Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. The Colorado primary and the growing support for socialism
The defeat of 15-term incumbent Diana DeGette in Tuesday’s Democratic congressional primary in Denver, Colorado by Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old first-time candidate and member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), is another expression of the broad political radicalization developing in the United States.
In the statewide Senate primary, former DSA member Julie Gonzales, who was outspent nine to one, won 46.6 percent of the vote and nearly defeated two-term Senator John Hickenlooper. Gonzales carried the city of Denver. Senator Michael Bennet, a pillar of the Washington establishment for two decades, was defeated in his bid for the party’s nomination for governor.
The Colorado results follow the primary victories one week earlier of three congressional candidates in New York City backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, two of them members of the DSA, the victory of a DSA member in the Democratic primary for mayor of Washington DC—tantamount to election in the US capital city—and electoral successes for candidates claiming to be “democratic socialists” in Seattle, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit and other cities.
This demonstration of mass support for socialism, in a country where socialism has been demonized by the media, the academic apologists for capitalism, the two major political parties and the government at all levels, has immense significance. What is taking place is a new stage in the political radicalization of ever broader layers of the population. The official narrative of American politics for the past century has rested on the claim that the United States is the one country where support for socialism was permanently foreclosed. That narrative is collapsing.
*****
Within the ruling class, these developments are producing anxiety. Trump and the Republicans have responded to the primary results in New York and Colorado with hysterical denunciations of “communism”—a recognition, in their own way, that the shift to the left in popular consciousness poses a threat to the wealth and power of the billionaire oligarchs.
“It’s the biggest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, September 11,” Trump posted on social media. “It’s a bigger threat, potentially a bigger threat than that, because it’s like a cancer that spreads, and you better stop it fast.”
Third Way, a group of “centrist” Democrats, has issued a manifesto reaffirming that they are “capitalists” committed to “fiscal responsibility” and “law and order.” In an accompanying op-ed column in the Washington Post, the group’s leaders refer approvingly to the McCarthyite purge of the unions and the Democratic Party, initiated in 1947 by Walter Reuther and Hubert Humphrey, as the model for a new anticommunist witch-hunt.
Representative Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat and fervent Zionist, described as “aberrations” the victories of candidates opposing the Israeli genocide in Gaza. “We’ve got to fight like hell to keep our party from being hijacked by socialists,” he said. “Most of them are bomb throwers, not problem solvers.”
It is in this context that one should read the Substack column published Thursday by economist and pro-Democratic Party pundit Paul Krugman, under the headline, “There Are Very Few Socialists in America.” Krugman undertakes to explain that the whole thing is a misunderstanding. “Very few Americans—even among politicians who call themselves democratic socialists—are really socialists,” he writes. What people actually support is “social democracy,” an ideology that is “OK with living in a mostly market-driven economic system in which some people make much more money than others.”
There is, he concedes, “a real groundswell of dismay over an economy that increasingly favors a tiny group of billionaires,” but those who say they favor socialism “are not demanding a dictatorship of the proletariat.” As for the “left-wing radicals in America,” they “have no realistic prospect of getting their way.”
This is whistling past the graveyard. Krugman is attempting to convince himself, and the privileged social layers for which he speaks, that the millions voting for candidates who call themselves socialists do not really mean it.
The DSA is the initial beneficiary of the political radicalization in America. But for all its rhetoric, it is a bourgeois party and has no viable program to address the conditions of poverty, war and attacks on democratic rights that are producing its own electoral successes. It is a faction of the Democratic Party, linked by a thousand threads to American imperialism, so much so that its founder Michael Harrington earned the apt moniker of “State Department socialist.”
Its candidates declare that this should be a country in which the interests of working people come first. But how is this to be achieved? Through what mechanism? The monopolization of wealth and power by the oligarchy and the impoverishment of the working class are not the products of mistaken policies. They are two sides of a single process, rooted in the private ownership of the means of production and the subordination of every social need to profit.
To promise that the interests of working people will come first, while leaving the banks, the corporations and the capitalist state untouched, is to promise a reconciliation of the wolf and the lamb.
2. Humanitarian crisis worsens in Venezuela, as botched earthquake rescue phase winds down
The confirmed death toll from the twin earthquakes that struck Venezuela’s Caribbean coast on June 24 has climbed to at least 2,295, a figure based solely on bodies recovered from the rubble; 11,267 have been reported injured. The United Nations estimates some 50,000 people remain unaccounted for.
In the port town of La Guaira, among the hardest-hit areas, rescue workers have spent recent days stacking coffins inside an improvised morgue as vans arrive with more corpses, laid out in rows along a concrete pier. The UN is procuring 10,000 body bags, according to resident coordinator Gianluca Rampolla.
More than a week after the disaster, international search-and-rescue contingents have begun winding down operations, citing the closing of the “critical survival window.” The rescue of a 43-year-old man pulled alive from a collapsed seven-story building in Catia La Mar, after eight days trapped beneath it, is being used as a last “hurrah” as international rescue teams leave.
*****
Aid workers, comparing the scenes to Gaza, warned that overcrowded shelters and the absence of clean water and sanitation now threaten disease outbreaks compounding the earthquakes’ direct toll. Eugenio Cova, a trauma unit chief who spoke to Al Jazeera, identified overcrowding and contaminated water as the principal dangers now facing survivors, with infections poised to claim lives.
For domestic consumption, the US media has mounted a damage control operation around Washington’s response. The Washington Post praised Trump for “going big” on relief after the White House pledged $300 million, while the New York Times applauded the administration’s mobilization despite what it noted was Trump’s longstanding hostility to foreign aid spending.
Trump’s own remarks tell a different story, openly displaying his contempt for the lives of Venezuelans. In the same statement acknowledging the earthquakes’ massive toll, he claimed Venezuelans were “dancing in the streets” over the country’s transformation into a US protectorate, echoing his 2017 visit to Hurricane Maria-ravaged Puerto Rico, when he threw paper towels at survivors and declared the response a triumph.
*****
As in every disaster before it, the Venezuelan military has focused its energies toward suppressing social unrest rather than toward rescue, leaving US forces free to assume direct operational control of key infrastructure.
The scale of need dwarfs what has been promised. The U.N. Development Program estimates physical damage at $4.7 to $8.7 billion; the risk-modeling firm Verisk puts economic losses above $10 billion, citing roughly 1,400 destroyed buildings.
