Gen. Juan José Torres, a bourgeois-nationalist officer employing “left” rhetoric, presided over a regime caught between an insurgent working class and the fascists within the state and the Armed Forces preparing to drown it in blood. The Popular Assembly that convened that May—called by the COB, based on the unions and, above all, the miners—gathered the immense combative energy of the Bolivian proletariat. The question it posed was whether the working class would take power, smashing the bourgeois state and its army, or be subordinated to a bourgeois regime and disarmed before reaction.
The leadership of the Assembly gave the fatal answer. The COB and the Stalinist Communist Party, with the Trotskyist credentials of Guillermo Lora’s POR lending them cover, supported a resolution declaring that the proletariat would back the Torres government’s “anti-imperialist and progressive measures” while criticizing its reactionary ones. This subordinated the working class to the national bourgeoisie and abandoned the Theory of Permanent Revolution that the POR had once applied to Bolivia in its “Thesis of Pulacayo.” Lora trusted Torres to arm the workers against the fascists; Torres armed no one. Banzer launched his coup from Santa Cruz, took La Paz in three days against the heroic but poorly armed resistance of the workers, and imposed seven years of dictatorship.
The “soviet” characterization the Morenoites now revive was the theoretical instrument for this betrayal. By cloaking the Assembly in the authority of 1917, Lora and his Pabloite co-thinkers buried the reality of its domination by Stalinist and trade-union leaders and its ultimately bourgeois character.
The Pabloite betrayal of the Bolivian workers was combatted by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) as it unfolded, treating it as a strategic experience of the international working class. In “Bolivia: Bitter Lessons of the Defeat,” written nine days after Banzer’s coup, the ICFI warned that a failure to draw its lessons would result in this defeat being repeated across the continent—a warning confirmed by the subsequent coups in Chile, Uruguay, Peru and Argentina.
The struggle to raise 1971 to the level of an international strategic experience, against the Pabloites and the French International Communist Organization (OCI), which provided cover for Lora as it broke with the International Committee, was inseparable from the defense of orthodox Trotskyism itself. This is not an academic dispute. The division between genuine Trotskyism and Pabloite revisionism has been written in the blood of the workers of Bolivia and of Latin America as a whole.
13. Europe burns in record 40℃ heatwave as climate funding targets missed by trillions
Cities across Western Europe have been hotter than much of the Middle East this week. The worst European heatwave in history has pushed temperatures as high as 44.3 degrees Celsius in France—its hottest ever day—and broken records in half of Europe’s 850 cities with over 50,000 residents.
Rare red heat alerts have been issued across swathes of France, Britain, Spain and Italy, with the heatwave now moving north and east towards Germany, Poland and the Balkans. More than 50 French departments have registered temperatures above 40℃ (104°F), including Paris. The UK announced its hottest ever June day of 36.9℃, while Spain has reached 42℃ and Italy 41℃.
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Hundreds of deaths have already been reported. The real toll will not be known for some time but will be in the tens of thousands. Conditions are comparable to the June 2022 heatwave which caused an estimated 70,000 deaths. Another 60,000 were killed in the summer heatwave of 2024. Longer-term negative health impacts will follow the spike in air pollution which accompanies extreme heat. These are disasters on a massive scale.
Most exposed are young children, the elderly, and outdoor workers. Over 1.6 million children in the UK, including 70,000 babies, are living in overheated homes—exceptionally dangerous for children under 5 who are less able to regulate their temperatures. During the 2022 heatwave, deaths in old-age nursing homes increased by over a third.
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The cause of the heatwave is an “Omega block”: a horseshoe-shaped band of low pressure around the affected area is dragging in hot air from Africa in the south and trapping it in a “heat dome”. The high pressure also interferes with cloud formation, allowing the sun to beat down.
Climate change increases the severity of these events. According to initial research by France’s Institute Pierre-Simon Laplace, global heating has made the current heatwave 2-4°C worse than would have been the case in the second half of the 20th century. This was confirmed by findings from the World Weather Attribution consortium.
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Rising global temperatures are also increasing the frequency of heatwaves on the continent, which is heating twice as fast as the global average increase. Spain, for example, suffered 129 days of heatwave from 1975-2000 and 329 days since the turn of the century. In the UK, the likelihood of 40℃ temperatures has tripled since 2000.
The world is on the threshold of breaching the limit targeted by the 2015 Paris Agreement of 1.5℃ heating above the pre-industrial average. It is projected to reach 2.8℃ by the end of the century based on current policies, which would mean drastically worse conditions than those now seen in Europe. Scientists at the University of Reading recently predicted the UK will see 45℃ (113°F) heat within the next 30 years, overheating 90 percent of homes.
By its nature, the crisis is global. A 2025 Lancet Countdown report revealed that worldwide heat-related deaths had risen 60 percent from an estimated 335,000 a year in 1990-99 to 546,000 annually in 2012–2021.
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Burning fossil fuels to fill the pockets of the rich increasingly means burning human beings to death for profit—another way the capitalist system spitting out wars, pandemics and deaths of despair is toxic to human life.
Society cannot afford the greed of the oligarchy, which must be expropriated. It cannot afford the anarchy of the market, which must be replaced with democratic planning. The only means of accomplishing this is a world socialist revolution carried out by the international working class.
14. United Kingdom: Operating theater assistants in Leeds take two-week strike over pay
The NHS careers guide describes the role of theater support staff as “the glue keeping the surgical team together”. Their duties include moving patients on trolleys, preparing patients for anesthetics, setting out equipment and instruments for surgery, making sure theaters are stocked with necessary items, and cleaning and tidying theaters after surgery.
Over the last 10 years there has been an ongoing shortage of senior clinical personnel, which, together with the increasing sophistication of surgical technology, means OTAs have been expected to assume higher levels of responsibility with no increase in pay. Previously they would have been responsible for more basic logistical tasks such as moving patients and cleaning theaters. Now they are expected to calibrate sophisticated machinery, handle delicate surgical instruments, monitor patients’ risks of infection and handle clinical samples.
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The NHS is being dismantled as part of a broader assault on public services to fund militarism and war. Demanding efficiency savings, the Starmer government has driven up productivity in the NHS, while claiming there is “not enough money” for decent pay.
Massive investment is needed in healthcare, funded by the expropriation of the corporations, banks and slashing the military budget. Such a struggle cannot be left in the hands of union bureaucracies. Workers must organize themselves in democratic rank-and-file committees in every hospital, linking together all NHS staff, including theater assistants, doctors, nurses, healthcare assistants, porters, cleaners, laboratory workers and administrative staff.
Last Friday’s train collision near Bedford, England, claimed the life of 60-year-old train driver Shaun Burton and injured 162 passengers, with 102 requiring hospital treatment and eight remaining in a critical condition as of Wednesday.
The collision between two East Midlands Railway (EMR) services occurred at around 5:15 p.m. on the Midland Main Line south of Bedford near Elstow. Both trains were bound for London St Pancras. The 4:40 p.m. service from Corby (train 1H46) crashed into the rear of the 3:50 p.m. Nottingham-to-London service (train 1B67) after it had come to a standstill on the line.
The horrific crash immediately raised questions about the state of Britain’s railway infrastructure and safety systems. Speaking to the media, Brett Byatt, a teacher traveling on the train that struck the stationary service and who helped provide first aid to the injured, said:
“We’ve got one of the oldest railway networks, and signal failures happen a lot, and now I’m just wondering, why would a train driver lose his life over this?”
This question goes to the heart of the issues government investigators are already seeking to evade and conceal.
The preliminary findings of the Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB), published Wednesday, foreground Burton’s train having passed a red signal before colliding with the stationary service. However, based on data still being analyzed from the on-train data recorders (OTDR) the report states that “it is not yet possible to say what indication the driver received from the AWS (Automatic Warning System) equipment on the train or how they responded to this.”
The AWS sounds a bell or chime when approaching a signal displaying a green aspect (the indication shown by the signal) and a horn when approaching any other aspect. The warning is intended to alert the driver to an upcoming signal restriction or speed change. The RAIB report confirms that emergency braking was initiated by train 1H46 only around nine seconds before impact. The train’s speed was reduced from approximately 76 mph (122 km/h) to around 49 mph (79 km/h) at the point of collision.
The report also acknowledges that train 1B67 had suffered a safety-system failure and had “come to a stop unexpectedly because a fault had developed with the Automatic Warning System (AWS) equipment fitted to it, which caused the brakes to apply.”