Washington’s record offers little hope that even the paltry sums pledged will materialize. A federal audit released this week found Puerto Rico had received only 25 percent of the $14 billion in US funds assigned to rebuild its power grid after Hurricane Maria, which killed an estimated 2,975 people, a decade ago. Six months after the 2010 Haiti earthquake—also used at the time to justify a foreign military occupation of the island—only 2 percent of $5.3 billion in pledged US aid had actually been delivered.
The disaster has exposed a deeper irony. The very Chavista government the US and its media have spent a quarter-century denouncing as a failed “Communist dictatorship” is now Washington’s preferred vehicle for consolidating direct control over Venezuela—preferred, in fact, over Washington’s own hand-picked opposition. Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado, who gave Trump her medal as a personal gift, remains barred from the country, with Washington declining to allow her return.
Washington, it is now clear, has no interest in ruling Venezuela indirectly through the traditional opposition it spent decades financing and promoting. It has settled instead on Delcy Rodríguez as the administrator best positioned to oversee the country’s transition into a direct US military protectorate—one being built, like Puerto Rico and Haiti before it, on the bodies of the poor and oppressed, while Washington and Caracas alike congratulate themselves and each other on a job well done.
3. ICE thugs kidnap over 10,000 immigrants in 5 days as White House orders worksite raids
US immigration police have kidnapped more than 10,000 people in just five days as part of a “major surge” ordered by the Trump White House, according to figures reported this week. The operation marks a further escalation in the administration’s mass deportation campaign, the spearhead of its drive toward dictatorship.Agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have seized immigrants at scheduled check-ins, outside courthouses and detention centers, during worksite operations, and in ambushes on residential streets. The purpose is not the removal of “criminals,” the lie repeated endlessly by the administration and the media, but the terrorizing of the entire immigrant population and, through it, the working class as a whole.
The White House directive, first reported by the New York Times, calls for ICE to maintain a pace of roughly 2,000 arrests a day. This is below the 3,000-a-day quota demanded last year by Trump adviser Stephen Miller, but it is still an enormous dragnet. The vast majority of those targeted have committed no crime. Many are people legally complying with the immigration system, including those attending required check-ins with federal authorities.
*****
The increase in operations follows the Supreme Court rulings last week effectively ending Temporary Protected Status for over a million people, including Haitians and Venezuelans, along with a ruling allowing the president to deny those seeking asylum at the border the ability to file claims. Venezuelan immigrants are facing threats of deportation to a country that has suffered the most devastating earthquake in the Western Hemisphere since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
The Times falsely claimed the surge of arrests under Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin “has occurred without the fanfare of highly visible operations last year.” There has been no shortage of social opposition to the kidnapping operations in cities and outside detention centers throughout the country. What has changed is not opposition to the ongoing brutality, but the effort of the ruling class and the corporate media to normalize it.
*****
As a massive heat dome engulfs much of the United States, threatening the lives of millions of workers and their families, some 63,000 people continue to languish in hellish conditions in immigrant concentration camps throughout the country.
On Wednesday, a protest was held outside the federal immigration office in Miramar, Florida, in Broward County. The facility has seen an influx of detainees following the recent closure of the grotesque “Alligator Alcatraz,” a more than $1 billion immigrant concentration camp erected on an abandoned airport tarmac in the middle of the Florida Everglades.
*****
The surge follows the passage of a multi-year appropriations bill providing nearly $70 billion for ICE and Customs and Border Protection through the end of Trump’s term. The measure was made possible by the Democratic Party, which voted to fund the rest of Trump’s fascistic and thoroughly corrupt government, allowing Republicans to pass the immigration funding with a simple majority. The mass deportation campaign is not an aberration, but the product of the bipartisan buildup of the police-state apparatus, now being turned ever more openly against immigrants and the entire working class.
4. July 4th and America’s revolutionary influence on Britain
Outline provided by Socialism AI:
I. The American Revolution's early influence on British radicalism
The Revolution Society and the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI) drew directly on American revolutionary ideals.
These groups were formative for the more significant London Corresponding Society (LCS), founded in 1792 by Thomas Hardy, John Thelwall, Joseph Gerrald, and Thomas Spence.
All of these founders acknowledged the American Revolution as central to their political development. Gerrald cited his experience living in America to argue that national conventions were the only legitimate expression of popular sovereignty.
II. The LCS shifted the class basis of the radical movement
The LCS drew thousands of working men into organized political activity, with audiences in the tens and even hundreds of thousands.
Thelwall's 1796 book The Rights of Nature argued that "the hideous accumulation of capital in a few hands… carries in its own enormity, the seeds of its cure" and that "every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society."
Thelwall also connected the exploitation of wage labor to chattel slavery, condemning both.
The LCS included freed slave Olaudah Equiano and forged ties with the United Irishmen, who were themselves inspired by the American Revolution.
E.P. Thompson noted that the LCS period marked the middle-class reformers' default and the plebeian radicals' "rapid leftwards movement," shaping popular consciousness for fifty years.
III. From the LCS to Chartism
Francis Place, an LCS member, later helped found the London Working Men's Association in 1836 — a central organization of early Chartism, the first mass working-class movement in history.
Chartism's demands (universal male suffrage, secret ballot, no property qualifications, equal constituencies, annual elections) carried forward the earlier radicals' program.
IV. Chartism and the fight against slavery
Chartist writers extensively compared chattel slavery and wage slavery. While some figures like James Bronterre O'Brien had confusions, the general tendency was toward recognizing a common cause.
Chartist leader William Lovett called American slavery "a feature of wealth and class domination" and met Frederick Douglass during his 1845–47 UK tour, co-founding the Anti-Slavery League.
William Cuffay, the son of a freed slave, was a popular "Physical Force" Chartist leader, elected to the movement's national executive and later transported to Tasmania.
The Chartist Land Plan, developed alongside American Free Soil radicals, became a "fulcrum" for rethinking the relationship between wage labor and chattel slavery. Feargus O'Connor described it as "a free temple" with "no distinction of color."
V. Conclusion
Chartism asserted that British workers shared a common cause with the struggle for emancipation in America — it was not merely a moral question but central to their own fight for freedom. This position proved hugely significant two decades later, during the American Civil War.
The article's central argument is that the American Revolution's ideals did not merely influence polite reform societies — they helped catalyze a distinctly working-class radicalism in Britain that, through the LCS and then Chartism, increasingly grasped the connection between the fight against wage slavery at home and chattel slavery abroad.
The American Revolution not only freed its citizens from the domination of the British Empire; it was an inspiration to all progressive struggles in British society, from the anti-slavery movement to the radical movement for democratic reform.
A direct line can be drawn from the supporters of the American revolutionaries to the Chartists, the great working-class movement of the 1830s and 40s—the best of whom would support the North in the Civil War which ended slavery. 1776 was also a critical moment in the development of the Irish Independence struggle.
In 2019, the New York Times launched the “1619 Project” rejecting the progressive character of the American Revolution, fraudulently presenting it as an effort to defend slavery with no real interest in democracy and equality. The independence struggle was rendered just another shabby episode in a country for whom slavery and anti-black racism was in its “DNA”. What passes for the American “left” signed up to this reactionary disavowal of one of the most significant revolutionary events in world history.
Seizing the opportunity, President Donald Trump and the wider American right has sought to claim 1776 for its own ultra-nationalist purposes. It is using the 250th anniversary to claim for Trump’s aspiring dictatorship the legacy of the founding fathers, who waged a war against precisely the sort of “tyranny” now being orchestrated from the White House.
British politicians, historians and even the monarchy have meanwhile sought to present the event as a terrible misunderstanding, ultimately only a blip in a longstanding “special relationship” between the two governments founded on joint foreign policy objectives and, supposedly, shared democratic values.
This is history falsified to suit the agenda of different factions of the ruling and affluent middle class. What is erased by all of them is the closely interconnected, popular struggle for democratic rights which took place on both sides of the Atlantic. That history of international intellectual ferment, reciprocal waves of radicalization, and political collaboration across borders is so horrifying to the ruling class and its hangers-on today because it finds its contemporary heir in the socialist movement.
*****
Contrary to the 1619 Project’s claim that the American Revolution was launched in defense of slavery, the struggle gave an enormous spur to the abolitionist movement in Britain.
Lawyer Granville Sharp was among the earliest British abolitionists, publishing A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery in 1769, securing the famous Somerset vs Stewart ruling that slavery had no basis in English law in 1772 and corresponding with pioneering abolitionist Anthony Benezet in Philadelphia. He was an acquaintance of Benjamin Franklin and correspondent of Bejamin Rush—two founding fathers—and supported the rights of the American Colonies against the British government. His 1774 pamphlet, A Declaration of the People’s Natural Right to a Share in the Legislature, was circulated by Franklin in America.
After the independence struggle, Franklin made it a priority for the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, of which he was president from 1785, to establish correspondence with Sharp and his close collaborator Thomas Clarkson. The pair were among the founders of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787, which led the campaign for abolition in the UK. Its work included publicizing details of the legislation passed against the slave trade by Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
*****
...[T]he fight against slavery was intimately tied up with the struggle for democratic reform in Britain, which was similarly energized by the American Revolution.[8] As David Brion Davis writes in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, “In 1793 the Earl of Abingdon warned that the abolition movement also drew on ‘Tom Paine’s Rights of Man for its chief and best support,’ and that it carried ‘seeds of other abolitions, different and distinct from that which it professes.’”[9]
Paine is, of course, the central figure: author of the hugely influential Common Sense (written in America in support of independence) and Rights of Man (written in Britain in defense of the French Revolution). These and others of Paine’s writings, drawing on the heritage of John Wilkes and James Burgh, became seminal texts in the British radical movement, but they were far from unique. They were the high points of a broad landscape of political writing and organization supportive of the American Revolution and the fight for democratic rights in Britain.
*****
Through the lens of historical materialism developed by Marx and Engels—in which history is understood as “the history of class struggle”—the role of the American Revolution and its continuation in the Civil War could be precisely identified, and its relationship with the current and future struggles of the working class established. Both aspects were brilliantly summed up in the 1864 “Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln”, authored by Marx, congratulating Lincoln on his re-election.
Marx spoke on behalf of a socialist movement inspired by the ideals of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” but oriented to the struggles of a growing working class which provided the basis for their vastly fuller realization than was possible under the leadership of the American bourgeois revolutionaries. It is entirely fitting to give a section of his letter the final word:
When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, “slavery” on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding “the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution”, and maintained slavery to be “a beneficent institution”, indeed, the old solution of the great problem of “the relation of capital to labor”, and cynically proclaimed property in man “the cornerstone of the new edifice”—then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters—and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.
While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.
The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes.”
5. Burnham told to make welfare and pension cuts to pay for UK rearmament and prepare war with Russia
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer published his long-delayed Defense Investment Plan (DIP) on June 30, committing an additional £15 billion to the armed forces over four years.
It leaves Starmer’s successor-in-waiting, Andy Burnham, having to find tens of billions of pounds in cuts to social spending to pay for a hike in military funding.
The DIP was meant to fund the Labour government’s 10-year Strategic Defense Review (SDR), published in June last year, but its funding commitments extend only to the four-year spending review period ending in 2029/30.
The plan takes total military spending to £298 billion in the period to 2029/30—almost £80 billion a year by the end of the decade. Speaking at a drone factory in Berkshire flanked by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, Starmer hailed “the biggest sustained increase in defense spending since the 1980s”, raising spending from 2.3 percent of GDP in 2024 to 2.7 percent. However, he added, this would only put “us on a trajectory to reach 3 percent in the next Parliament [after a scheduled 2029 general election]”.
Every line of the 80-page DIP is directed at preparing for war with Russia, declaring that “President Putin’s aggression is growing around our shores, in the High North, across Europe, and in Ukraine.” Ramping up military spending is required as “NATO is now warning that Russia could be ready to use military force against the Alliance by the end of this decade.”
*****
For the military cabal and their backers in the media, who determine the policies of governments, the DIP confirms their verdict that the Starmer government had to go for refusing to stump up far more than £15 billion and pay for this by slashing welfare.
Military chiefs had demanded at least £28 billion to fund a “black hole” in the Ministry of Defense’s budget—without which all 62 recommendations of last year’s Strategic Defense Review could not be met.
Starmer’s critics wasted no time in denouncing the final settlement as inadequate....
*****
Following Starmer’s resignation, Burnham is expected to be formally declared Labour leader on July 17 and to enter Downing Street on July 20.
The Times reported that Burnham had to find “almost £7 billion of cuts to schools, hospitals, road and energy projects to pay for increased defense spending in one of his first acts as prime minister.” This was “on top of the £4.7 billion of savings or tax rises that Burnham’s chancellor will have to find at the next budget to pay for the unfunded element of the defense investment plan.”
According to the Financial Times, Burnham was “blindsided” by the initial DIP funding gap of £4.7 billion, including the £1.8 billion in savings that must be allocated in the coming financial year.