The fundamental issues concerning signalling infrastructure, train protection systems and equipment failures are relegated to a handful of bullet points for future examination on the sequence of events, with no date set for publication of a final report.
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The examination of these potentially systemic failures is deferred while a narrative is established that Burton—the principal victim of the disaster—was responsible. The Telegraph, for example, ran the headline, “Train driver passed through red signal before Bedford crash.”
A glaring omission from the RAIB’s preliminary findings is that the signalling system on this section of the line on one of Britain’s principal intercity rail routes was not equipped with the Train Protection and Warning System (TPWS).
TPWS automatically applies a train’s brakes if it approaches a signal at danger and is designed to prevent precisely the type of collision that occurred at Bedford.
16. Hyundai autoworkers in South Korea vote to strike
Autoworkers at Hyundai Motors in South Korea overwhelmingly voted to strike on Wednesday. They join workers around the world looking for a means to fight back against the attacks on wages and conditions as big business attempts to force the working class to pay for the worsening crisis of capitalism.The Hyundai workers belong to the Korean Metal Workers’ Union (KMWU). From among the 94.15 percent of union members who voted, 92.03 percent approved a strike. The KMWU’s Hyundai branch has a total of 39,668 members.
The KMWU has requested a 149,600 won ($US97.42) monthly pay increase, and a performance bonus equal to 30 percent of Hyundai’s 2025 net profits, which totaled 10.36 trillion won ($US6.75 billion). It also called for an increase in bonuses from 750 percent to 800 percent of base salary, and job protections as the use of artificial intelligence (AI) expands in auto factories. The union claims included shorter working hours and that Hyundai expand hiring.
The KMWU has no intention of waging a genuine struggle against Hyundai Motors let alone the administration of President Lee Jae-myung, which is responsible the onslaught on the South Korean working class as a whole. The same is true for the KMWU’s parent organization, the so-called “militant” Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU).
Instead, the KMWU is doing everything it can to prevent a strike while isolating Hyundai autoworkers. If a strike is called, the union will use it as a safety valve to let off steam before trying to impose a pro-company deal. The trade unions function as an industrial police force for big business.
The Hyundai strike vote only took place after weeks of negotiations failed to produce a contract suitable to the company that the union could sell to its membership. The strike vote took place only one day before government-mediated wage negotiations between the company and the KMWU broke down.
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Hyundai has increasingly promoted automation and AI as a means of boosting productivity. Through its investments in robotics, including the development and planned deployment of humanoid robots capable of performing repetitive manufacturing tasks, the company has signaled that automation will play a growing role in production. Hyundai has also expanded the use of AI-driven quality inspection systems, predictive maintenance software, and automated production management tools designed to increase factory efficiency while slashing costs.
“Earlier this year, Hyundai Motors announced that it would deploy a physical AI robot called Atlas for parts sequencing work starting in 2028 and for vehicle assembly work in 2030, replacing human labor and operating an unmanned factory that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, even with the lights off,” KMWU Hyundai branch head Lee Jong-cheol told the Korea Times in April.
In the hands of the working class, these technologies would be used to improve people’s lives, lessening their physical labor while increasing time for culture and leisure. Instead, under capitalism, AI and automation are being used to immiserate the working class. While the unions acknowledge the fact, they have offered no genuine solutions to fight back against these attacks.
The rapid transition to electric vehicle production has further heightened concerns over jobs. Electric vehicles generally require fewer components and less assembly labor than vehicles powered by internal combustion engines.
Hyundai workers are not alone in this struggle in South Korea or internationally. Across the country’s automotive sector, workers at both large companies and smaller parts suppliers are moving into struggle. Negotiations have stalled at GM Korea, where the KMWU has requested a similar agreement as that proposed for Hyundai. GM Korea workers voted to go on strike on June 18. Of the 5,934 union branch members who took part in the vote, 94.96 percent approved a walkout. The union has a total membership of 6,517.
In the United States, workers at auto parts manufacturers like Nexteer Automotive, American Axle, Dana, and Bridgewater Interiors have also been in struggle.