The Times’ editorial Wednesday put Burnham on his marching orders. Headlined, “Defence plan is Andy Burnham’s call to arms on public finances”, it described the £4.7 billion shortfall as a “poison pill” administered by the outgoing premier while denouncing the £15 billion uplift as “half of what they need”.
The need to vastly increase the arms budget and the funding deficit “should spur him to take radical action on pensions and welfare.”
*****
The Financial Times editorialised that the DIP funding gap risked Britain becoming “a mid-tier country behind Poland, Germany, and the Baltic and Nordic nations”. Burnham’s job was to raid “the soaring welfare budget.” Succeeding where Starmer failed “will be a defining test of the Burnham premiership”.
In his speech Monday outlining his agenda, Burnham spoke of a 10-year plan to raise living standards. But such boilerplate was blown apart within a matter of 48 hours, as the military had their say.
Last year, under pressure from US President Trump, NATO members pledged to devote 5 percent of GDP to the military by 2035. On publication of the DIP, the Resolution Foundation calculated the cost of this at an additional £25 billion every year.
*****
Burnham has got the message. Asked about the DIP by Marr on LBC Radio, Burnham said of hiking military spending: “I regard it as something that the country has to face up to very seriously. We’re in a changing world. The nature of the threat is changing… I will take my responsibilities fully to fund the defence investment plan…”
6. Australia: The Age blames socialists for Victorian teachers’ rejection of union-Labor sellout
In a comment last week, the Age’s chief political correspondent Chip Le Grand bemoaned the rejection of a sellout enterprise agreement by Victorian teachers for the first time in over forty years.
Le Grand, drawing on the trope of the “outside agitator,” ascribed the defeat of the agreement to the influence of socialists. He particularly singled out the Committee for Public Education (CFPE), a rank-and-file teachers’ network initiated by the Socialist Equality Party, which had campaigned among educators for a “no” vote.
The column testified to nervousness within the corporate ruling elite over the teachers’ rebellion and the weakening grip of the trade union bureaucracy that it expresses. The Age is the most prominent “liberal” daily newspaper in Victoria. Le Grand is its most prominent commentator.
Le Grand defended the deal cooked up by the Victorian Labor government and the Australian Education Union (AEU) leadership, denounced the intervention of the CFPE and presented teachers as having been duped into voting “no.” In fact the Age played a not inconsequential role in trying, on behalf of the government and the union leadership, to bulldoze the agreement through by “leaking” it in their publication before it had even been released to teachers.
There was a glaring contradiction at the heart of Le Grand’s column. Aside from blaming the campaign of the CFPE, he was unable to explain why almost 58 percent of teachers had voted “no” to the AEU-Labor deal.
“Victorian teachers are Australia’s worst paid. This is a serious problem,” Le Grand acknowledged. “The obvious solution, one the AEU leadership and government thought they had settled on, was to give them substantially more pay.”
The image of a beneficent government and AEU bureaucracy offering a major pay rise on a platter, only to be rebuked by befuddled educators, is not only an insult to teachers’ intelligence. It is a complete falsification.
*****
A right-wing figure, who previously worked for Murdoch’s Australian newspaper for 25 years, Le Grand was unstinting in his praise of the AEU leadership. He did not mention the anti-democratic methods through which the 2022 sellout was imposed, including widespread censorship, which the AEU had replicated in the lead-up to the recent ballot. Those methods not only expose the AEU as an industrial and political police force. They underscore the determined and deliberate stand by teachers expressed in the mass “no” vote.
Le Grand’s greatest concern was that the vote expressed a weakening of the grip of the union bureaucracy.
*****
The enterprise bargaining system that Le Grand defends has been a central mechanism for a decades-long assault on the jobs, wages and conditions, not only of educators, but of the entire working class. Introduced by the Keating Labor government in the early 1990s, with the full support of the union bureaucracies, enterprise bargaining divides workers up, locks them into extended agreements negotiated behind closed doors and prohibits any industrial action outside a narrow bargaining period.
For teachers, that has meant an AEU sellout every four years, either reducing real wages or keeping them stagnant, and providing for the ongoing gutting of public education by governments, the majority of them in recent years led by Labor. Every other section of workers has gone through the same experience over decades, from public health staff to private sector employees.
For socialists and for workers to challenge that corporate-government-union set-up is illegitimate, according to Le Grand. He wrote: “The desire to blow up the system rather than reach agreement through constructive bargaining is an expression of industrial Hansonism, which, in the case of teachers struggling to meet rent and mortgage payments on moderate incomes, serves only to aggravate grievance.”
Again, if the enterprise bargaining system had been so beneficial to teachers, why is it that they are “struggling to meet rent and mortgage payments on moderate incomes”? The idea that teachers would receive anything more than “moderate incomes” or live lives that did not involve a daily struggle to make ends meet is dismissed out of hand by the professional journalist, who is presumably well remunerated for his services to the corporate elite.
*****
Le Grand’s suggestion that the “no” vote was primarily the result of the CFPE’s campaigning is absurd. But what is true is that the experiences through which workers are passing are objectively posing the need for a rebellion against the union bureaucracy, a political fight against the Labor governments and a new perspective.
Le Grand’s comment had the character of a warning to the ruling elite itself, amid growing opposition in the working class, that the CFPE and the Socialist Equality Party are advancing such an alternative perspective.
7. Germany: With NATO chief Rutte present: Merz government adopts war laws
In the presence of NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, the Merz-Klingbeil government on Wednesday set in motion a comprehensive package of war laws at the Defense Ministry. Under the seemingly harmless phrase “Germany is becoming crisis-proof,” the Bundeswehr, the state apparatus, the economy and the whole of society are to be rapidly prepared for a direct war against Russia.
*****
The decisions are part of the preparations for the impending NATO summit in Ankara on July 7-8. Merz had already announced in advance new financing commitments by the European NATO states for Ukraine. Rutte explicitly praised Germany for spending 3.5 percent of GDP on defense by 2029 and declared that the summit would be about translating this money into “deployable, combat-ready capabilities” and “significantly expanding” the arms industry.
The cabinet adopted three central measures: the draft of a Reserve Strengthening Act, the draft of a Bundeswehr Infrastructure Acceleration Act and key points for amending the security and precautionary laws. The Defence Ministry declared that the decisions were connected with “national and alliance defense,” the personnel expansion of the Bundeswehr, accelerated military infrastructure and “whole-of-state security provision.”
In this way, the new German Military Strategy and Operations Plan Germany are being concretely implemented. As the WSWS already analyzed in April, the new Military Strategy defines Russia as the central threat and orients all military planning towards a comprehensive war against the nuclear power. It envisages a massive increase in Bundeswehr personnel, the establishment of deployable large formations, the permanent stationing of German troops on Russia’s border, the expansion of arms production, preparations for conscription, military logistics for rapid troop deployments and the integration of the military, state, economy and society within the framework of “comprehensive defense.”
Precisely these elements are at the center of the new laws. They create the legal prerequisites for forcibly conscripting personnel, building military infrastructure in fast-track procedures and subordinating civilian life to the needs of warfare.
*****
The coercion is comprehensive. The maximum duration of compulsory reserve service is to range from three to twelve weeks per year, depending on previous service. Over the entire period of service monitoring, compulsory service can total six to twelve months. For former temporary and professional soldiers, call-up applies up to the age of 65, and in individual cases up to 68.
Particularly far-reaching is the fact that coercion is not limited to a state of tension or defense. The ministry explicitly writes that in future unlimited reserve service is to be possible even outside a state of tension or defense, for example in the event of a “hybrid threat situation” or another crisis situation. This massively lowers the threshold for military coercion. Under the vague slogan of a “hybrid threat,” the government can mobilize reservists before a state of war has even been officially declared.
War deployments abroad are also being prepared. Anyone who has performed more than one year of military service can in future be obligated to serve abroad in EU or NATO states as well as aboard ships and aircraft. This provision makes clear what is at stake: the reserve is not being built up for abstract “security,” but for Germany’s integration into NATO war planning on the eastern flank.
At the same time, the Bundeswehr is beginning to register the so-called R1 inventory. This refers to former professional soldiers, soldiers serving on a temporary basis with at least two years of service, and other reservists subject to service obligations. Since July 1, the Bundeswehr has been sending out questionnaires with QR codes and personalized access data. These request information on professional qualifications, changes in health status, contact details and activities in so-called blue-light organizations. Anyone who fails to report changes subject to notification can be punished with fines and enforcement measures.
This is the concrete content of the much-invoked “military service monitoring.” The state registers, records, assigns and mobilizes. What is now being legally enforced for reservists also serves to prepare for the coming compulsory military service. Pistorius and Merz are still trying to sell the new military service as voluntary. But the reserve shows the logic of the entire project: as soon as the required numbers are not reached, compulsory recruitment will come. Not volunteering, but coercion for war is the core of this policy.
The second law, the Bundeswehr Infrastructure Acceleration Act, is intended to create the material basis for these war plans. The Defense Ministry speaks of a “comprehensive infrastructural renewal on a scale unprecedented since the founding of the Bundeswehr.” Barracks, training facilities, ammunition depots, command and logistics centers, and facilities to support allied armed forces are to be newly built, expanded or modernized.
*****
In other words, while hospitals, schools, housing and civilian infrastructure decay, all obstacles are to be swept aside for barracks, ammunition depots and military logistics. Environmental requirements, planning procedures and legal challenges are being restricted so that Germany can more rapidly be built up into NATO’s military hub.
This is precisely what lies at the center of Operations Plan Germany. The Bundeswehr describes it as the “essential military component of Germany’s comprehensive defense.” It combines the military components of national and alliance defense with the necessary civilian support services. Its core is Germany’s role as NATO’s hub. In an emergency, up to 800,000 allied soldiers and 200,000 vehicles are to be moved through Germany and supplied within six months. The plan is secret, comprises around 1,400 pages according to Bundeswehr sources, and is continuously updated. Its aim is to increase “cold-start capability,” “war-fighting capability” and “staying power.”
The new laws are the legislative implementation of this plan. The Reserve Strengthening Act provides the personnel. The Infrastructure Acceleration Act creates the barracks, depots, ammunition stores, transport routes and command centers. The amendment of the security and precautionary laws is intended to subordinate civilian supply, administration and the economy in crises and wars to military planning. Under the slogan of “comprehensive defense,” civilian authorities, municipalities, companies, transport infrastructure, healthcare and labor are integrated into military planning.
*****
The working class and youth must take this development as a warning. The war laws are directed not only outward, against Russia. They are also directed inward. The costs of rearmament are being imposed on the population through social cuts, wage reductions, longer working hours and attacks on democratic rights. At the same time, the state apparatus is being restructured so that resistance to war and social austerity can be suppressed.
8. Heat wave exposes workers to injury and death in auto plants, warehouses and delivery routes
A dangerous heat wave across the Midwest and Eastern United States is exposing workers to serious injury and death in manufacturing plants, warehouses, postal facilities and delivery routes, where millions are being kept on the job without air conditioning or adequate safety measures.
*****
In the US, the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center (WPC) warned Thursday of a “prolonged and dangerous heatwave” across the Central and Eastern US, with widespread highs of 95 to 105 degrees Fahrenheit (35 to 41 C) and heat indices reaching 100 to 115 degrees Fahrenheit (38 to 46 C). The WPC warned that warm overnight lows in the mid-70s to low 80s Fahrenheit (24 to 28 C) will provide little recovery, producing widespread Major to Extreme Heat Risk and increased danger of heat-related illness, especially for those without adequate cooling.
*****
Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker in Macungie, Pennsylvania and socialist candidate for UAW president, issued a statement Thursday calling on workers to take control over safety conditions as the heat wave spreads across factories, warehouses, construction sites, farms and delivery routes.
“Workers must have the right to stop the line and halt production when heat or any other condition threatens health and safety, with no retaliation, discipline or loss of pay,” Lehman said. “All workers must receive paid heat breaks, unlimited access to cool water and electrolytes, shaded and air-conditioned rest areas, and medical attention on demand.
“Production rates must be reduced or production halted when heat indices reach dangerous levels, including inside plants where machinery, concrete, poor ventilation and physical labor make conditions worse than outside readings suggest. All workplaces must be equipped with proper climate controls, including air conditioning and ventilation, paid for by the companies.
“Workers must receive full pay for any shutdown caused by unsafe heat, storms, power failures, wildfire smoke, pandemics or other emergencies. All heat-related incidents, near misses, hospitalizations and complaints must be reported immediately and made public to the entire workforce.”
Lehman called for replacing “worthless joint labor-management safety committees” with safety committees “made up entirely of active workers elected by and accountable to the rank and file,” adding, “No worker should die for a truck or any other commodity. Workers must unite, take control over safety, and fight for a system based on human need, not private profit.”