The 1,700 workers at Nexteer in Saginaw, Michigan overwhelmingly authorized a strike in May while voting to reject three proposed sellout agreements orchestrated by the United Auto Workers (UAW). Rather than call a strike however, the UAW rigged a fourth vote on a similar deal with the union claiming it had passed on Friday.
This took place as 1,000 workers at American Axle in Three Rivers, Michigan struck during the first two weeks of June before the UAW rushed through a concessions contract.
The campaign of autoworker Will Lehman for UAW president is playing a significant role in fighting against these betrayals. Lehman has called for the abolition of the union bureaucracy and the transfer of power to the rank-and-file. The Lehman campaign is fighting to build independent committees at factories and workplaces and uniting them through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). In contrast to the nationalism of the trade unions, the IWA-RFC fights to unite workers across industries and national borders.
South Korean workers at Hyundai Motors should take their struggle out of the hands of the KMWU and the union bureaucrats and form their own rank-and-file factory committees. They should reach out to workers at GM Korea and Kia as well as workers in the United States, Japan, and around the world for a united fight the corporate auto giants to defend jobs, wages and conditions.
17. IYSSE meeting: World War, Imperialism and the Illusion of a Multipolar World
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in Sri Lanka is holding a public Zoom meeting on Wednesday, July 8, at 7:00 p.m. titled: “The Threat of World War, Imperialism and the Illusion of a Multipolar World Order.”
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The NATO-led war against Russia in Ukraine, the US war on Iran, and Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, backed by the US, are all part of an unfolding global war. The fragile ceasefire brokered by the Trump administration with Tehran is only a temporary pause.
US imperialism is seeking to re-assert its lost global hegemony by securing control over the oil-rich Middle East and ultimately targeting Russia and China—which the US regards as its chief rival. Other imperialist powers are backing these wars while simultaneously pursuing their own military plans to secure their strategic interests.
Amid these critical developments, various postmodernist academics and pseudo-left groups in Sri Lanka, like their counterparts internationally, are engaged in a political campaign to derail workers, students and youth by concealing the growing threat of imperialist war. Sumith Chaaminda, a senior lecturer at the University of Colombo, is promoting the myth that the emergence of a “multipolar world” lessens the danger of war. Chaaminda and his associates argue that the rise of new “power centers,” such as Russia, China and the BRICS bloc, can establish a new global equilibrium and stability.
Not a single academic has condemned the criminal imperialist assault on Iran or Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the slaughter of tens of thousands of people.
Pseudo-left groups such as the Frontline Socialist Party and the Socialist People’s Forum, which is affiliated to Pabloite United Secretariat, are likewise preaching that the world is moving toward a multipolar order. They call on the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government to pursue a “non-aligned” foreign policy to defend Sri Lanka’s national interests.
The essence of these arguments, promoted by affluent middle-class layers, is that workers, youth and the oppressed can secure their future within the framework of the crisis-ridden global capitalist order. They seek to lull the masses and keep them politically disarmed in the face of the immense danger of a catastrophic global conflagration.
In reality, the JVP/NPP government is integrating itself into the US war preparations against China in the Indo-Pacific region and has refused to condemn the war on Iran. At the same time, the government is imposing the brutal austerity dictates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on workers and the rural poor.
War is not the result of diplomatic failures but a catastrophic expression of the historic crisis of capitalism. The irreconcilable contradiction between the capitalist nation-state system and the globalized economy makes war inevitable. Capitalism cannot evolve into a peaceful or democratic multipolar order. In the 20th century, imperialism plunged humanity into two world wars, sacrificing millions of lives and destroying immense productive forces.
As the ruling class imposes the costs of war and the worsening economic crisis on working people, using increasingly authoritarian methods, mass struggles are emerging as workers fight to defend their social and democratic rights. The working class, armed with a socialist and internationalist program, is the only revolutionary force capable of halting imperialism’s plunge toward nuclear war.
The IYSSE meeting will discuss the roots of the present crisis, the reactionary theories advanced by academics and pseudo-left tendencies. Speakers will explain the revolutionary program of the Trotskyist movement for building an international working-class movement against war, and the tasks facing youth and students as part of this struggle.
We invite you to join this meeting and participate in this important discussion.
Date: Wednesday, July 8.
Time: 7:00 p.m.
18. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Australia:
Cambodia:
India:
New Zealand:
Singapore:
19. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