Workers cannot wait for management, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) or the union bureaucracies to act after more people collapse or die. Rank-and-file committees must be built in every workplace to monitor conditions, report heat illness and near misses, stop work when conditions are unsafe, demand full pay during heat-related shutdowns and link workers across plants, warehouses, routes and industries.
9. Keiko Fujimori declares herself president-elect of Peru
Keiko Fujimori, the far-right candidate favored by the bourgeoisie and US imperialism, proclaimed herself president-elect of Peru Monday after the ONPE (National Office of Electoral Processes) announced that 100 percent of votes had been counted. Fujimori’s declaration came days before the official announcement by the JNE (National Jury of Elections), which must still resolve challenged ballots before the Special Electoral Juries. The JNE is expected to proclaim the winner as soon as Friday, July 3, in a proclamation that cannot be appealed.
The results give Fujimori (Fuerza Popular) 50.135 percent, a razor-thin lead over her rival Roberto Sánchez (Juntos por el Perú) with 49.865 percent. The difference is 49,641 votes out of more than 18 million cast, less than 0.20 percent of the electorate.
This is Fujimori’s fourth presidential bid. In 2021 she lost to Pedro Castillo by an even narrower margin of 44,263 votes. If confirmed, she will become Peru’s ninth president in 10 years, continuing a protracted crisis of bourgeois rule.
That the last two elections were decided by less than 0.20 percent reveals a country deeply divided.
Immediately after her self-proclamation, congratulations poured in from US imperialism and far-right South American presidents: José Kast of Chile, Javier Milei of Argentina, and president-elect Abelardo de la Espriella of Colombia. Each is pursuing a fascistic program of subordination to US imperialism and war on the working class.
Trump has trampled South American sovereignty across the continent: offering explicit support to de la Espriella, Kast and Milei; dispatching his ambassador in Peru, Bernie Navarro, to visit the ONPE before the second round to demand “clean” elections; and placing a legal team at Jair Bolsonaro’s disposal to free him from prison after his conviction on the charge of inciting a coup after losing the 2022 presidential election in Brazil to Lula da Silva of the Workers Party. Providing his backing in Brazil’s October 2026 elections, Trump met recently at the White House with Flavio Bolsonaro, who is running as a surrogate for his father, who is ineligible and under house arrest.
Washington’s systematic violation of South American sovereignty is aimed at eradicating Chinese influence from the continent and, more broadly installing far-right puppet governments tasked with crushing any opposition from the working class and oppressed masses. These are considered necessary preparations for a war against China, which has already overtaken the US in electric vehicles, high-speed magnetic rail and other advanced technologies.
Peru has become a key arena of US-China rivalry due to China’s dominant economic presence, prompting escalating US pressure that is now beginning to roll back Chinese control over strategic infrastructure like the Chancay mega-port. The pressure is bearing fruit: on July 1, it was announced that regulatory oversight of the Chancay mega-port would be transferred from China’s Cosco Shipping to Ositran, a Peruvian government agency.
*****
The entire electoral process in Peru has been plagued by glaring irregularities. In the first round, ballot boxes never reached working-class districts in Lima’s Cono Sur. Ballots were found in a Surquillo garbage dump, and ONPE negligence disenfranchised 52,000 voters. These irregularities forced the resignation of ONPE president Piero Corvetto, whose home was raided by prosecutors investigating collusion and dereliction of duty.
In a violation of national sovereignty, US Ambassador Bernie Navarro presented himself at the ONPE to demand a “clean” second round. Given Washington’s open favoritism toward Fujimori, the intervention aimed to pressure the electoral body against Sánchez.
Last week, ONPE Secretary General Elar Juan Bolaños Llanos—in the post since 2020—resigned after discovering documents on his computer that he had never produced but appeared under his name. His resignation letter warned that the violation “incapacitates the institution to carry out the upcoming regional and immediately opened disciplinary proceedings against him.
The question that remains to be answered is how far has corruption penetrated the ONPE? Did it extend to the manipulation of votes—precisely what Sánchez had alleged in his multiple challenges, particularly regarding overseas ballots?
Sánchez’s concession, clearing the path for Fujimori to take power on July 28, follows the collapse of the so-called “pink tide” and “21st century socialism,” whose principal representatives were Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia. In Brazil, Lula, the founder of the Workers’ Party recently declared before the IMF and the G7: “I was never left-wing.”
Keiko Fujimori served as first lady from August 1994 until November 2000, when her father, dictator Alberto Fujimori, fled to Japan. She replaced her mother, Susana Higuchi, after the latter was abducted for having denounced before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that donations from the Japanese people were being sold by relatives of her husband. She was held captive in the Government Palace and tortured. Peru’s Documentation and Research Center concluded that “Fujimori violated human rights by attempting to murder his wife.” Keiko learned from her father how to govern. She founded and leads Fuerza Popular despotically.
The objective force driving an impending social explosion in Peru is staggering inequality. It makes democratic governance and respect for the vote impossible—which is precisely why Peruvian elections are riddled with irregularities. The purpose of a Keiko Fujimori government can be defined in a single sentence: to preserve her father’s 1993 Constitution, the foundation of Peru’s vast social inequality, through increasingly dictatorial forms of rule.
At one pole of Peruvian society, there has been the accumulation of enormous wealth. Led by Eduardo Hochschild ($5.2 billion), 17 family clans control Peru’s economy in alliance with transnational corporations, amassing a combined fortune of $35 billion. Among them are a dozen billionaires, while between 165 and 300 families possess $50 million or more each. At the other pole, nearly nine million Peruvians live in poverty and just under two million in extreme poverty.
*****
The bourgeoisie’s fear of a revolutionary uprising against the state is well founded. Since last year, a dozen successful 24-hour public transport strikes have enjoyed overwhelming popular support. In the first five months of this year alone, 64 drivers have been murdered. Working people are fed up with living in cities that are unaffordable and overwhelmed by criminality.
The bourgeoisie, congressmen and prosecutors know this well. For them, it is like the pandemic: a necessary evil to live with. The mafias controlling working-class districts continue collecting extortion payments and murdering innocent drivers with impunity.
Trade union leaders, mostly representing private transport companies, act in complicity with the police to contain the strikes and protests, assuring that they never threaten the despised bourgeois state.
The collapse of the bourgeois-nationalist establishment and threat of fascism poses urgently the need for the working class to take up the fight to build the party of world socialist revolution across Latin America. This means the establishment of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International—the Socialist Equality Parties.
10. Alexander Rabinowitch’s The Bolsheviks Survive: Petrograd 1919
The fourth and final volume of Rabinowitch’s books on the October Revolution in Petrograd is a major contribution to the history of the civil war.
*****
Here is a simple outline of the article provided by Socialism AI:
I. Introduction
- Rabinowitch's four-volume series on the Bolshevik Revolution; this final volume covers 1919, the second year of Bolshevik rule and the most difficult year of the [Russian] civil war.
II. Strengths of the Book
- Meticulous archival research, engaging writing, and never-before-seen images.
- Attention to political conflicts within the Bolshevik Party, working-class moods, and Trotsky's essential role.
III. The Struggle Against the Counterrevolution
- Objective challenges: White Army occupations, severe fuel shortages, and the siege of Petrograd.
- MI6 agent Paul Dukes: Built a substantial spy network that infiltrated Soviet military and civil agencies, including Kronstadt.
- Finnish counterrevolution: Terrorist attacks and conspiracies in Petrograd.
- Why the counterrevolution failed: The Revolution's social conquests (education, culture) had struck deep roots among workers.
- Defense against Yudenich (fall 1919): Mass worker mobilization and Trotsky's extraordinary intervention saved the city.
IV. The Military Opposition (Eighth Party Congress, March 1919)
- Conflict over Trotsky's policy of using ex-Tsarist military specialists ("spetsy") and centralized command.
- The opposition, backed by Stalin and the Tsaritsyn group, held overwhelming majorities in closed sessions.
- Lenin's forceful intervention secured the narrow but decisive victory for Trotsky's approach — critical to winning the civil war.
V. Zinoviev and Petrograd-Moscow Tensions
- Zinoviev's parochialism and resentment over the capital's move to Moscow.
- His later alliance with Stalin against Trotsky (1923) and eventual turn toward the United Left Opposition (1926).
VI. The Civil War, Stalinism, and the International Revolution
- Cadre depletion: Reliable Communists were drained to the front, leaving the party isolated within the working class.
- Rabinowitch's thesis: Growing isolation and counterrevolutionary pressure explain the turn toward authoritarianism.
- Democratic Centralists: Expressed legitimate worker concerns but were indifferent to international strategy.
- Critical weakness of the book: Ignores the formation of the Communist International (March 1919) — the year's most important event — and thus misses how the fate of the German and world revolution shaped the rise of national tendencies and Stalinism.
VII. Conclusion
- Despite its limitations, an exceedingly important work of scholarly commitment and integrity, deserving careful study by all interested in the fate of the socialist revolution.
11. Wall of Tears memorial to child victims of the Gaza genocide comes to Dearborn, Michigan
Created by artist-photographer Phil Buehler, the Wall of Tears is “a public artwork memorializing the 18,457+ children killed in Gaza from October 7th, 2023 until July 19, 2025.”That’s more than one child killed every hour. The work first appeared in Brooklyn, New York on January 29, the anniversary of the death of Hind Rajab. On June 11, it was brought to PEACE Park East in Dearborn, Michigan (13621 Michigan Ave, across from the Arab American National Museum) where it will remain on display through the end of July.
The Wall is 50 feet long, and towers at seven and a half feet high. The name of each martyred child is listed in small letters, in both Arabic and Roman, in the chronological order of his or her death, as is the age when he or she was killed. Boys names are highlighted in light grey, and girls in white. The names completely cover the wall, from top to bottom and along its entire length. One has to stoop down to read the names near the ground and stretch upward ito see those at the top.
The massacre of children in Gaza has been described by UN human rights expert Chris Sidoti as the “greatest of any conflict in recorded warfare.” A June 2026 UN Commission report found that Israeli forces intentionally and directly targeted children—not as collateral damage, but as deliberate targets, using precision sniper rifles, quadcopter drones and aerial munitions that gave operators “a high degree of clear visual confirmation of the target, including whether the target is a child.”
The scale and relentless nature of this atrocity is reflected in the scale of the Wall and the density of the names, stacked in enormously high columns one after another for 50 feet. Girls and boys alike were killed. Many died one year old or less than one.
*****
While freely accessible and well-enough displayed, the installation is somewhat tucked away in a small, low-traffic park. This reviewer was there for over 30 minutes on Saturday afternoon–that is, before the heat wave–and didn’t see a single other visitor. People passing by on the sidewalk, of whom there were many, wouldn’t know it was there.
That’s unfortunate, because it’s quite powerful. If this was located on a busy sidewalk anywhere in America, people would be stopping and talking about it all day.
11. Turkish teachers suspend Ankara protest ahead of NATO summit
Educators and teachers fighting for the appointment of teachers, improvements to their personal benefits and an increase in minimum wages in the private sector suspended their protests in Ankara, along with their hunger strike, on June 27. Their actions in Ankara had been continuing since June 14. Having been subjected to relentless police violence, the teachers were being directly threatened by the bans imposed ahead of the NATO summit on July 7–8.
In its statement, the Private Sector Teachers’ Union declared that the “NATO Directive” issued by the Ankara Governor’s Office—in coordination with the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—had officially banned constitutional and democratic rights, and that the hunger strike was among the actions covered by this ban. It added: “We are not talking about rights that have merely been shelved. What we are emphasizing is that the repression and violence inflicted on teachers over the past 14 days is about to be given official form.”
*****
Aware of the widespread anti-imperialist and anti-war sentiment among the population, the government is taking sweeping measures in addition to the preventive arrests. The Ankara Governor’s Office banned all assemblies, demonstrations and marches, press statements, sit-ins, rallies, hunger strikes, the setting up of stands and tents, the distribution of leaflets and the hanging of posters and banners across the city from 00:00 on June 28 until 23:59 on July 10—for 13 days. The governor’s offices of Adana, Bolu, Eskişehir, Karabük and Mersin subsequently adopted similar decisions.
12. Turkish comedian Deniz Göktaş detained at Istanbul airport over political satire
Turkish stand-up comedian Deniz Göktaş was detained at passport control at an Istanbul airport on Thursday while returning to Türkiye from abroad. Since June 24, Göktaş had been targeted by pro-government media and right-wing circles, with open calls for his arrest over his widely acclaimed political comedy special “Ölü Deniz” (Dead Sea). His detention marks a dangerous escalation of attacks on art and freedom of expression in Türkiye.
The World Socialist Web Site and the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi - Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party - Fourth International) demand the immediate release of Deniz Göktaş, the dropping of the investigation against him and a halt to all attacks on art and freedom of expression.
The Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office had launched an investigation into Göktaş on the baseless charge of “publicly denigrating the religious values embraced by a section of the population” over jokes in the show, which was staged on June 1 at the Harbiye Cemil Topuzlu Open-Air Theatre and released on YouTube on June 24. The prosecutor’s office publicly announced the investigation, describing Göktaş as a “suspect” in whose social media content “elements of a crime” had been identified. Earlier, posts on X containing excerpts from the show had been blocked by court order on the grounds of “protecting national security and public order.” In a statement before his detention, Göktaş said that “no official information” had reached him and that he had no plans to live outside Türkiye.
The roughly 90-minute show was viewed more than 1 million times within 24 hours of its release and had surpassed 8.5 million views as of July 2. Notably, Göktaş made the show freely available to everyone on YouTube rather than on a paid digital platform, with monetization turned off and no ads. Reaching millions of workers and young people, the show became “dangerous” in the eyes of the ruling elite. At the same time, this immense public interest was itself a mass response to the attempt to suppress Göktaş.
“Ölü Deniz” is a satire directed not at individuals but at the political and media establishment as a whole. Göktaş’s subjects included the 32-year political career of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; the revocation of the university diploma of Ekrem İmamoğlu, the jailed Istanbul metropolitan mayor from the Kemalist Republican People's Party (CHP); the police raid on the CHP’s headquarters following a court’s “absolute nullity” ruling against the party; the mass protests that erupted against İmamoğlu;s arrest; the ensuing widespread arrests; and mainstream media figures. While directing his sharpest political barbs at Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), in power since 2002, he did not spare the CHP, and he also satirized Turkish nationalism and its contradictions on the Kurdish question.
One of the most striking features of the show was that censorship is itself its subject. Göktaş recounts that the legal opinion he received from lawyers on “Selam Selam,” his first show, was: “Never release it.” On stage, he satirizes a nightmare in which he sees himself on the gallows, and the ranks of the “intellectuals” in his family—the intellectual in exile, the intellectual in prison, the dead intellectual. He is fully aware of the historical price of being a dissident artist in Turkey.
In the show, Göktaş also refers to Erdoğan being jailed in 1998 for reciting a poem. The state apparatus now headed by a politician once imprisoned over a poem is prosecuting a comedian over a joke.
*****
Although the official pretext for the investigation is “religious values,” the real target is clearly the political content, which gives voice to—and at the same time encourages—the anti-government sentiments of broad layers of the population through powerful humor. The “national security” invoked to justify the access bans betrays the state’s real concern. What is meant is the security not of the people, but of the ruling class and the government.
*****
Göktaş was born in 1994 in Mamak, a working class district of Ankara, as the child of what he describes as a communist and Alevi family of a worker and a civil servant. He studied psychology at Middle East Technical University (ODTÜ) after switching from engineering, and and he first took the stage in 2019 at an open-mic night organized by the TuzBiber Comedy Club.
He became known for his columns in the satirical journal Uykusuz, his podcasts, which reached wide audiences during the pandemic, and “Selam Selam,” which he likewise released for free on YouTube in 2023. His storytelling—built on long narratives, observations of everyday life and unexpected connections rather than rapid-fire punchlines—has made him the voice of a generation of young people who grew up amid economic crisis, political repression, an uncertain future and wars. The targeting of Göktaş reflects the fear that this generation might recognize its own experiences on stage through humor, and that millions might not just laugh it off.
On stage, Göktaş also addressed class divisions directly through his own experiences. Describing a vacation home he rented for his family after becoming famous as “a museum of the life we couldn’t live,” he explained that moving up the social ladder is possible not through a single show but only over generations, and he remarked that he observes the people at close quarters—and that things are bad.
*****
The investigation into Göktaş is not an isolated incident. Numerous elected CHP mayors have been jailed, from the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality to the Adalar Municipality. The CHP’s elected leadership has been removed and its headquarters raided by police. An emerging workers’ movement faces growing repression, while journalists and social media users face prosecution. Ahead of the NATO summit to be held in Ankara on July 7–8, large numbers of NATO opponents have been arrested, and bans on demonstrations and assemblies—amounting to a de facto state of emergency, above all in the capital—have been imposed. All of this expresses the response of Erdoğan, backed by the dominant sections of the Turkish ruling class and by NATO, to the escalation of imperialist war from Ukraine to the Middle East and to the growth of the class struggle amid mounting social inequality. That response is the drive to consolidate a dictatorship.
The ruling class cannot tolerate even humor, because it fears the growing opposition of the working class and youth. This atmosphere of political repression is not unique to Türkiye. It is increasingly being normalized from the United States to Europe and throughout the world.
*****
History shows that attacks on satire are always bound up with broader attacks on the working class and democratic rights. In Türkiye, Markopaşa, the weekly political satire magazine published by Sabahattin Ali, Aziz Nesin and Rıfat Ilgaz, was repeatedly shut down in the late 1940s during the CHP era, and its writers were prosecuted again and again; Sabahattin Ali was murdered at the border in 1948.
*****
This is also an international tradition that the bourgeoisie has inherited from the ruling elites that preceded it: no sooner had the Nazi regime come to power than it shut down the cabaret stages and sent satirists to concentration camps; the McCarthyite witch-hunt drove Charlie Chaplin into exile from the United States, while the comedian Lenny Bruce was targeted with “obscenity” trials. When humor is put on trial, basic democratic rights—freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right to strike and to organize—are either next in line or already under attack.
*****
No faction of the ruling class—firmly tied to imperialism, and prepared to eliminate, indeed actively promoting the elimination of, civil liberties in order to protect its wealth and power—can defend democracy. This task falls to the masses of workers and young people who have so widely embraced Göktaş’s show.
*****
The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi calls on all workers and young people who oppose the persecution of Deniz Göktaş to join this struggle.
13. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe & the Middle East
Africa
Kenya:
Namibia:
Nigeria:
South Africa:
Sudan:
France:
Video game workers strike and protest job cuts outside major studios
Germany:
Thousands of shop workers in one-day strike against poverty wages
Norway:
Hundreds of striking offshore service and drilling workers disrupt oil production
Portugal:
Emergency services operators hold week-long strike for professional recognition
United Kingdom:
Further stoppage by staff at cancer research facility over pay
Bus manufacturing workers in Scarborough walk out over pay
Lecturers at a Glasgow university in Scotland walk out over job cuts threat
Walkout by hotel hospitality staff in Manchester over union recognition and working conditions
Rail cleaning staff in Liverpool strike over pay
Iran:
Protests by workers over deteriorating living conditions continue
14. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
